Homily for Friday
1st Week of Lent
Feb. 26, 2021
Collect
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.
We prayed in the Collect
that we might “be conformed to the paschal observances.” We know well that Lent is intended to prepare
us for Easter, for the paschal observances.
In those observances, in the Easter Triduum, we participate with our
Lord Jesus in his passion, death, and resurrection. But our prayer today is that we be “conformed”
to those observances.
How can we be conformed to the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus? By suffering, by dying, and by rising.
Jesus didn’t seek
suffering. He prayed that his Father let
him escape it. But when that couldn’t
be, when he had to drink the cup of suffering, he embraced it (cf. Matt
26:39). All of us suffer. We suffer physical pain and emotional
pain. We suffer the psychological pain
of observing so much injustice wreaked by ignorant and evil persons and
unmerited suffering from disasters and illness, and we’re powerless against all
that. These kinds of suffering embraced
with Christ conform us to his paschal sacrifice.
We die in 2 ways. In God’s time, we’ll leave this world; like
Jesus, we may surrender to the Father’s plan for that, even now, as well as
when the moment comes. St. Alphonsus
includes such a prayer in his Stations of the Cross (5th Station). Before that moment, every day brings us
opportunities to die to ourselves by resisting temptation and by overcoming our
natural selfishness.
In those 2 ways, suffering
and dying, we seek to be conformed to the paschal observances. Thru such conformity, we hope—ah, there’s
that strenna word again!—to be raised to Christ’s eternal life, our ultimate
conformity to the paschal mystery.
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