March 1, 2017 - Reflection

Joel 2:12-18; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6AB, 12-13, 14, 17; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2;

​Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
 
REFLECTION
 
At the threshold of our Lenten pilgrimage we expect asceticism, but we encounter poetry. Joel confronts us with “Rend your hearts, not your garments.” Then II Corinthians proclaims, “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” And, finally, in today’s gospel Jesus exhorts us to find that “inner room” where we can pray in secret. These readings invite us to look at Lent in a little different way. Maybe, just maybe, Lent is less a season of “giving up,” of mortification and self-denial but more a season of “taking in,” of pausing to discover that the prose of our life can become poetry.
 
Lent calls us to pause, to reflect on what it means to proclaim “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Lent shatters categories as we try to get our minds around assertions like, “The last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). We have to feel the chill of unanticipated fulfillment when Jesus assures his partner in death, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). For Lent is a season of poetic reversals and symbolic tensions—all revolving around a God unafraid to die that we might embrace life. But to enter into that graced paradox means taking time for Lenten wonder in the confines of that inner room, my heart.
 
Rev. Howard Gray, S.J., is Interim Vice President for Mission and Ministry.

---