2007 2nd Sunday of Lent

I have to confess that when I turned to those readings last Sunday and began to think about today’s homily, I didn’t exactly do so with an open mind. Having begun Lent two weeks ago with a reflection on the relevance of prayer, fasting and alsmgiving in the modern world, and having focused more specifically last week on the first of these, prayer, I was hoping that the liturgy this week would provide us with an opportunity to look more closely at the second, fasting. At first sight, however, this did not seem to be the case. But as the days passed, I began to see that the opportunity is there and would like to take advantage of it now.

The first reading today describes one of the key moments in the Old Testament. Moses, having killed an Egyptian in a quarrel, has fled. In the wilderness, however, he meets God in the burning bush, and God sends him back to Egypt to lead his people in the epic journey we know as the Exodus. And Paul speaks of this in the second reading, reminding the people of Corinth of how the Israelites were guided by a cloud and passed through the Red Sea. God had done great things for them. It was what they wanted and had longed for throughout their years in Egypt. And yet, in spite of all that, most of them - to quote Paul - ‘failed to please God and their corpses littered the desert.’And he goes on to say that ‘these things happened as warnings for us, not to have the wicked lusts for forbidden things that they had,’ So what’s going on here? Well, something very profound I suggest.

The essence of God’s relationship with us is that, having created us in his own image and likenesss, he longs to share his life with us. We are created for God and so, deep within ourselves, we experience desires and longings only God can satisfy. We long for a love that is eternal and does not disappoint because that is what the love of God is like. We long for intimacy and dread loneliness because at the heart of God is the intimacy we call the Trinity. We long for peace, but it is a peace the world cannot give. And yet there is a problem. And the problem is that these are not the only desires we have. We have all kinds of others, many of which are shallow and superficial, and these create an unresolved conflict within every human being. It is the conflict which caused those corpses to litter the desert despite everything God had done for the people and it is the conflict St Paul speaks of so eloquently in a famous passage from the letter to the Romans. ‘I do not understand my own behaviour’ he writes. ‘I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things I hate. The good thing I want to do I never do; the evil thing I do not want – that is what I do…What a wretched man I am,’ a lament in which we could all surely recognize ourselves.

Our whole lives are a procession of unfulfilled good intentions. Over and over again we promise ourselves and others that we will do something and it never happens. We keep hurting the people we love and, despite our best intentions, carry on doing it. Deep within ourselves we aspire to what is good and yet, time and time again, fall flat on our faces. We come hear each week to be fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, and yet, somehow, they don’t have the impact on our lives they could have and which, at some level of ourselves, we want them to have. And the root of all this lies in the conflicting desires in us. We are like a carriage being drawn by a team of horses all pulling in different directions. Our more superficial desires and wants, some of them no more than raw instinct, are like a litter of puppies running riot around the house, tearing down the curtains, chewing the legs of the chairs, smashing the ornaments and disrupting the whole life of the house. What both the team of horses and the dogs need are order and discipline and in the inner world of our conflicting desires that is what fasting, penance, self denial and mortification, old-fashioned words to many, are designed to cultivate.

And so there is nothing negative about them. They have one purpose and one purpose only, which is to help us do the things we want to do rather than the things we don’t want to do but keep doing. They are about making it possible for us to be who we really want to be rather than who our out-of-control desires drive us to be, at some level against our will. They are about turning our intentions into reality by giving power back to our deepest desires rather than our superficial ones. And ultimately, they are about setting us free. They are about freedom.

The fundamental truth about God which emerges from that Exodus story is that God is a liberating God, a God who leads his people out of slavery. The slavery he leads us out of, however, is not the same as the slavery the people experienced in Egypt. Theirs was physical slavery. Ours today is more psychological and spiritual. For millions today, freedom means being able to do whatever we want or feel like without any boundaries or limits. But, of course, this is not freedom. True freedom is not about doing what we want or feel like at any given moment. True feeedom is about doing what is right, even when we don’t feel like it. The genuinely free person is one who, since he/she is in control of his/her superficial desires and not ruled by them, is able to be the best that they can be rather the worst. And this, of course, is what the liturgy of Lent is talking about when it says. ‘This great season of grace is your gift to your family. You give us strength to purify our hearts, to control our desires, and so serve you in freedom. You teach us to live in this passing world with our hearts set on the world that will never end.’ Surely this is one of the signs of the times.

We are a society which, fuelled by consumersim, is addicted in all kinds of ways to satisfying our superficial desires. Drugs addiction is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath, there is a whole world of unfreedoms. And so I invite you to recognize your own and develop a plan of fasting, self-denial and good old-fashioned mortification designed to deal with it.
Addiction to drugs, the scourge of our time, is no more than the tip of an iceberg. The truth is that we are a society addicted in so many ways to our shallow and superficial desires. We are addicted to rubbish on television. We are addicted to having our own way. We are addicted to things we don’t need. But we are addicted most of all to a life-style which perpetuates poverty and injustice in other parts of the world. And so we pray for the grace we need to break free of these addictions…………Lord hear us

It is our addictions which cause us to do what St Paul speaks of in the passage we heard quoted today. It is because we lack inner freedom that we do the things we don’t want to do and don’t do the the things we do want to do. This is what enslaves us and prevents us being what, deep down, we long to be. And so we pray for the grace we need to grow in freedom this Lent through the ancient but modern practice of fasting and self-denial…………………………….Lord hear us

For a whole variety of historical reasons, our society today has a distorted notion of what it means to be free. As a result, many confuse freedom with licence and permissiveness, and among those who have suffered most from this are the young. Born, through no fault of their own, into a world often totally lacking in moral guidance, many are left not knowing what is right and what is wrong. And so we ask God to guide them when we fail to do so………………………Lord hear us

Humanity at its best aspires to all kinds of good things. We are all in favour of building peace. We are all in favour of justice. We would all love to see an end to the hunger and poverty which bedevils the vast bulk of human beings on our planet and we would all like to see an end to warfare and violence. But for these things to become a reality, each of us mus experience the grace of conversion in our own lives. And so we pray for a real openness to it this Lent……………………….Lord hear us

Conversion is challenging and change can be very slow. Often we spend years resisting it or not even recognizing the need for it. And so we pray that, even when we have failed many times in the past, and even if Lent this year fails to produce the necessary fruit, that we may, like the fig tree in the Gospel, never give up hope or stop trying and so maybe bear fruit next year……………………………Lord hear us

As Moses approached the burning bush in the first reading, he took off his shoes because he was on holy ground. But every human being is holy ground. And so we pray for the grace to recognize God in every person and to approach them with something of the sense of awe and wonder Moses felt before God……....Lord hear us