Lent

The good news we receive today is that in God’s heart there is a room for all people without exception. Even if we are weak and sinful, if we often fall and feel so small before God, we can count on His mercy. The first words of today’s Gospel invite us to look confidently towards a loving God.  Tax collectors and sinners were approaching Jesus to listen to Him. He welcomed everybody who were lost and sat at the table with them. We too can come to Jesus and taste His love, and strengthen ourselves with His forgiveness.

It is true – it is difficult to understand the patient love of the Lord, who, despite our constant failures, shows His mercy constantly. However, this is how God loves, and His love is different from ours, which often recalculates the balance of profits and losses. The merciful father in the Gospel’s parable does not give up his fatherly tenderness, waits patiently for his son’s return, meets him with open arms, gives him a feast for joy and dresses him in his best clothes. In short, he restores his son’s lost dignity. God also prepares such beautiful gifts for us. It is only necessary to constantly patiently return to the Father’s arms, because only there is love and forgiveness. St. Paul invites us: Be reconciled to God!

You can start all over again today. The old is passing away, and now something new, better, more beautiful is born. But will you take another chance given to you from God …?

The example of the tree mentioned in today’s Gospel shows that we cannot speak of a guarantee everywhere.  Where there is an organism which – like this evangelical tree – lives its own life, it is difficult to speak of a guarantee.  There is only a silent hope: “it may bear fruit.”

The season of Great Lent prompts us to certain sacrifices, mortification, and various forms of penance. On the one hand, with coming of Lent, arises an anxiety of the vineyard owner in many hearts, who says: “I am coming and looking for fruit on this fig tree, and I do not find it”; on the other hand, you can hear the words full of determination: “one more year…maybe it will bear fruit.”

Today’s Gospel is part of the Lenten call to conversion. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to make an examination of your conscience about wasted opportunities and repeated promises. “It’s been three years since I’m coming looking for fruit,” says Christ … Isn’t it time to say to Him, “Lord, it’s still one more year year“. You have to find a little hope in you, some faith in God’s help and, quite simply, a little self-denial. When we use well our time of conversion, the joy of Easter will truly be the joy of life that bears the fruit that God seeks in it. 

The story of Jesus in the desert tells about temptations of the evil and how to overcome them. When we analyze Jesus’ answers, we find clues for our conduct. The desert is a symbol of man’s spiritual struggle. Jesus goes there full of the Holy Spirit. Before He begins the fight against Satan, He is filled with the power received from the Father. This fact means that then God allows us to be tempted, first He grants us His grace to face them. The first temptation is about our needs. Sometimes it seems as if there are things we couldn’t live without. The world of advertising further enhances this impression in us. Jesus does not reject our desires or needs, but He makes us realize that, as believers, we are to nourish ourselves by God’s Word. It contains the truth about our lives and answers to the most difficult questions. In the second temptation, Jesus straightens our thinking about the value system. Wealth, power or beauty are not the most important things in life. We should care more about cultivating a relationship with God, because our happiness depends on Him: “For what profit will a man receive, if he gains the whole world and suffers a loss of his soul?” In the third temptation Jesus reveals our dignity. It is a gift from God and no one can take it from us. Regardless of our sins, God always loves us and we are priceless to Him. It is worth to remember it as we begin the time of our conversion.

Today’s parable is one of the best-known stories in the Bible. While it is generally called the parable of the prodigal son, the focus is not only on the prodigal son and his repentance but on the father and his mercy. Incidentally, the story could be called the parable of the resentful brother, since it is also about a brother who was very indignant about his younger brother’s self-indulgence and angry with his father for showing mercy towards him. Resentment has stolen his joy. He has been loyal to his father and his estate, an upright member of the community, and feels he deserves to be the sole inheritor of his father’s wealth. The father’s mercy and love encompass both sons. He wants not only his younger son back, but his elder son as well. This is not a story that separates the 2 brothers into the good one and the evil one. It is only the father who demonstrates goodness. He wants both to participate in his joy. The father’s unreserved love is offered wholly and equally. He doesn’t compare the 2 sons.

The prodigal son is that part of us which is rebellious and irresponsible with the gifts God has placed in our lives. Perhaps we are takers who gather everything we can to ourselves, or squander what we have. Perhaps we don’t show appreciation for our parents and families. Today’s parable teaches that God offers people a second chance. God doesn’t give up on us when we do things that are wrong and will always forgive us if we truly repent. And what can we learn from the older brother’s jealousy? Are you carrying a resentment that is stealing your joy? Have you tried to be less judgmental? How willing are you to reflect on this story for the rest of Lent, and do something about it so that Easter joy can be yours? Lent is an opportunity for new beginnings for ourselves and perhaps we should take the opportunity to give one another a second chance, to show mercy, learning from the father in the story.

