8th Sunday of the Year (C)

The Church is about to embark, beginning this Wednesday, on her annual “campaign of Christian service” which we call the season of Lent. We will undertake voluntary acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We will set firm resolutions to give something up or to adopt a new charitable practice among the works of mercy. We will deprive ourselves of various pleasures and delights. We will strengthen our resolve to turn away from sin and to be faithful to the Gospel. 

We will do all of this because we desire to change. We know that we are not what we should be, and we’re grateful that the Church gives us this season of Lent each year for us to work on ourselves. And yet, however great our determination may be to make this Lent matter, chances are in the coming weeks we will quickly find ourselves struggling to keep even the smallest of those resolutions. Somewhat frequently, I go without eating breakfast or lunch; sometimes the day carries me from one thing to the next and I don’t even notice I’ve missed a meal. But every year on Ash Wednesday, without fail, I have to strategically plan out my big meal, my small meals, and wonder how on earth I’m possibly going to make it from one to the next without snacking in between. 

As Lent gets underway, we will all find ourselves struggling with our penances. The words of the great 20th century American author Flannery O’Connor provide a helpful explanation of what’s going on here. She wrote, “All human nature vigorously resists grace, because grace changes us, and the change is painful.”

Grace changes us, and change is painful; therefore, we vigorously resist it. We know that we need to change, but when we set out to do it, everything in us seems to react against our efforts. 

I wonder if that is the case because we tend to miss the central element of what Flannery O’Connor described, namely, grace. In the midst of our introspection, in our looking for the speck in our own eye before pointing out the beam in our brother’s, do we perhaps get too much caught up in our own selves and overlook the fact that it is divine grace that is really at work here, not our mere efforts alone. We tend to approach Lent as a season of ‘what I need to do, for God’ rather than as a season of ‘what God wants to do, in me’. It is God’s grace that changes us; and yes, that change is painful, and we will react vigorously against it, but to recognize the primacy of grace over and above our own resolutions places all that we undertake in Lent in its proper context, that of God’s unmerited love for us, to change us, into his new creation. 

To use an analogy, if we were to diagnose ourselves with an illness and attempt to treat ourselves, we wouldn’t do a very good job and would likely run the risk of hurting ourselves further. But if we are under the care of a diligent doctor and commit ourselves to the regimen that they have prescribed for us, then we can take confidence that, while the treatment may still be unpleasant, it will lead us to health. It is the same with God. 

The Responsorial Psalm and the Second Reading describe God’s treatment plan for us. In the Psalm, we heard that the just one “shall flourish like the palm tree,” and “They that are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.” The just shall “bear fruit even in old age; vigorous and sturdy shall they be.” Earlier in the first Psalm of the Book of Psalms, the Psalmist tells us that the one who is blessed is “planted by streams of water.” To be just and good, to be whole and complete, to flourish and bear fruit, requires one to be planted near a river of living and life-giving water. Whereas the Bible associates life and flourishing with water, it also places sin alongside the desert. We know all too well the experience of dryness, of dehydration, of being in a place that is devoid of life on account of our own sinfulness. Lent is an opportunity to venture into the desert, to face the reality of our own sinfulness, so that we yearn all the more for the refreshing waters of God’s grace to restore us, to enable us to grow strong and sturdy, to flourish, and to bear fruit. 

As a parish throughout Lent we will be praying together the words of Psalm 63: “O God, you are my God, for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.” We will have prayer cards for you all with that Psalm and an image of the desert beginning next week. These words will shape our parish’s prayer during Lent, as we come to recognize our own dryness and our need and desire for the water that only God can give. 

And the water that God gives, the water of his grace which changes us, is the water and Blood that comes from his pierced side from the Cross––the Cross by which Jesus’ death has definitively conquered sin and death. It is this water which, as Saint Paul describes, changes what is corruptible in us to become incorruptible, what is mortal to become immortal. In the Cross, Paul tells us, we know that our “labor is not in vain.” 

All that we undertake in this holy season, every penance and discipline, every act of mercy and of almsgiving, has value and power and will be effective only insofar as it is united to the Lord’s Cross, in which is our only hope to leave the desert behind and to be planted for all eternity in the courts of our God, made complete and incorruptible, as victors over sin and death in Christ Jesus our Lord. To him be glory now and forever. Amen.