Homily - 18 February 2018 - The First Sunday of Lent

The First Sunday of Lent (B)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Have you ever noticed how people react upon seeing a rainbow? For those of us who do not often experience them, rainbows elicit a great excitement and a certain childlike joy as we see the colors stretching across the sky, and the fuller the rainbow, the greater our excitement.

A rainbow over the Kalaupapa Peninsula of Moloka'i
21 February 2010

We know perfectly well why the bow forms as sunlight passes through the droplets of water and yet still we pause to look at them. There is something about a rainbow that simply captures our attention. How often do we see through the rainbow - beyond the arc and the colors and the natural wonder - to the covenant the Lord made with us?

After the waters of the Flood receded, and after Noah built an altar to the Lord and offered sacrifice, God said to him: 

This is the sign of the covenant that I am giving for all ages to come, of the covenant between me and you and every living creature with you: I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.  When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will recall the covenant I have made between me and you and all living beings (Genesis 9:12-16). 

This covenant was first made with Noah and renewed with Abraham and then with Moses and fulfilled and perfected in Jesus Christ. It was this covenant that we received at Baptism, the covenant sealed in the Blood of Christ. If the Lord of heaven and earth recalls the covenant he has made each time a rainbow appears, should we not also recall this covenant? Too often we are forgetful of God, though he never forgets us.

Saint Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, tells us the waters of the Flood “prefigured baptism, which saves you now” (I Peter 3:21). Just as Noah and his family were saved through the waters of the Flood inside the ark, so, too, Christians are saved through the waters of Baptism in the Church, the Barque, the ship, of Peter. Baptism “is not a removal of dirt from the body,” Saint Peter says, “but an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him” (I Peter 3:21-22).

When Jesus accepted John’s baptism “of repentance for the forgiveness of sin,” the Spirit “immediately impels him into the consequences of that decision – consequences that will eventually lead to the cross” (Mark 1:4).[1] Just as Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise (cf. Genesis 3:24), so “the Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert” to be tempted for forty days (Mark 1:12), just as Israel was tested for forty years in the desert (cf. Deuteronomy 8:2). When he allowed himself to be driven out into the desert, he accepted the history of Israel. “Jesus relives the story of Israel, but as an obedient son who is totally faithful in his own trial in the desert.”[2]

When Satan tempted Jesus in the desert he was given the same choice as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the same choice as Israel in the desert. But unlike Adam and Eve, unlike Israel, Jesus remained faithful and obedient and now sits at the right hand of the Father, victorious over Satan, sin, and death, because he accepted his Messianic ministry from the Father in full obedience, docility, and love.

NAF 4508, fol. 23r

Jesus goes into the desert for one purpose: to be “tempted by Satan” (Mark 1:12). From ancient times the desert symbolized the realm of evil, which was represented by the beasts dwelling there. Jesus goes to be tempted by Satan, “the prince of demons,” whose very name means “adversary” (Mark 3:22). It is this adversary, this enemy, who seeks to thwart Jesus’ every move throughout the gospels.

When he enters into the desert, Jesus “enters into Satan’s territory deliberately, to begin his campaign against the powers of evil. He is looking for a fight! Yet he will confront Satan not with a blast of divine lightning, but in his frail human nature, empowered by the Spirit.”[3]

This battle with Satan that Jesus begins today is the very reason for his coming among us at Christmas, but why would he wish to fight the adversary in this way when he could easily fight him with his glory and majesty? Saint Lawrence of Brindisi says:

…in order that his victory might be the more glorious, he willed to fight Satan in our weak flesh. It is as if an unarmed man, right hand bound, were to fight with his left hand alone against a powerful army; if he emerged victorious, his victory would be regarded as all the more glorious. So Christ conquered Satan with the right hand of his divinity bound and using against him only the left hand of his weak humanity.[4]

He did so as an example to his disciples, as an example to us; he showed us how to overcome Satan and temptation by fasting, prayer, and complete trust and obedience to the Father.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the attacks of the adversary increase all the more after Baptism as Satan tries to steal us back. But we can be confident of victory if we follow the example of Jesus; if we fast, if we pray with patient hope, and if we remain attached to God in obedient trust, the victory belongs to us, or, rather to Jesus Christ, in whose victory we will share.

