LENT I
18 February 2024
Gn 9:8-15
1 P 3:18-22
Mk 1:12-15
Each year during Lent, the Church is driven into the wilderness after the example of Jesus himself. It is good to know that this is the Spirit’s work, not ours. True, He has to drive us rather forcefully at times, without forsaking His usual kindness. He has to push us, as it were, and we, too, have to push ourselves. But, again, it is good to know that the lead comes from Him. We are here, in this spiritual wilderness of forty days, because He invited us, because He thought that it would do good to us, even, that we had a real need for it.
We are a people in need of conversion. “Repent and believe in the gospel”. Here are words we need. There is a good news in repentance. To repent is first to acknowledge that we have not always been faithful to the Christian way. We have sinned, we have more or less seriously hurt our neighbour and ourselves, we have offended God. The good news is that it is not a final end. We can confess our sins and receive forgiveness. We can even counterbalance our bad actions by good ones. We can redeem the past by making penance. If we abstain from chocolate, alcohol, smoking and spending our time on our screens, if we care for others in their needs, if we give more time to meditation and prayer, if we visit the local church more often, we free ourselves for the gift of charity. We become a little more open to the gift of grace, more charitable, more loving. We make the world around us a little better. We undo some of the evil we have done.
The Spirit who pushes us into the wilderness and inspires our conversion is the Spirit of Love. The aim of the Lenten penance He inspires us to undertake is love. “Repent and believe in the Gospel” for the Gospel tells you of the Father who “so loved the world that He gave His only Son” (Jn 3:16). The Gospel witnesses to Jesus who “having loved His own who were in the world loved them to the end” (Jn 13.1). The Gospel teaches us the New Commandment: “as I have loved you, […] you also love one another” (Jn 13.34). We need the wilderness to listen anew to these priceless words. We need a time of retreat, a place of silence, Jesus’ presence and His kind, patient, loving teaching. We need the Spirit in our hearts making them “burning within us while [the Risen Christ opens] to us the Scriptures” (Lk 24.32) and inspires in us the faith in His message of salvation.
As Lent is beginning, let us turn to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to inspire us concerning what we can add to our ordinary Christian life to make it more fruitful. Above all, let us ask Him to baptise us in the kind fire of His love so that we feel not only invited but “pushed”, compelled to love, to love more, to better love, to begin again to love with great confidence, hope and joy.