The Constant Gardener: Homily for the First Sunday in Lent

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Christ Jesus. Just a few days ago, as the ashes were imposed on our heads we heard the solemn words:

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris

Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return

On that day, we also heard the advice of Our Lord,

when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.

In today’s Gospel, when Our Lord – soon after His baptism – goes into the desert to pray, He demonstrates to us what this advice means.

We can, however, go deeper into this mystery. The desert is a place of dryness, where water is lacking and this signifies the dryness of our spirits when, because of our sin, we are distanced from God. We should hold this idea in mind when we read the first lines of the first reading this Sunday, from the book of Genesis:

The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground
and blew into his nostrils the breath of life,
and so man became a living being.

Reflecting on these words St. Augustine reminds us that we were made not just of dry dust, but rather from clay, or mud, which is “a mixture of earth and water.” In other words, God wet the dry earth, and infused this wet earth, this clay, with His spirit.

In the desert, and through His Passion, and now from the wound in  His Most Sacred Heart, Our Lord similarly irrigates the desert, of our souls, with his sweat, tears and blood. His entire Passion was undertaken, so that the dryness in which we found ourselves could be irrigated and then made a receptacle for His Holy Spirit.

If He provides the water and Spirit that makes us, to use the words of St. Iraneus of which I am very fond; “fully alive,” then it makes sense to understand that we are the ones who provides the dry earth, or humus, so that it may be irrigated, and planted with His seed, the Holy Spirit, so that we may bear fruit “a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Mt 13: 8). Psalm 104: 29-30 underlines the fact that without His Holy Spirit, we are just dry earth:

when you take away their breath, they die
    and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
    and you renew the face of the ground.

This dry earth, this humus, is the inner room that Our Lord referred to on Ash Wednesday. With the help of His Passion and death, and the gift of His Holy Spirit, He wishes that this desert be converted into a garden that will bear much fruit. (It was not for nothing that the first encounter with the Risen Lord took place in a garden, and He was mistaken for a gardener – Jn 20: 15).

Listen to the words of the prophet Isaiah (5:1b – 2):

My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;

This is the work that Our Lord would have us do, as he also suggests in the parable of the sower (Mt 13: 1-9, 18-22).

He would have us plough it deep, to remove the stones in the soil, the weeds or thorns, so that when He sows and irrigates it with His Word this humus will reap much fruit.

And how would we plough this dry earth? With the prayer, fasting, and penance of Lent. Understand prayer as the act of ploughing, and we get a sense of how we must pray; repeatedly, letting the tip of the plough go ever deeper into our soul. As many of you well know, I am fond of ejaculatory prayer, a single verse repeated over and over again, so that it becomes entrenched in our hearts. This is ploughing of the soul. The fast and other penance is the process through which we collect the stones in our hearts, those emotions, desires, attachments, that we realise we do not need, and can – or must – do without.

My dear brothers and sisters, in the opening words of the first reading I suggested that we find three things: flesh (dust), water, and the Spirit. The same combination of objects is to be found in the episode of the baptism of Our Lord. His earthly body (our flesh) enters the river Jordan (water) and the Holy Spirit descends on it to recognize Our Lord as the beloved Son of God. This is what happens to us at baptism, where our dry earth is irrigated with the sweat, blood, and the water from the side of Our Lord and the Holy Spirit gives us new life, and repeatedly at every sacrament, and Eucharistic communion. All we need to do is ensure that the soil is ploughed deep, something we also do at confession.

My dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord commands us today to go into our inner room, the desert of dry earth, and cultivate it so that it could become a garden. The Christian tradition recognizes Our Lady as the Hortus Conclusus, the enclosed garden. A garden that was cultivated through constant prayer and humility, patience and perseverance. On this first Sunday of Lent, let us turn to this Hortus Conclusus, and petition Her help so that we may convert our inner deserts into the enclosed gardens of the Lord through the rest of these thirty-six days.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.

(The homily was written exclusively for this virtual congregation I have the privilege to address.)

(Image reference: Christ appears as a gardener to Mary Magdalene (Noli me tangere), Maerten de Vos, 1585.)

Come Let Us Do Battle! Homily for Ash Wednesday

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this first Ash Wednesday of my priestly life, I would like to share two incidents with you which offer us a way to purify our practice of this holy season of Lent into which we are proceeding.

