Order Your Lives to Christ! Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

The second preface of Lent (we can get into what is a preface at Mass at some other time, in short, it is the prayer offered by the priest just prior to the Sanctus), which has the theme of Spiritual penance has this penetrating insight to offer us:

For you have given your children a sacred time

for the renewing and purifying of their hearts,

that, freed from disordered affections [italicized emphasis mine],

they may so deal with the things of this passing world

so to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.

Disordered affections, this is precisely what St. Paul is getting at in his letter to the Philippians, which we read today, on Passion Sunday, when he says:

Brothers and sisters:
I consider everything as a loss
because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things
and I consider them so much rubbish,
that I may gain Christ and be found in him

Brothers and sisters, this attitude of St. Paul, is the attitude that we should adopt during our Lenten fasts and abstinence. We fast and abstain from things because we recognize that at some level these things that we otherwise hold affection for – whether chocolate, or alcohol, or films and television, music, or parties, are all disordered. They are disordered, because it followed mindlessly, they do not lead us toward Christ, but away from Him. When we give up these things for Lent therefore, our attitude ought not to be to wait for the forty days so that we can just go back to them with gusto, but to realise that, in fact, we can live without them! Living without them may open up one more way in which we can draw ourselves closer to Christ by learning to live without the things of this world and live with the one thing that gives us (eternal) life; Our Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, and to go back to second preface, the point of Lenten abstinences is that we may be freed from disordered affections.

One of the features of contemporary life is to mistake the object of our affections, and the sentiments that we feel when in the presence of these objects, as the reason for our living. To repurpose a silly line from a TV comedy, St. Paul says wrong! Accept the loss of all things that keep you from Christ, accept them as so much rubbish, and you will be well on the way towards the goal of the Christian life. In other words, order your life to Christ and His Cross, and you will win!

St. Paul can sometimes use strikingly contemporary language when he speaks about the Christian life. Take, for example, these words in his letter to the Corinthians (9: 24-27) that those of us involved with healthy lifestyles, exercising and the gym, will readily get:

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

The Lenten fasts and abstinences are spiritual exercises so that we can limber up for the race toward the final prize. They are merely the warmup, so that the following Lent we can do better, and then the following year even better. As someone who has lived, and loved, the fast life, may I suggest to you, that as you take up these fasts and abstinences, your life opens up to the beauty of other things are more ordered towards Christ.

There will be many of you who will have started Lent with determination and verve and are now tired and have fallen away from your fasts. Buck up! So you’ve slacked off! No matter! Pick yourself up and get back with the programme! Some of you may not have started at all! No matter! There is someone I know who would start late, but his fasts would get more and more rigorous as he approached Good Friday. This could be you too! As the Gospel acclamation reminds us:

Even now, says the Lord,
return to me with your whole heart;
for I am gracious and merciful.

Even now, says the Lord! Bretheren, I leave you with the first verse of a beautiful hymn written in the fifth century, which you could well turn into a personal prayer, and even sing it, for the remainder of Lent;

Lord Jesus think on me

and purge away my sin,

from earthly passions set me free,

and make me pure within. 

May you have a blessed Passiontide.

(Image reference: Adoration of the True Cross by St Helena and the Emperor Heraclius, Jimenez Bernalt, 1480s, Saragossa Museum).

Rejoice in the Lord! Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Through this entire period of Lent I have tried to demonstrate that Lent may be a period of fast and abstinence, but it is not, by any means, a period of glumness. Christian life is about love and joy, and these sentiments must animate us always. This fourth Sunday of Lent, when we are more than halfway through Lent, Holy Mother Church makes precisely this point, when while designating this day Laetare Sunday, She asks us to rejoice!

If we rejoice, however, it is, to quote from the prophet Nehemiah, in the Lord that we must rejoice, and the parable of the prodigal song, which we encounter in the Gospel today, teaches us just how!

Relying on patristic readings, that is, the interpretations by the Fathers of the Church, we realise that the parable of the prodigal son offers us a quick review of salvation history. Central to this reading of the parable of the prodigal son is to understand the son as the figure of Adam and his offspring – that is us, the human race. We were in the Father’s house, until through Adam’s desire to be independent, and not have to listen to God, we left the Father’s house. In other words, we left Eden, for this earth, where we often spend the graces that we are given from the Father in pointless ways, or as Or Lord puts it, “in a life of dissipation.”

The life spent away from the Father, is a life without grace. All too often, relying on the graces that we may have inherited or have, we believe that we can rely without the Father – in other words, we do not need to go for Mass, to participate in the sacraments. But, as the parable demonstrates, there is only so long that we can last without getting a refill on grace.

Once the prodigal son has spent what he gathered from the Father, he then turns to a local who makes him herd his pigs. Building on the fact that the local makes the son herd pigs, the Fathers of the Church point out that this man is a reference to the Prince of this world, the devil.  And if we think about it, we realise that very often, after we have spent our graces, rather than turn to the Father, we turn to the various false gods: we seek solace in money, power, fame, pleasure. The “the pods on which the swine fed” are the cheap thrills that the devil provides us to distract us from recognizing who we are, and from our destiny to return to the embrace of the Father; and shamefully, rather than return to a grace filled life with the Father, we often long to eat our “fill of the pods on which the swine fed”.