This is why the liturgical color for this season is violet. It is both the color of repentance and of royalty. The violet vestments call us to repent of our sins and to amend our life even as they remind us of the victory of Christ over Satan.

These, then, are the weapons that we take up in the battle against Satan: prayer, fasting, and alms-giving. The weapon of prayer enables “our hearts to root our secret lies and forms of deception, and then to find the consolation God offers.”[5] The weapon of fasting “weakens our tendency to violence” and “revives our desire to obey God, who alone is capable of satisfying our hunger.”[6] And the weapon of almsgiving “sets us free from greed” and allows us to “share in God’s providential care for his children.”[7]

These three weapons, these forms of penance, we call the Lenten discipline. The word discipline comes from the same root as the word disciple, a root that refers to a student. Discipline is always meant to teach; the disciplines, the weapons, of prayer, fasting, and alms-giving teach us to live more like Jesus; they teach us to be faithful to God even as they fight off the attacks of Satan.

This fight with the tempter is serious and one in which every Christian must engage.

Fighting against evil, against every form of selfishness and hate, and dying to oneself to live in God is the ascetic journey that every disciple of Jesus is called to make with humility and patience, with generosity and perseverance.[8]

Jesus’ example and victory in the desert show us how to live in this way. In the desert, as on the Cross, “Christ suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God” (I Peter 3:18).

Let each of us also enter into the desert this Lent and fight against our temptations, whether they be to pride or greed, to lust or anger or gluttony, to envy or sloth. Let us take up our weapons of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving and fight the good fight. As we do so, let us recall the covenant the Lord has made with us, seeking in these days of Lent to renew the promises we made at Baptism to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ in order that the glory of Easter, the joy of heaven, might be ours. Amen.

---

[1] Mary Healy, Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Mark, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008), 38.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] From A Word in Season: Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours (Villanova, Pennsylvania: Augustinian Press, 1999), 7:245.  Quoted in Healy, The Gospel of Mark, 39.

[5] Pope Francis, Message for Lent 2018.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, 1 March 2006.

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent - 5 March 2017

N.B.: A few grammatical and editorial corrections have been made to the text of the following homily.

The First Sunday of Lent (A)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Earlier this week, the Holy Father Pope Francis announced his prayer intention for this month of March and asked us a direct question: “How many of you pray for persecuted Christians?”[1] So important is this question to Pope Francis that the Holy See produced a short video to accompany His Holiness’ prayer intention “that persecuted Christians may be supported by the prayers and material help of the whole Church.”

So many of our fellow members of the Body of Christ experience daily something of what the Lord Jesus experienced in the desert, “harsh conditions, utter loneliness, and the gnawing discomforts of hunger” and, more than this, the “assaults of [our] archenemy, the devil.”[2] We make their situation more desperate by frequently giving too little thought to them.

In his brief message accompanying this video, Pope Francis said:

How many people are being persecuted because of their faith, forced to abandon their homes, their places of worship, their lands, their loved ones!

They are persecuted and killed because they are Christians. Those who persecute them make no distinction between the religious communities to which they belong.

I ask you: how many of you pray for persecuted Christians?

Do it with me, that they may be supported by the prayers and material help of all the Churches and communities.

These words of the Holy Father stand as a stark challenge for each us during these days of Lent. Grateful for the riches of his merciful love and confident in the certainty that “because [Jesus] himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted,” so many of our brothers and sisters willingly endure great hardships for the sake of his name, while we all too often grumble about not being allowed to eat meat one day of the week, which we sometimes forget or even give in to social pressure (Hebrews 2:18). It rather puts things in perspective, does it not?

Some Catholics seem to be under the curious impression that they must eat fish on Fridays during Lent, which, of course, is incorrect. While we are obliged to abstain from eating meat each Lenten Friday, this does not mean we have to eat fish; though the eating of fish has because customary, it is not required. Here many ask why we are allowed to eat fish and not meat.

