Homily for Ash Wednesday

Today, we begin Lent.  One of the themes of Lent is that we fast.  Not as in exceeding the speed limit, but rather it’s about cutting back, self-discipline, eating plainer food and eating less of it.  We might, instead, prefer the word “feast”.  It’s just the same as fast, but with an extra letter – the letter “e”.  But the letter “e” is the beginning of the word “Easter”.  We can feast at Easter, but for now, and especially today, we fast.  Besides, feasting is much more enjoyable when we’ve worked up an appetite, and also when we’ve done something to earn it, rather than being handed it on a plate with no work involved.

But fasting and feasting, Lent and Easter, are not just times of stoic effort and self-congratulation.  That would be completely to distort the meaning of Lent and Easter.  We travel through Lent and Easter with Christ.  We join Him in the desert when He spent forty days fasting, we follow Him to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room and then to Calvary, and then we rejoice at the empty tomb, live with the risen Christ and go into the whole world to spread the Good News.  Lent and Easter have a purpose, and that is to draw us closer to Christ.  Without Christ, they are empty of all real meaning.

But if we draw closer to Christ, that means other things have to go.  If we bring icicles to a furnace, the icicles will melt and then evaporate.  If we bring our sin to Christ, we can’t stay with that sin.  We either have to leave Christ, or hand that sin over to Him for Him to get rid of it for us.  And we can’t go on sinning.  After meeting Christ, our lives change for the better.  We can’t stay the same as before.

The second reading has a message for those of us who know something has to change in our lives, but keep on putting it off.  “Behold, now is the favourable time; behold, now is the day of salvation”.  As we know, the thing about putting things off until tomorrow is, that tomorrow never comes.  But why wait?  John Pridmore tells the story that when he was a child, he got a thorn in his hand.  He was afraid that if he showed it to his mother, she would just clumsily only make matters worse in her attempt to get rid of it, so he hid it from her.  Then one day, she spotted it and removed it straight away.  He thought to himself how stupid he had been – he had put up with all that pain, when it could have been gone in an instant, days ago.

Maybe we take the same approach with confession.  There are things that pain our souls.  We try to forget about them.  And perhaps, for a while, we succeed.  But from time to time, something reminds us of them, and maybe we are irritated when that happens.  We can be scared of going to confession.  It can be difficult to own up.  Maybe, deep down, we try to protect ourselves and subconsciously forget important things, so that, on the surface, we can’t remember anything in particular that we need to confess.  But when we do actually go to confession, it is such a relief!  It is so simple!  The priest says those words of absolution, and all our sins are gone!

Maybe our situation is complicated.  Maybe we need more than just a quick three minutes to detail everything.  It is possible to arrange a separate time for confession.  You can choose any priest you want.  You can opt for face to face, or arrange to meet behind the screen, with the curtain closed.  It might be that you need half an hour to do proper justice to what you need to mention – if so, then so be it.  It might be that there is a particular priest that you think might be more understanding of your situation, or there might be one that you particularly get on with.  Or maybe you just want to pick someone that doesn’t know you.  You don’t have to go to your parish priest; the important thing is that you do go.  The Church holds a deathbed confession as so important that if I went to visit someone who was dying, and in that room there was also someone there who was a laicised priest, a man who had left the priesthood, normally he wouldn’t be able to hear confessions, but in those circumstances, the dying person can request to go to the laicised priest, not me, and that is perfectly valid in that situation.

And there’s more.  We have recently come to the end of the Jubilee Year.  The holy doors of cathedrals around the world have closed.  But God’s mercy does not, and a special year of St Francis has been declared, commemorating the eight hundredth anniversary of the death of St Francis, and there are special plenary indulgences available.  So even if you have put things off, please don’t put them off now.  With Christ, fast.  Do the difficult work now.  Repent.  Confess.  And then at Easter, with the risen Christ, sharing in His risen life, you can truly rejoice.  You can place the letter “e” of Easter into the word “fast” and Christ can change it for you into a real feast, a feast that leads to the banquet of eternal life in heaven.