Today, we are
celebrating the 5th Sunday of Lent. We have one more week to go before Palm
Sunday and the start of Holy Week. As we’ve been continuing our journey
through this holy season, I’ve been thinking about the history of Lent and how
it ties into our present-day observances. Lent has its roots in the early
Church right after Jesus’ death and resurrection, when a time of fasting and preparation
for Easter was observed. Irenaus of Lyons, one of the Doctors of the
Church, wrote about this time of preparation in the late 2nd century. By
the time of the Council of Nicea in the early 4th century, when Christianity
became an officially recognized religion in the Roman Empire, the 40 days of
Lent was already a tradition. The 40 days of Lent not only alludes to the
40 days that Jesus spent fasting and praying in the desert, but also the 40
days that Moses spent on the mountaintop with God, and the 40 days that the
prophet Elijah spent walking to Mount Horeb.
This 40 days of Lent is a time when we look inside our lives, when
we look inside of our hearts to see how we need to change and renew ourselves.
We often think of the heart as the source of love and emotion in our
modern western world. However, in ancient Israel, the heart often
symbolized the vital life force within a human being. Thus, writing God’s
laws and his new covenant on the human heart meant that it became a part of our
very being, not something imposed externally.
Think about all the laws we have in our lives that call out to us.
We have the laws of God, the laws of the government, and other laws as
well. In fact, now in our country, we see the Catholic Church standing up
to the government and our lawmakers to laws that we see as unjust and against
God’s laws. I was with Bishop Latino earlier this week for the priests
council; he was expressing his concern for the Health and Human Services
mandate that would force our Catholic institutions to pay for contraception for
individuals, a mandate that would attack the freedom of religion in our
country, the freedom both Catholic individuals and institutions have in living
out our Catholic faith. Bishop Latino also mentioned the immigration law
that just passed in the house in our state legislature, a law that we were
advocating against when we gathered for the Catholic Day at the Capitol in
Jackson. Monday, I attended a demonstration at the state capitol against
the execution of two men in our state just this past week. We still have a law
in our state that allows for the death penalty, which our Church opposes as
being against the Gospel of Life. One of these young men who was
executed, Matt Puckett, converted to Catholicism while in prison.
While we think of all these laws that have influence on our lives,
Jeremiah was talking about God writing his law on the hearts of the people.
Jeremiah was prophesying in a time right before the exile to Babylon
where he saw the people going against both the law of God and the will of God.
Jeremiah warned them about how they were breaking God’s covenant, about
how they were following the false prophets in their society. Jeremiah
spent a lot of time challenging, confronting, and chastising the people of
Ancient Israel, but included in the 52 chapters of the book of Jeremiah are
several chapters called the book of consolation, in which he provides the
people hope, in which God expresses his fidelity to his people. Our reading
today comes from those chapters of consolation.
And that brings us to our own journey through Lent. Perhaps
there are times when we have strayed from God, when we know our lives of faith
have gotten off the track in some way. We can stray from God in both big
ways and little ways, and we all know how those little ways can add up.
We have a very wonderful psalm today that continues with theme of the
heart that we hear in Jeremiah. The psalmist writes: “A clean heart
create for me, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me. Cast me not out
from your presence, and your Holy Spirit take not from me.” We hear in
psalm 51 a believer who addresses God with true contrition and humble
repentance for his sins, a believer who wants to be transformed, made new, and
cleansed from all that keeps him from God. God asks us to have that same introspection and humility that the psalmist has today, to look inside of our
hearts, to see what is keeping us from living a holy life.
As I mentioned, next week we will celebrate the beginning of Holy Week
with Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph. The triumph of
our salvation and the journey to the cross – these are two elements that are
essential to our faith and to understanding our relationship with Jesus, to
understanding our journey through Easter and Lent. As we continue our 40
days in the desert, we might want to look at what is written in our own hearts,
if it is God’s law or if is from the messages that we hear from our secular
world. Indeed, we may find ourselves as a point on our journey where we
are struggling against God’s laws, seeing them as something that is externally
imposed on us, rather than something that is a part of our very being. We
are called to open our hearts to God in order to make ourselves into a new
creation, to have new life in our Savior Jesus Christ. May we continue to
open ourselves to that process as we continue on our journey during Lent.
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