Some – speaking from an anti-Catholic bias – have claimed the Church first allowed us to eat fish on Lenten Fridays to support the fishing industry in the middle ages. This, however, is not true. In his book, A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, Ian Mortimer includes a chapter on “What to Eat and Drink.” In this chapter, he notes, quite rightly, that

The medieval Church [that is, the Catholic Church] used to restrict the eating of meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, as well as in Advent and Lent and on the vigils on certain saints' feast days. In 1549 Edward VI [a Protestant] reestablishes Fridays and Saturdays as nonmeat days, as well as Lent and other religious feasts. In 1563 Elizabeth's government [which was also Protestant] imposes fasting on Wednesdays too, including a prohibition on slaughtering animals. There is an important difference compared to pre-Reformation [that is, Catholic] times, however: avoidance of meat is no longer a religious observance but secular law. The purpose of fasting on Wednesdays is specifically to encourage the eating of fish, to support the fishing industry.[3]

It was, then, the Protestant government of England and not the Catholic Church that banned meat and allowed fish to support the fishmongers. If this is case, why did the Church allow our ancestors in the faith to eat fish, but not meat, on certain days?

For the Church, the reason for the forbidding of meat and the allowing of fish was less temporal, much simpler, and more spiritual than that of the secular government. In his Liber Festivalis, which he wrote in the late 1400s, John Myre explains that “when God, for Adam’s sin, cursed the earth and the land, he cursed not the water; wherefore it is lawful for a man to eat in Lent that which cometh of the water.” In fact, centuries earlier, Saint Isidore of Seville, who died in 636, wrote in his De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, "We are certainly able to eat fish, because the Lord accepted one after the resurrection. Neither the savior nor the apostles have forbidden this."[4] From this, we see that the non-eating of meat and the eating of fish was – and is – intended as both a penance, a small communal sacrifice offered lovingly to God, and a reminder of God's merciful and victorious love.

When we fail to realize this connection, when we fail to see the value and importance to our fasting and abstinence, it is because we have become, like our first parents, too focused on ourselves and on our own pleasures. “Adam was placed in Paradise, and there, seeking pleasure, he fell.”[5] How often do we, too, fall into sin by seeking pleasure and running from the Cross instead of seeking union with God? Unlike Adam, Jesus “was led into the desert, and there, by constant fasting, overcame the devil.”[6]

In these days of Lent, then, let us not seek our own pleasure, but let us go with Jesus into the desert. Just as he fasted out of love for us, let us fast out of love for our persecuted brothers and sisters who grow more numerous each day.

If we focus our thoughts and our prayers not on ourselves but on others, we, too, can, with the help of divine grace, overcome the sin of self-centeredness and experience the joy of salvation (cf. Psalm 51:17). This is why Pope Francis has asked the Holy Spirit this Lent to “lead us on a true journey of conversion, so that we can rediscover the gift of God’s word, be purified of the sin that blinds us, and serve Christ present in our brothers and sisters in need.”[7]

Let us then ask the Lord to help us acknowledge our sins, to forgive our sins, and to cleanse our hearts so that his compassion may be ours. Moreover, “let us pray for one another so that, by sharing in the victory of Christ, we may open our doors to the weak and poor. Then we will be able to experience and share to the full the joy of Easter.”[8] Amen.

---

[1] In “Pope’s Prayer Intention for March: Support Persecuted Christians,” Vatican Radio, 2 March 2017. Accessed 4 March 2017. Available at http://www.news.va/en/news/popes-prayer-intention-for-march-support-for-perse

[2] Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2010), 74.

[3] Ian Mortimer, A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 215.

[4] Saint Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, 1.44[45].2.

[5] Saint Anthony of Padua, Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, 4. In Paul Spilsbury, trans., Sermons for Sundays and Festivals, Vol. I: General Prologue, Sundays from Septuagesima to Pentecost (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero Padova, 2007), 73.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Pope Francis, Message for Lent 2017, 3.

[8] Ibid.

Homily - 12 February 2017 - On hearts chilled by sin and the warmth of spring

The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Dear brothers and sisters,

The return of warmer temperatures this weekend after the recent snowfall has stoked my hopes that the season of spring may soon be upon us. The ancient Anglo-Saxons would not have disagreed with this hope. In fact, they would argue that spring has already come, for they held the season we associate with sunlight and joy actually began five nights after Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation, meaning that spring really began on February 7^th.

Now, we might rightly contest that it is still cold outside – or normally is, at least – and that spring will not really come for another month or so, arriving on or about March 21^st (may God forbid it to wait so long!). To this argument, the Anglo-Saxons would respond with this maxim:

Fate is most powerful, winter is coldest,

spring is frostiest, it is the longest cold.[1]

Which of us is right, we moderns, or the ancients? I generally side with the ancients, and I hope you will soon see why.