In the Old Testament the early encounters with God are based on the promise that the Lord who has revealed himself to His people will always be faithful to them. When God says to Moses, “I Am who I Am,” He is declaring that He is the one who will always be beside His people, leading and guiding them. It is this fidelity that sustains the people of Israel in their journey to the promised land. The people, of course, were not always faithful to God. Sometimes God seems to be willing to destroy them and needs to be persuaded otherwise by human representatives such as Moses and the prophets. At other times God declares that He will always be with His people, no matter how unfaithful their behavior. St. Paul wants us to take the events of the history of Israel as a warning as to what may happen to us Christians if we are not faithful to God and do not keep to God’s ways. Disasters, whether caused by nature or people, aren’t signs of God’s punishment. But when things go wrong, they are signs to us to reflect on our lives and ask ourselves whether we are producing the fruit that is asked of us.

One of the early Greek Fathers of the Church said that out three greatest temptations to sin are laziness, forgetfulness, and thoughtlessness. If thoughtlessness might be deemed the temptation of youth,  forgetfulness is certainly the habit of old age, and perhaps laziness belongs to both.

At the beginning of Lent we are presented with the familiar text of the temptation of Jesus. Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit and led by the Holy Spirit, moves into new territory. This new space will be challenging but ultimately rewarding. The wilderness is a place where there are few signposts; the terrain is often monotonous and difficult to navigate. This is serious stuff, requiring commitment and spiritual preparation. Jesus is being sharpened and honed for the short and trying public ministry which lies ahead. Jesus encounters the old adversary, the devil, head-on. Tempted to misuse His power, Jesus has to think on His feet and be resolute in standing up against the father of lies. Worship of God alone; not putting God to the test; being satisfied solely with the bread of God’s word – these are the fundamental lessons that Jesus has learnt and will stand Him in good stead for the future. Because Jesus is strong in these areas, the devil has no way in and leaves Him.

This is 1st Sunday of Lent and so we have the opportunity once again to enter into the wilderness space that the Church opens up for us in her liturgical calendar. Lent gives us the chance to be adventurous and try something new. Decisions about prayer and being nourished by the word of God will need to be made. A firm resolve is always helpful in ensuring that we stick to our plans. So today is the day, if we have not done it already, to commit ourselves to stepping away from the familiar and onto this Lenten journey. Of course, all this is done with faith that blessings will be received. It might not be the physical lifting of a trophy, but it could be the ability to raise our hands aloft at the forthcoming feast with a renewed sense of all that God has done is doing for us in Christ.

Some 30 years before St. John wrote today’s Gospel, the huge Temple in Jerusalem had been completely destroyed by the Roman army. Once it had been among the wonders of the ancient world, the most sacred place on earth for the Jews, the place where God dwelt among God’s people. Not it was little more than ruins. For John it was so much more than an ancient site. He had seen it is its glory days. Now he was old, but as a young man he had actually visited it with Jesus. It was Passover time and John had witnessed the huge influx of Jews, coming fro all parts of the Mediterranean world; he had seen the Temple courts being turned into a kind of bazaar, with the transactions of money changers… John could see that Jesus was distressed; more than that – He was angry. The next moment, He was clearing them out of the Temple – men and beasts and birds; He was tipping over the tables of the money changers, so that the coins went jangling across the stone pavement. “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market,” He cried. The Jewish authorities were not amused. Who did this young rabbi from Nazareth think he was? What sign could He offer to show what it all meant? John admits that it was only after Jesus’ death and resurrection that He realized what Jesus was getting at.

Within few weeks we shall be celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus; in the risen Christ we have the new, indestructible temple of God. This temple is made not of stones, but of the glorified flesh of the victorious Christ; this is where God is to be found and where God is worship in spirit and truth. This temple is build of living stones, and they are you and me. Together with Christ our head, we make one body, one temple to the glory of God.

The voice figures prominently in today’s reading. In the first reading, the voice of God seems to be asking if not the impossible, then the inhuman. Isaac – was the child God promised so that Abraham could become the founding father of “a great nation.” With relief, we discover that in fact the point of the story is the very opposite to what it appears to be on the surface: whereas human sacrifice was commonplace in the ancient Near East, what is revealed is that God does not want human sacrifice. The voice of God takes center stage at the transfiguration that Jesus’ identity as God’s own beloved Son – a truth that literally makes Jesus glow. As Jesus descends the mountain, He starts to help His disciples to understand the meaning of His sonship: that He will be faithful and obedient to His Father, even to the point of having to give up His life.

As Christians, we believe that the transfiguration is not merely a past event but an ongoing reality. God’s voice continues to be at work in our world today, and in our lives. We need to learn how to listen and perceive at more than just a superficial level. That takes time and practice and commitment. When we do listen in prayer – when we are able to step outside our own expectations and preconceptions and focus – we find that God’s voice continues to be creative and transformative. By making time each day quietly to open ourselves to the presence of God, we make room for God to affirm our dignity as God’s beloved sons and daughters. Being children of the loving Father is something that shines out from our lives – because we have learn to listen to the voice.