1st SUNDAY LENT (C) 17 February 2013

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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)

33rd SUNDAY (B) 18 November 2012

Fr. Gerard Kelly

In the early Church – in those first few decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus – people expected the Second Coming to occur very soon.  In fact, they expected to see the second coming of Jesus in their own life time.  This naturally had a great impact on the way they lived their lives and the decisions they made.  If you think the world is going to end soon you quickly get a very different perspective on life.  Things that were once important become less important, and things that had been ignored suddenly become very important.  We all know, of course, that the world did not end in those few decades after Jesus, and we know that he has not come back to earth.  Those people soon came to realise the same thing.

This created new problems for them.  They began to ask questions about God – particularly wanting to know what God was doing.  God seemed to have gone silent, seemed to have forgotten them.  Evil things were still happening.  They came to realise that the time they were living in was no different to any other time.  People still suffered and died, natural disasters still occurred, political and civil strife was still raging in some parts of the territory, and violence still occurred in the streets.  This raised questions for them about Jesus and his message.  Jesus had preached the coming reign of God and had called for repentance and conversion.  When he preached the Beatitudes he had told them that with the coming reign of God people would be blessed.  They were now asking where this reign was.  Where is God?

In this situation they began to reflect on the sayings of Jesus like the one we have heard today.  These are very difficult sayings to understand, and it is easy to misunderstand them.  We need to look for the central message that they are giving and not read them as some scientific statement about the world and its future.

In very imaginative terms, these sayings speak about the confusion that will precede the end time.  They are not sayings about when the end time will occur.  In fact, just the opposite!  Jesus says that no one knows the day or the hour.  This is why these sayings were so important for the early church, which had been expecting the second coming in their own time and were disappointed that it was not happening.  These sayings were meant to help shift their focus from worrying about when the end time might occur to how to live in the present time.  These are sayings that give encouragement in the face of challenges and difficulties.

The basic image of the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory was meant to remind them that God had not abandoned them.  Here was a vision of the future where God would visit them.  For this reason, they had every reason to be hopeful and confident.  It is this vision that now shapes their lives and their choices.  They shouldn’t become overwhelmed by the confusion, or evil, or strife they see around them, nor should they shut themselves off from the world hiding in the knoweldge that Jesus will be back soon.  Rather, they should live in the world, and play their part in giving witness even now – and no matter how imperfectly – to what the reign of God will look like.

That is why these readings have been so influential over the centuries.  Every generation, including our own, finds itself asking questions about the way the world is, or the way the church is, or the way society is, and wanting to know where God is in all of this.  Our world probably suffers no less than earlier generations from natural disasters, political and civil strife, institutional corruption, and bad behaviour.  People still feel hurt when they are badly treated or misunderstood, even by people inside the church.  Many around us are looking for reasons to still believe in God.  And of course, there are those who will use any excuse not to believe in God.  Even those people who think that Jesus was simply a good moral teacher and that his teaching is worth following often don’t believe that God can make much difference. 

This is why the message of today’s readings is still there to be heard.  This message is meant to re-kindle the vision of God’s reign.  At certain times that reign can seem imperceptible, just like the mustard seed that Jesus spoke of elsewhere.  But he told us that the mustard seed grows into a great bush.  The message of the readings encourages us to take hope, and to let the promise of Jesus shape the way we choose to live now.  So, while these readings are not trying to predict the second coming of Christ, and are warning us not to become distracted by these thoughts, they do ask us to think of the second coming on a much larger canvas, and to recognise how it can have an impact even now.  The readings thus not only encourage us, but also invite us to rely on the Holy Spirit so that we live even now, thinking and behaving like God, so that his kingdom will be visible in us and we can show the world what is possible when people welcome the gospel of God.