The coming of spring as held by the Anglo-Saxons seems questionable to us because we like to divide the seasons evenly throughout the year (or at least pretend we can do so), but Aelfric of Eynsham, known as the Grammarian, provides this explanation as to why spring is the longest cold: “the lengthening day is cold because the earth is permeated with the winter chill, and it takes a long time before it is warmed again.”[2] As it is with the earth, is it not also the same with our hearts? Once our hearts are permeated with the chill of the sins of anger, of lust, of falsehood, and of any failure to love both God and neighbor, does it not take a long time for them to be warmed again by the fire of the Lord’s love? Do we not grow comfortable in our cold-heartedness and resist anything that would warm them and require of us a change?

The word Aelfric used for spring is somewhat familiar to us. He spoke of the season of lencten and, after dropping a few letters over the course of time, lencten became lent, the season we are soon to enter, the season of spring, both of the natural world and of our hearts. We know the season of Lent will soon be upon us because, as I drove by a fast food hamburger restaurant a few days ago in Quincy, I saw another sign that Lent will soon be here: the marquee in the restaurant’s parking lot proclaimed, “Beer battered fish is back.”

If we return for a moment to the natural season of spring, we know that, as the Anglo-Saxons knew before us,

Frost must freeze, fire burn up wood,

the earth grow cold; ice form bridges,

water wear a covering, wondrously locking up

shoots in the earth. One alone shall unbind

the frost’s fetters: God most mighty.

Winter shall turn, good weather come again,

summer bright and hot. The never-resting sea,

the deep way of the dead, will be the longest hidden.[3]

In the same way that none of us can awaken the spring or unbind the fetters of the frost, neither can we – without the aid of divine grace – unbind the fetters of sin that freeze our hearts. Only God most mighty can do so. Only he can warm our hearts to make them bright and hot so that when we enter the deep way of the dead we might not be lost and cast out of his presence because our failures to keep his commandments of love.

It may seem strange for me to be talking about Lent so early, with the actual season still some two weeks away, but we spend a lot of time preparing for Super Bowl parties, birthday celebrations, Valentine’s Day dinners, and even events of lesser importance. Should we not also prepare ourselves to enter into the season of Lent when we will ask the Lord to thaw our hearts? We cannot ask him to bring about the powers of his spring within us unless we know what needs to be thawed, what needs to be warmed, and what needs to be unbound.

Today the Lord Jesus warns us rather sternly of what needs to be thawed, warmed, and unbound within our hearts if we are to enter into his Kingdom: anger, lust, and falsehood (cf. Matthew 5:22, 28, and 37). He acknowledges the goodness of the law given through Moses and, seeing how the people were not conforming their hearts to the full righteousness desired by the law, he expands it and fulfills it in his own person “by showing the kind of life to which the law ultimately pointed.”[4] It is to this life that you and I are called and so we must ask ourselves if our hearts are conformed to the heart of Christ.

It is not enough that we not murder someone; rather, we must not even allow murderous thoughts – which come from anger - to enter our minds. It is not enough that we not commit adultery; rather, we must not even allow lustful desires to form in our hearts. It is not enough that we not tell falsehoods; rather, we must say what we mean. In all of this, Jesus demands of his disciples a “wholehearted trust and obedience toward the heavenly Father that radiates God’s love to the world.”[5] Do we trust that what he commands is for our own good? Do others recognize the love of God radiating out of our lives?

We know that love is always seen in the details. Grand gestures of love are sometimes important and necessary, but, in the end, our love – or lack thereof – is shown more clearly in the ordinary occurrences of life. If we tell ourselves, “It is just a little white lie,” that does not change the fact that it is still a lie. If we do not place our shopping carts within the corrals in the parking lot, but instead leave them scattered about, we demonstrate a lack of love for others. If a spouse looks at someone with lustful thoughts, he or she is not honoring the marriage covenant between husband and wife. We cannot forget that God “understands man’s every deed” (Sirach 15:19).

The Lord says to us today, “If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you; if you trust in God, you too shall live; he has set before you fire and water; to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand” (Sirach 15:15-16). The keeping of the commandments, then, requires that we trust in God; if we do not trust in him, we cannot keep his commandments. This is the wisdom of God, hidden from and mysterious to those who see Jesus only as a good teacher and do not recognize him as God most mighty (cf. I Corinthians 2:7).

