Rite of Election

For our parish communities - that during this Lenten period, they may grow in

charity and be constant in prayer.

The Elected: Mary Manying Zou, Mary Lingying Kong and Eric Jun Qu

1st SUNDAY LENT (C) 17 February 2013

Click here to download Cantonese homily translation audio

We have begun the season of Lent, and we speak of it as a time of renewal.  Sometimes it helps to think of secular analogies for what we are doing during Lent.  I think of such words – and such processes – as audit, or review, or appraisal or stock-take.  All of these words suggest that we are stopping what we are doing so that we can look carefully at how we have been performing.  Usually there are a set of standards that we use in order to compare our performance.  Analogies like these, of course, are only helpful up to a certain point.  They don’t tell the whole story of what Lent is about.  They don’t tell us, for example, is about a journey to Easter.  They don’t necessarily capture the spirit of Lent, which our liturgy describes as a joyful season.  Often people face an audit or an appraisal with a certain sense of fear and anxiety.  We approach Lent as a time to encounter our loving God more deeply.

This, in fact, is the starting point of Lent: that God has loved us.  Any penance we undertake during Lent is aimed at knowing the love of God more clearly.  God’s love is the source of renewal and repentance.  If we look at any serious effort at religious renewal we see that it always involves going back to the beginnings and recalling how the Holy Spirit has been at work.  Religious renewal will happen as people remember God’s original calling, God’s initial action in their lives, and as they seek to re-kindle that first fervour.   In the years after the Second Vatican Council religious orders of sisters and brothers all spent time renewing their congregations.  The call they all heard was to go back to the charism of their founder.  In a similar way, this is our task in Lent.

In fact, this is what Moses was doing in the first reading today.  He called on the people to remember their ancestors who had been wanderers and who found themselves in Egypt.  Then he tells them what God did for them: he heard their cry for help and he freed them from slavery in Egypt; finally, he brought them to a land flowing with milk and honey.  The point of remembering these events is to remember God’s love for them, and to remember how they became God’s people – his very own people, a people after his own heart.

Today, on this first Sunday of Lent we are being invited to remember, so that memory will become the stimulus for our Lenten observance and renewal.  What should we remember?  I would suggest that the starting point for our memory should be our baptism and all that was associated with it.  Remember what first attracted you to seek baptism; remember the process you went through before you were baptised; remember what you were taught.  If you were baptised as a baby, remember the first time you learnt about God.  Or remember the first time you were taught to pray.  The point of our remembering is to experience once again that initial love of God, that attraction we had to God.  Then, against the background of this experience, we can examine our life now and see how far we might have moved away from that original experience.  True conversion is a response to the love of God.

The readings tell us something more about how we should enter into the season of Lent.  The gospel tells us of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, when he went into the desert.  It had a similar impact to the penances we undertake during Lent.  The desert was a place that was unwelcoming, where there were none of the usual things that organise a person’s life.  The desert was a place of testing.  When they were out there, people came to know themselves as they had never known themselves before.  Suddenly temptations were all around them.  These were not necessarily temptations to moral wrong-doing.  At their heart, they were temptations to run away from God.  This is what we see with Jesus today.  The three temptations he faced capture for us the idea of how the desert challenges people.  Ultimately, these temptations are about how we stand before the created world (turn a stone into a loaf of bread), before other people (receive power and glory over the kingdoms of the world), and before God (put God to the test).  The temptation is to take control in such a way that God is no longer necessary.  While we see Jesus being tempted in this way, it is also helpful to recognise that these are the temptations of every age.  Perhaps in our own age, more than any other, the big temptation is to push God aside as though we don’t need God.  Modern society acts as though it has the power to conquer everything, to control everything, to determine everything –whether it be creation, people or God.

It is true that I am speaking here in a very general way about society as a whole.  But it can focus our attention this Lent.  Let me suggest two things that we might like to do during this coming first week of Lent.  Take some time to pray – to sit quietly with God.  As you sit with God remember how you came to faith; remember your earliest experiences of being loved by God.  Then, secondly, identify the ways in your life that you seek to control – whether it be trying to control creation, or control other people.  Identify, too, those places in your life you seek to act like God in the most subtle of ways.  If we do these things I believe we will have begun Lent well.

Fr Gerard Kelly (Catholic Institute of Sydney)