Our People

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, Year A

Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish, Watson’s Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
10/2/2008

Last Tuesday was known in the Anglophone parts of the Christian world as Shrove Tuesday: the name refers to being ‘shriven’ or absolved after going to Confession. In Francophone places the day is called Mardi Gras, the reference being to this being the last day for eating fat. In some places it is known as Carnival, which means farewell to meat. Here in Australia most people call it Pancake Tuesday, which like Mardi Gras and Carne-vale points to the strict fast ahead, in this case because of the ancient custom of using up all our butter, eggs and sweet things the day before Lent.

Well, I went this Tuesday past not to a pancake parlour but a pizza parlour and I found that I was scandalising my Lebanese Maronite waiter by eating meat. I discovered that Eastern Christians had already begun Lent and despite my best efforts to explain that we Latin Catholics began Lent the next day, I’m sure he thought I was a typical impious Westerner and a lax priest to boot!

While Eastern and Western Christians do not agree on exactly when Lent is, we do at least agree that its forty days long. In Byzantine tradition the forty days of Lent start on Clean Monday (i.e. the Monday just past), but that would make Lent 48 days long, so they finish ordinary Lent on the Friday before Palm Sunday. Then Second Lent begins and the really hard fasting with it. We lax Westerners only have one Lent, which runs from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, but that too, it seems, does not compute, since it adds up to 46 days. But it does compute: the six Sundays of Lent are not counted in our Lent because every Sunday is a mini- Easter, a commemoration of the Resurrection. Even this is not so simple, however, since we still call them ‘Sundays of Lent’, wear purple, engage in penitential practices, stop singing the Gloria and avoid saying the A-word associated with Easter. Nonetheless, for forty days or so, from around now, whether from East or West, we Christians are all on retreat.

Well, why the forty days, however they are counted? Obviously, our forty days mimic those we heard in this morning’s Gospel (Mt 4:1-11). We join Jesus in fasting, prayer and almsgiving, and so face up to our demons as did Christ. But why did he go on retreat for forty days? Well, we know that Moses spent forty days with God on Mount Sinai, so that seems to be a good length of time for a retreat with God. We know that Nineveh was given forty days in which to repent by Jonah and so that seems a good length of time to spend being tried and, in our case not in Jesus’, a good length of time to spend repenting. And we know that God made the rain last forty days and nights in Noah’s time (rather like the present!) and so that’s a good length of time to spend in preparation for baptism.

And so, in the early Church, the catechumens – those preparing for baptism at Easter – kept a strict fast while receiving their last instructions. Like the Ninevites they repented, like Moses they spent their days with God, like those in Noah’s day they contemplated the water, and like Christ they prepared for their ‘public life’ beyond baptism. I always think parishes who have someone to baptise at Easter better understand what both Easter and Lent are about. Anyway, in due course this practice was extended to all Christians, not just those preparing for Baptism and those accompanying them. It gives us all a chance to prepare better for Easter.

Lent is, then, a time to renounce some pleasures like chocolate or wine, to abstain from meat on Fridays, to give to the poor especially through Project Compassion, to offer extra prayers and devotions, and especially to make our at-least-annual Confession, our return to baptismal innocence. I remember last year a Protestant minister recommending that we fast from fasting in Lent. He was being deliberately provocative, but his thought was that all these Catholic practices are worthless because they are built on the illusion that we can save ourselves by doing them. But that, of course, is to miss the point altogether. We are not trying to save ourselves; we are making a Lenten space for God, for only our Easter Lord, to saves us. For if Easter is about salvation, Lent is about sin; if Easter is about life, Lent is about death. It is because of the Lent in our everyday lives that we need Easter.

It is sometimes said we Christians are an Easter people. Certainly the Resurrection is the central event of our lives and identity. But without the cross and the tomb, without acknowledging the sin and death that lead to the cross and the tomb, without walking the forty-day long Lenten journey with Christ to the grave and beyond, the Resurrection would just be divine fireworks, a spectacular with little relevance to our ordinary lives. The fact is: we are not an Easter People so much as a Lent and Easter People.

Adam and Eve’s sin, the proto-sin told in our First Reading (Gen ch 3), was certainly original. No human being had tried that before. Sadly it was far from the last. Adam and Eve’s sin left us all damaged and it was the prototype for all sin. It had three essential dimensions. Like all sins ever since, it represented an attack on God, whose divine will is offended: Adam and Eve knew what God wanted for them and they did the opposite. Sin is also, always, an attack on our neighbour, often directly but even in the case of the most ‘private’ sins, it affects the whole Church. So today we saw how Adam and Eve drew each other in to the sin. Lastly, by sinning, we always attack ourselves, we make ourselves less than we could be and should be. We degrade the image of God in us.

The effects of sin follow on directly: alienation from ourselves, from each other and from God. We see that in story of the first sin, when Adam and Eve immediately set too blaming each other, hating their own bodies, and hiding from God. And that is why we have three Lenten antidotes. Fasting is about seeking reconciliation with ourselves; almsgiving is about reconciliation with each other; and prayer is about reconciliation with God. Three balms for three messes in the human heart.

By fasting we seek to co-operate with God in getting a handle on our passions. We face up to our self-indulgence and obsession with comfort, the sin or mess in our relationship to ourselves. We come to terms with our own weakness and our internal division of the heart. We try by some token of self-denial to co-operate with God in his project of healing our hearts.

By almsgiving we seek to work with God in facing up to our selfishness, our unwillingness to share our comfort with others. We seek to come to terms with the injustice and the unlovingness of a world in which so many starve or are otherwise neglected. We aim to deal with the sin or mess in our relationships not just to ourselves, but to others. We try to turn a little generosity into the beginning of a whole new way of sharing and to co-operate with God’s project of healing our relationships

Finally, by prayer we co-operate with God in addressing the neglect of the spiritual element in our lives, our unwillingness to share our time and space and minds and wills with God. We come to terms with spiritual indifference and practical agnosticism of so much of our daily life – the fact that while we say we believe, we often live as if we did not. We aim to deal with the sin or mess in our relationships not just to our selves and to each other but to God also. We try to turn a little prayerfulness into a whole new way of communicating better with the One who loves us most and who wants to heal our relationship with him, even if it costs him death on a cross.