Fortunately, however, there is always the stirring of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. I believe it was the stirring of the Holy Spirit that made the son come to his senses, to repent for his behaviour and to then turn to the Father.

In the son’s soliloquy, where he practices the little speech he would make to his father, we see also the common attitude we often have when we go to confession. We may confess our sins, but we are not sure if God truly forgives us. The parable should be a wake up call for us, however, of the attitude of God to our every confession:

While he was still a long way off,
his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion.
He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.

The Father is always waiting for our return, and the moment we make the first move, He rushes to embrace us!

And then, what I think is the pièce de résistance of the parable: the father takes the fatted calf and slaughters it to mark the reconciliation. My dear brothers and sisters, we eat meat so often today that we forget that in the old days, meat was reserved for the rich and for special occasions. When the father slaughtered the calf it was a big thing, and a way to bring dignity back to this reconciliation of the son with the father. And according to Peter Chrysologus, the slaughtered calf is in fact a reference to the Son of God who was slaughtered on the cross so that the sons of Adam could be restored to the dignity which they had lost thanks to the original sin.

My dear brothers and sisters, the parable ends with the father saying:

we must celebrate and rejoice,
because your brother was dead and has come to life again;
he was lost and has been found.

Indeed, as Our Lord teaches in the Gospel according to Luke (15:7), “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents.” Let us, therefore, this Laetare Sunday, be the cause for rejoicing in Heaven, when inspired by this parable, we become the prodigal son who returns to the embrace of the Father through recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation, or confession.

(This homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 30 March 2025.)

(Image reference: “The Prodigal Son”(detail), Albrecht Dürer, c.1496, The Met, New York.)

Repent, and enter into Life: Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

I know of a, once very powerful, man. With his power, he usurped land, and  proceeded to build a magnificent mansion, in violation of every rule. And because power makes us attractive, he lived a debauched life. On one such misadventure, he went to a distant city, with the female relative, to engage there in a drug fueled adulterous relationship. Something went wrong, however, and he was struck down by a stroke, a state from which he has not fully recovered, even after the passage of many years.

My dear brothers and sisters, after having heard this anecdote, many of you will be nodding and thinking of how a sinful life eventually gets the punishment it deserves. And yet, in the Gospel this Sunday, Our Lord suggests to the contrary.

Responding to the news report that Pilate had killed some Jews who had just offered their sacrifices, Our Lord says:

“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way
they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?
By no means!

Our Lord then adds another example to drive home the point. This time he speaks about a tower that fell on some people and killed them:

Or those eighteen people who were killed
when the tower at Siloam fell on them—
do you think they were more guilty
than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?
By no means!

In making these two observations, Our Lord was challenging an assumption that is as popular today as it was in His own time, that calamity is the result of sin! In asking these rhetorical questions, Our Lord is making clear that the Jews that Pilate killed, and the eighteen people who were crushed by the tower of Siloam were not more guilty, or sinful, that any other people.

If so, then why did they die? Because it is a rule of this sinful world that we live in that bad things happen even to good people! It is true that, as in the anecdote I just recounted, the sins we commit can catch up with us even in our lifetimes, but it is more often the case that the unjust and the evil people of this world have wonderful lives (do read Psalm 73)! It is often the just who suffer!

But the point Our Lord was, and is, making is not about suffering, but about repentance, which is why after both these examples, he says the exact same words:

But I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!

Repent, he says, and you will live. Do not repent, and then like those in the examples, who had no opportunity to repent, you will have died the second, and more important, death, the death of the soul.

My dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord constantly warns us that we must fear not physical death, but the death of the soul (Mt 10:28), and because death is always so close, so unpredictable, and one could die at any time, without the possibility of repenting, our entire life should be one of repentance.

The Christian life is one of joy, and the call to repentance does not mean a life of fear and mourning. In keeping with this principle of joy, the faith offers us the sacramental opportunity for repentance, in the form of the sacrament of reconciliation, all the time. All we need to do is find a priest and confess our sins. Remember also, that we should not receive communion if we are in mortal sin. A regular confession, therefore, is an excellent way to prepare for a good death.

There are also other ways in which we can prepare for a good death and make our lives one of continuous repentance. We can spend as many moments we have by repeating a prayer that is known as the Jesus prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,

Have mercy of me, a sinner.

Repeating this prayer constantly, and mindfully, will create in us the disposition necessary to lead a life of repentance, one that will regularly lead us to the sacrament of confession, and eventually to heaven.

This is the beauty of the Christian life; the call to repentance does not mean a life of fear and a long face. Because Our Lord has borne the price of our sin, and can take away our sin, our repentance does not lead to a wallowing in unhappiness. On the contrary, it opens the doors to happiness and joy, because we know that there is now a life after sin.

Brothers and sisters, we are halfway through Lent, a period we began with the words “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” This Sunday, Our Lord reiterates that message, inviting us to repent, and enter into life. Let us respond wholesomely to this call!

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda, on 23 March 2025.)

(Image reference: “Saint Jerome in penitence”, Jose de Ribera "el Españoleto", 1634, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.)