Lent

We don’t know her name, but the Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel has the longest conversation recorded between Jesus and any person. It was noon on a hot day. Jesus, tired from traveling, chose a rest stop – Jacob’s well, outside the town of Sychar – while waiting for His disciples to fetch food. The woman who joined Him at the well was an outcast, looked down upon by her own people. She came alone to draw water from the community well when, during biblical times, drawing water and chatting at the well was the social highpoint of many women’s day. But this woman was ostracized and marked as immoral woman living openly with the sixth in a series of men. Jews weren’t supposed to speak to Samaritans. Men weren’t permitted to address women without their husbands present. Jesus was willing to ignore the rules, but the woman reminded Him. She focused on the laws of respectable society; Jesus focused on grace. To this woman Jesus revealed that He was the Messiah, offering the living water. She forgot about her own need to fetch water, and ran to tell others about Jesus. She became a powerful evangelist.

The story of the woman at the well teaches us that God loves every one of us, especially those of us who feel ourselves undervalued and even worthless.

The story of the Fall, which we heard in today’s 1st reading, endlessly fascinates us because it is also the story of Everyman and Everywoman, of each one of us. We are like our first Adam and Eva, who chose to go against God and to be satisfied by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The effects of sin bring about the downfall of others. The result are disastrous; the relationship with God is broken, their own relationship is damaged and they feel shame. They find it hard to look at each other, and will need to work for their living and experience the suffering of hard labor and toil. Remarkably God doesn’t not forget them and is abundant to them because God wants them to find a way back into God’s love. God is always planting new seeds in our hearts. The Lord forgives us when we return to Him in the sacrament of reconciliation and our hearts are cleansed.

Lent is about the expansion of the heart so that it becomes more loving and generous. First, prayer opens the heart and helps us to listen to God’s word. Second, the invitation to fast expands our hearts so that we become more aware of the ways that we so often focus on satisfying our own needs and desires rather than being willing to open our hearts to our neighbor. Fasting can make us more grateful for what we have received and more generous to others in their need. Third, we can develop our Lenten exercises by giving to others, especially through almsgiving and charitable works. By the end of Lent, with plenty of exercise, our spiritual heart will be in better shape and more ready to resist temptation and place its trust in God.

We see dynamic story at work in the Gospel of the so called prodigal son, though with a twist. The younger son is indeed prodigal – wasteful and dissolute. He has forgotten his father, his family and even his faith as he is reduced to working as a swineherd. It is there, at his lowest ebb, that he “comes to his senses”: he remembers, and the key thing he remembers is his father – his father’s house, his father’s goodness, his father’s love. The twist is that Jesus told this story to the scribes and Pharisees who were grumbling that Jesus was mixing with tax collectors and sinners and eating with them. They are represented in the figure of the elder son who cannot countenance forgiving the younger son. He can only remember the wrong his brother has committed, and so he is unable to forgive.

We are invited to bring resolution to this unfinished story. It is unfinished because we don’t know what the elder son did next. As the camera fades out, we are left wondering what the elder son will do, and importantly: what I will do? Jesus poses this startling challenge to us: will you embrace the way of forgiveness in your own life, and so join the celebration of God’s mercy, or do you prefer to stay outside, clinging to your memory of hurts, anger and offenses?

The Gospel leaves some major questions unanswered. How can God allow innocent people to suffer and die? It would almost be easier to understand a god who instantly punishes sins, but Jesus clearly distances himself (and His Father) from any such conclusion. Of course, this is what causes people to ask, “How can God allow innocent people to suffer?” There is some helpful biblical background to this issue in today’s first reading: the conversation between Moses and God via the burning bush. What God says to Moses is, “I have heard the cry of my people in their distress…I mean to respond to their need.” This applies to the distress of God’s people who are slaves in Egypt. God pledges to free them, but there is also the revelation of the name by which God chooses to be known: “I Am” meaning “the one who always is”. We can conclude, then, that God always hears the cry of God’s people in their distress, and always responds. The Good News that Jesus reveals is that He is God’s response to our need. In Jesus, God doesn’t take away human suffering; God shares in it. Every parent knows the impossibility of taking away a child’s pain; like every parent, God our Father shares the suffering of all His children. The death of Jesus guarantees this, and His resurrection points to the total destruction of all suffering, all pain, all sorrow.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of a journey. The journey doesn’t end with the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. On that day, we gaze up into the heavens but realize that we still have work to do on earth and places to go.

Only in the Gospel of St. Luke are we told that Jesus climbed the mountain of the transfiguration in order to pray. St. Luke emphasizes the role of prayer in the lives of Jesus and His disciples. He had learned how the Church could not make progress without prayer, and if we ask what is wrong with the Church, and our own lives, the answer is often the same: there is not enough prayer. The story of transfiguration is a story of prayer, and our understanding of it can be deepened if we look back in the Bible. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he found the people worshiping a golden calf, and he was angry but he stayed with them. Elijah, too, ran from the people, but found faith among the Gentiles. Jesus finds confusion among the people He has left behind but, instead of running away, He sets His face for Jerusalem. Prayer gives us peace, but we have to take that peace into the turbulence of people’s lives.