If we who know his divinity, if we who have seen his power, open our hearts to him and ask him to bring about a new springtime within us, if we cooperate with his grace and strive to root out sin from our lives, if we reach out towards the fire of his love, then the waters of death, the deep way of the dead, will not forever hide us. If we allow the fire of his love to permeate our hearts and melt away the chill of sin, then we will be conformed to him and, on the last day, be ushered into his kingdom of joy and peace.

The Holy Father Pope Francis reminds us that “Lent is the favourable season for renewing our encounter with Christ, living in his word, in the sacraments and in our neighbour.”[6] Let each of us, then, take serious stock of our lives in these coming days. Let us make a thorough and honest examination of our consciences, asking the Lord to shine the clarity of his light upon our many sins, upon our many failures to love both God and neighbor, so that when we enter the season of Lent our hearts might not be bound up forever in the chill of winter but might be set free by the springtime of God’s love. Amen.

---

[1] “Maxims II.” In Eleanor Parker, “‘Unwinding the Winter’s Chains’: Spring, Thaw, and Some Anglo-Saxon Poems," A Clerk of Oxford, 7 February 2015.

[2] Aelfric, De Temporibus Anni. In ibid.

[3] Maxims I. In ibid.

[4] Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2010), 94.

[5] Ibid., 95.

[6] Pope Francis, Message for Lent 2017, 3.

Homily - 13 March 2016

N.B.: Several typographical and grammatical errors that went unnoticed in the draft text of the below homily at the time I published it, have now been corrected to make for a smoother read, with a few minor additions or subtractions here and there which do not alter the themes of the homily.

The Fifth Sunday of Lent (C)

Dear brothers and sisters,

Too often, we are quick to ask, where the man with whom the woman committed adultery in today’s passage of the Gospel? Why did the scribes and Pharisees not bring him to Jesus and condemn him, too, we ask, as the law required? Why does Jesus himself not insist on the man being brought before him? The immediacy with which these questions come to our minds and hearts shows that we are not unlike those scribes and Pharisees, for they show that we, too, are quick to point the finger and condemn, without considering our own sinfulness. In doing so, we fail to see, to hear, to understand, the overwhelming, gentleness of Jesus, together with his justice.

“Go, and from now on do not sin anymore,” he says to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:11). In these gentle and merciful words, we see – as Pope Francis writes in his bull of indiction for this Jubilee of Mercy – that everything in Jesus “speaks of mercy. Nothing in him is devoid of compassion.”[1] As he says to her, so he says to us, “Go, and from now on do not sin anymore.”

Is this a fair command that the Lord issues to us? We are weak and sinful; wounded by original sin, our intellects are darkened and we have an inclination, a tendency, towards evil that we call concupiscence. Though the stain of original sin is washed away in baptism, the effects of original sin remain. The Lord knows we are still wounded and weak; how then can he tell us to go and sin no more? He does so because he wants us to attain the resurrection of the dead (cf. Philippians 3:11).

Saint Augustine once famously said that each of us is a fomes peccati, a tinderbox of sin. He means to say that it takes but a small spark to ignite the destructive fire of sin within us. Each of us knows what sins we are prone to commit and to which temptations we most easily succumb. We know, if we are honest, what strikes against us and catches fire; we know that we are indeed walking tinderboxes of sin.

Considering, then, this reality of our fallen human nature, we hear again the words of the Lord: “Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” We want to keep these words of the Lord, to live without sin, but we are also well aware of our weakness and sinfulness. What then are we to do?

For a start, we must not follow the example of the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel who go about looking for the sins of others while seemingly ignoring their own. After cautioning them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her,” Jesus bent down a second time to write on the ground (John 8:7). The one who wrote on the ground with his finger is the very same one who, with that same finger, carved the Ten Commandments into those two stone tablets given to Moses (cf. Exodus 31:18). As the author of the law, he is the one who ultimately judges violations of the law and calls us sinners to judgment; he is also the one who grants clemency.

