In just a few days, we will enter the holy season of Lent. Many of us approach Lent with an eager spirit, seen especially by the huge turnout we get at our masses for Ash Wednesday. One would think it is a Holy Day of Obligation (which it is not). I do not think that is the reason why most people come, though. We have an awareness deep down that we need Lent. We approach Lent with a recognition that there are things in our lives where we do not have peace. It might be our relationship with another person, our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with different attachments or bad habits, and at the root of it all, our relationship with the Lord. Therefore, I think we can see Lent as a time where, through the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we have an opportunity to experience reconciliation in those various relationships and so recover the peace that our hearts desire. With that in mind, I have chosen the following invocation from the Litany of the Sacred Heart for our focus this week, and in some ways, for the upcoming season of Lent:
Heart of Jesus, our peace and our reconciliation, have mercy on us
In the Gospel for this Sunday, we continue to hear from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus offers a more thorough teaching on some of the Ten Commandments. A casual reading of the Decalogue (another name for the Ten Commandments) seems to suggest a list made mainly up of things we should not do. However, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, they “point out the conditions of a life freed from the slavery of sin. The Decalogue is a path of life.” (CCC 2057) They are a path of life because they are all ordered toward something very positive: love, for all of the commandments are summed up as ways in which we love God and our neighbor. When we fail to live that law of love, we experience division which deprives us of peace. Living according to the commandments reverses that.
Perhaps as we prepare for Lent and what practices we want to undertake, spend some time over the next few days thinking about the relationships I mentioned above. Where are we not experiencing peace? Ask the Lord to use whatever your Lenten practices are to be at the service of bringing reconciliation through the Heart of Jesus to those relationships and thus restore peace in your life.
Our Lenten journey is leading us to Easter Sunday, but it must go through Good Friday. On that day, Jesus died on the Cross which makes our reconciliation with God possible, articulated well by St. Paul:
God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation. (Rom 5:8–11)