Homily for Ash Wednesday
March
5, 2025
Joel
2: 12-18
2
Cor 5: 20—6: 2
Christian
Brothers, St. Joseph Residence, N.R.
CNS photo/Christopher Riggs, The Catholic Advance
“Even now, says the
Lord, return to me with your whole heart” (Joel 2: 12).
Like the Gospel, Lent
is partly about conversion—returning to the Lord. The other part is about the Lord’s reception
of the repentant sinner: “gracious and
merciful is he” (2:13). The Lord’s
graciousness and mercy are personified in our Lord Jesus, who is the Gospel,
the Good News, of God.
God made Jesus, “who
did not know sin,” St. Paul writes, “to be sin” (2 Cor 5:21), which means that
he made Jesus the atonement sacrifice for our sins,[1]
“so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (5:21). Jesus makes us right with God as an act of
grace, an act of undeserved mercy.
Joel calls us to
return to this merciful God. Our hearts
are distracted by so much, even our hearts in a religious community. We have our little attachments—to things, to
habits, to pleasures, even to sins—that distract us from prayer or from
attending to our brothers. We might be
too inclined to think about our health, about our next meal, about the Yankees,
about social media, about some slight that we suffered, about someone’s
irritating habit. We might be too prone
to making sharp responses when we’re irritated, to criticizing a superior or
some other brother or one of the staff, to reluctance to pray, to carelessness
about our diet. We might be fearful
about the encounter with the Lord that lies ahead for every one of us.
Lent invites us to
surrender ourselves more completely to God—to God who heartily desires our
reconciliation with him, for he is gracious, merciful, rich in kindness (Joel
2:13).
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