Seeing what he wrote on the ground, whatever it was, the Pharisees “went away one by one” and so the woman was left alone with Jesus (John 8:9). What a great tragedy! Only one repentant sinner remained; the unrepentant sinners went away, simply because they had not yet been caught in their sins. They stood before the visible and tangible incarnation of love, and in their proud refusal to acknowledge themselves as sinners, they closed their hearts to mercy, and walked away from him.[2]

Consider, my friends, the great mercy the Lord would have extended to the scribes and Pharisees had they, too, remained with him! Pride kept them away and closed their hearts; let humility keep us with Jesus when he reveals our sins to us, whether in the silence of our hearts or on the ground before us.

Without the grace and mercy of God, we, too, are like captives bound by sin (cf. Psalm 126:1). From this captivity, the Lord Jesus longs to free us, but he will not release us against our wills. We must engage in a great spiritual battle to which, by virtue of baptism and confirmation, we are summoned. We must strive to turn our hearts from our sinful desires, away from the things of this world, and strive to turn them instead toward the will of the Lord and toward the things of heaven. If we cooperate with the grace God gives to those who ask it of him, if we do not deny our sins but confess them, then we will “be counted among the members of Christ.”[3] Indeed, if we open our hearts to the depths of his mercy, he will release us from the captivity of sin and our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues with rejoicing (cf. Psalm 126:2).

Saint Paul knew this battle well. Writing to the Church in Rome, he declared, “For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:19). We might say he knew himself to be a walking tinderbox of sin. The Apostle recognized the necessity of engaging actively – and not merely passively - in this struggle because he knew what is at stake: the supreme good (cf. Philippians3:8).

The great J.R.R. Tolkien, the famed author of The Lord of the Rings, knew this, as well. Referring to the failure of Frodo, Tolkien said, “one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate [by which he here meant mortal] creatures, however ‘good.’”[4] This is why - in another letter in which he also comments on the failure of Frodo - Tolkien suggests how we should approach this spiritual battle:

To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgment, we must apply a scale tempered by ‘mercy’: that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgments of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another’s strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.[5]

Here, of course, Tolkien is not denying the reality of sin or brushing away its consequences; rather, he suggests, as Pope Francis says, “pardoning offenses becomes the clearest expression of merciful love, and for us Christians it is an imperative from which we cannot excuse ourselves.”[6] The scribes and Pharisees would not allow themselves to be merciful, and so they also refused to receive mercy.

Weak and prone to sin though we are, we are not without hope, for the Lord himself has prepared rest areas, if you will, in which we can regain our strength and emerge refreshed and rejuvenated. It is the Lord himself who “put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my chosen people to drink” (Isaiah 43:20). That water, dear friends, flows from the sacred wounds of Christ; this invigorating river is the sacraments entrusted by the Lord to his Church, particularly the sacraments of penance and of the Eucharist. It is this water of grace that enables and ennobles us to strive to attain the highest ideal without compromise, that of walking “eagerly in that same charity with which, out of love for the world, [Jesus] handed himself over to death.”[7] It is this water that dampens the tinderboxes of our hearts and helps us to resist sin and the wiles of the devil.

Despite his own great weaknesses, Saint Paul engaged exceedingly well in this battle. Because he drank frequently from these sacramental waters, he emerged victorious, even though, in the end, he lost his head. Today, he says to us, “I consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Philippians3:8-9). What is the greatest desire of our hearts? Is it to be found in Christ, or is it something else? How carefully do your guard your head?

In these remaining days of Lent, the Lord longs to forgive our sins, if only we will humble ourselves and remain with him, not resisting him, but instead seeking his mercy and grace. Let us not stay far from him, but let us approach him in the confessional to know his gentle and merciful love. Though we may go into the confessional weeping, we will emerge rejoicing because, having died to sin within its walls, we will rise anew in the love of God (cf. Psalm 126:6). And whether or not, in the end, we lose our heads out of love for, and loyalty to, Christ Jesus our Lord, we will keep the supreme good of knowing him (cf. Philippians 3:8). Amen.

---

[1] Pope Francis, Misericordiae vultis, 8.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Prayer After Communion of the Fifth Sunday of Lent.

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, Draft letter to J. Burn, 26 July 1956, emphasis original. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company), 252.

[5] Ibid., Draft letter to Eileen Elgar, September 1963. In ibid., 326.

[6] Pope Francis, ibid., 9.

[7] Collect of the Fifth Sunday of Lent.