Today’s passage from Jeremiah begins, “See, the days are coming…” The second reading, from the letter to the Hebrews, speaks of Christ looking beyond His life on earth. In the Gospel, Jesus says that “the hour has come.” We still live in that “hour;” it is still unfolding in our lives.
Our lives are full of small deaths, and small resurrections. When we confess our sins, when we join with Christ in His Eucharist, when we make sacrifices and take risks for His sake, then something in us dies and something new is born again. We can live many years without allowing this death and resurrection to take place in our lives. We may not choose to change, but sometimes it is outside circumstances that force a change on us. This can be the grace of God for us, but only if we have faith and hope. If we lived our lives in a perpetual winter, and all living memory had forgotten the spring, how shocked we would be when a new spring finally came. We would call it the death of winter, unable to imagine that this was not death but a newness of life. St. Paul tells us that we are to walk in that newness of life. Christ walked into the greatest darkness possible, the rejection of salvation itself, yet He entered into that darkness and faced up to it with His human emotions, showing that fear is to be overcome by hope and love.
The art of travel is knowing what to pack, but the experienced traveler will also know what to pack. We will gain more from Lent if we see it as not just a temporary giving up of things but rather training in letting go of everything that holds us up on the journey to the kingdom. Jesus teaches us to travel lightly. In Lent we can learn something about how demanding the journey to eternal happiness can be. It may not be material things that we’re called to let go of. We may need to let go of attitudes, emotional blinds, compulsions, automatic responses to situations; in short, the false sense of self that hides the true self which is being created in Christ. Now in these last two weeks of Lent, we can consider the magnitude of the journey Christ has asked us to pursue. Yet it is not a journey we make on our own; if we look ahead, He is there, and we follow.