In discussion with a priest, I indicated that I was thinking of giving up meat altogether this holy season. This seemed to enrage the priest who set upon me, indicating that he thought that these kinds of fasts were pointless, because after Lent, people went on a rampage gorging themselves on meat, or drink, or whatever they abstained from during Lent.

The second incident took place at a carnivalesque party I attended. Once again, the forthcoming season of Lent entered the conversation, and one man indicated that he did not believe in giving up anything during Lent. He rationalized that what we were supposed to do was to put in the money that we would have used to buy ourselves a drink, or other goodie, and at the end of Lent give that to charity. He then proceeded to joke that we could just as well put in the money and have the drink.

Both these scenarios, my dear brothers and sisters, horrified me, because I recognized in them the diabolical; the work of the devil. In our times the work of the devil has been primarily through urging us against external demonstrations of piety, of physical exertions of penitence and fasting. What is important is the mind, we are told. We have to convert our attitudes, we are told, and the physical actions do not really matter.

As with most things about the devil, there is some truth in the proposition. It is true that our intentions must be purified, but the little deviation that he effects eventually takes us miles away from the devout life, and the devil wins! Let us remind, ourselves, my dear brothers and sisters, through recourse to the Collect for the mass on Ash Wednesday, as to the purpose of our Lenten fasts and penitence.

Support us, Lord, as with this Lent fast

we begin our Christian warfare,

so that in doing battle against the spirit of evil

we may be armed with the weapon of self-denial.

Clearly, the season of Lent is a campaign of spiritual warfare, where supported by our Lord, we do battle with the devil, for the sake of our souls, and those of others, arming ourselves with weapons of self-denial. This is the purpose of our Lenten fasts, my dear brothers and sisters, and we can only exercise self-restraint if we physically abstain from pleasures of the flesh – no matter how innocent these pleasures may seem.

The diabolical urge to restrict Lenten exercises to the intellectual is in part the result of a misinterpretation of today’s Gospel. For decades now we have been urged to interpret the Gospel as Our Lord asking us to hide our prayer and fasting, and our pious acts and penitence. But this is NOT the intention of Our Lord. Let us re-read these verses and enter into the correct spirit that animates them:

Take care not to perform righteous deeds
in order that people may see them; [italicized emphasis mine]

When you pray,
do not be like the hypocrites,
who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners
so that others may see them. [italicized emphasis mine]

“in order that people may see them”, “so that others may see them”! These are the operative words of the Gospel! And similarly with the other lessons we see the same caution:

When you give alms,
do not blow a trumpet before you,

….

to win the praise of others.

In other words, do not act with the sole intention that others may see you. We are doing these acts not to gain the admiration and praise of people, but so that we may gain, as in the words of the Gospel today;

              recompense from your heavenly Father.

The Fathers of the Church are also in agreement with this reading of the scriptures. No lesser an authority that the great St. John Chrysostum says “He [that is Our Lord] is not focusing simply on the outward act done but the inward intent.”

Our Lord warns that if we act with the intention to gain the admiration and praise of this world, then our reward will be the fleeting and temporary rewards of this world. Our attention during this holy season of Lent must be turned not towards this world, but to the world that is to come, the world towards which we are all headed in pilgrimage.

In defence of the public enactment of our piety and penance, the Church Fathers point to the command of our Lord (Mt 5: 16)

Let your light shine so that others may see your good works and may glorify your Father who is in heaven.

In other words, do your works of piety, penitence, and charity in full view of the world, but care little for what they say or do to you as a result. The only reason you are undertaking these acts, is to gain reward in heaven, and to draw more people to our God.

As St. Paul counsels us in the second reading:

We are ambassadors for Christ,
as if God were appealing through us.

God has made us the heralds of His Gospel and wishes that we teach others how to live pious Christian lives. Our job, my dear brothers and sisters, is to convert the world to the faith, and we can do this only if we lead visibly pious lives. Lives that are not a sham, but genuinely pious! This is the task that we must set for ourselves this Lent. Grow in piety through actions that are not restricted to our mind, but carried out in full view of everyone, regardless of what they say.

May Our Lord, His Blessed Mother, His Holy Angels and Saints support us in your spiritual warfare this holy season.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 18 Feb 2026.)

(Image reference: Mary Hands Over the Infant Jesus to the Archangel Gabriel so that She can Beat a Demon, The Taymouth Hours, 14^th Cent., Yates Thompson Collection of the British Library.)