Liturgical Colour : Purple/Violet

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today marks the beginning of the Season of Lent, also known as Quadragesima, a time of preparation and reflection as we prepare ourselves well for the upcoming celebrations of Holy Week and Easter, the most important moments in our whole entire liturgical year. On this day, the day of Ash Wednesday, we have this imposition of blessed ashes on all the people of God as a clear and symbolic representation of our desire to be forgiven from our sins, and as a sign of our repentance and regret from all the things that we have disobeyed the Lord for, and which therefore brought us into the path of sin and evil, out of which we are seeking the Lord for His help and grace, so that, He may free us from the shackles of our sins and evils.

In our first reading today, we heard the reading from the Book of the prophet Joel in which we are all called to repent and turn away from our many sins and wickedness, all because of the great love and compassion, His mercy and forgiveness that He was willing to offer us all generously. The prophet Joel came to the people of God, to those who have been afflicted by hardships, trials, sufferings and difficulties because of their disobedience and lack of faith in God. They have committed all sorts of wickedness and evils, as they allowed themselves to be tempted by the pleasures of the world, its glory and fame, and all the other distractions that have pulled them away from the path of God’s righteousness and grace. That was why they fell further and further into sin and darkness.

Yet, the Lord never gave up on His beloved people, as He continued to send prophets and messengers, one after another, to call upon those people to return to Him, to seek His forgiveness and mercy, and to remind them all that He has always loved them and has always been willing to embrace them all once again with His love, and to bless them and give them all His grace once again, and that He is a merciful God, if only that each and every one of them would return to Him with contrite and repentant hearts and minds. Through the repentance and genuine regret that the people felt for their sins, they would receive the fullness of God’s love, kindness, compassion and forgiveness. Thus, the prophet Joel called on all the people of God to return to Him once again with love and faith.

In our second reading today, we heard from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, in which the Apostle St. Paul reminded the faithful there of the fact and truth that the Lord their God has saved their people and brought them all to His presence once again, through none other than His own Beloved Son, Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, Whom He has sent into this world in order to bring unto us the perfect manifestation of His love and salvation. This brings once again our attention into the great love and kindness which God has always had for us, and for which we really should be thankful for, as without this love and generosity, we would have been condemned into our downfall and destruction, because of our many sins which should have led us into the utter darkness.

God does not intend for that to happen to us, and He has always shown that His mercy and love are greater than the power of sin, and all the darkness that have surrounded us. He has sent us His Son so that through Him all of us may have and receive the guarantee of eternal life and true joy, by His loving sacrifice on the Cross, through which He has redeemed us all from the power and dominion of sin and death. Each and every one of us who have been defiled by the corruption of sin have been called to embrace God’s love and kindness found in His beloved Son, manifested perfectly to us, and shown to us, in His most glorious and wonderful act of love, bearing our many sins, all the consequences and punishments for them, on His Cross, so that He, as our Paschal Lamb, slain and sacrificed on the Altar of the Cross, may become the perfect and most worthy offering for the atonement of all of our many sins.

This is the truth which St. Paul, the other Apostles, the disciples and missionaries of the Lord had preached and proclaimed about. They have spoken about everything that God has done for our sake through His Son, Our Lord and Saviour, and therefore, each and every one of us, as God’s beloved people, may be holy and filled with His grace once again, rejecting firmly the path of sin and evil, renouncing and resisting all the temptations and the false promises of Satan, and all the things which had led to the downfall of so many among our predecessors, and which we have been reminded about so that we ourselves will not fall into the same trap of sin, that we may find our way to righteousness and grace through our repentance and sincere desire to reject firmly the path of sin and evil.

In our Gospel passage today, we then heard of the Lord’s discourse to His disciples and the people listening to Him regarding the matter of the practice of fasting, which is practiced by the Israelites as mentioned by the prophet Joel in our first reading today, and also by their descendants, the Jewish people. The Lord was teaching them about the right way how each and every one of them ought to be fasting, that is by doing so not because they wanted to be seen or witnessed, praised or honoured by others in doing that. In essence, the Lord reminded them and hence all of us as well, that our practice of fasting and abstinence which we always do today on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, abstinence itself which we practice on Fridays throughout the year, and other Lenten practices, like almsgiving and other devotions, should always be centred on God.

This is because if we fast or carry out our Lenten practices in order to be seen or be praised by others, just as how the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law liked to do it during the time of the Lord’s ministry, then we are not really being sincere in our intention and purpose of doing such actions. We are instead feeding our ego and pride, desire and greed, among other things, and we fall short of doing our obligations and what we are expected to do as God’s followers and disciples. We ought to fast and abstain because we want to learn to restrain our desires and the demands of our bodies from worldly satisfactions and all the pleasures of the flesh, and not because we want to be praised and honoured, which is in fact contrary to the spirit of fasting and abstinence in the first place.

That is why, brothers and sisters in Christ, as we enter into this Season of Lent today, being marked with the blessed ashes as a sign of our repentance, let us more importantly mark our hearts with the genuine sign of repentance and with the strong desire to seek God’s love and mercy, His compassion and forgiveness. The ashes should not be merely just an external symbol or formality, and it should not be the source of pride and ego, thinking that we are better or more righteous than others. Rather, it should remind us all of our sinfulness, and our weakness in our faith life, so that we may come to seek the Lord, to seek His loving compassion and mercy, that He may lead us all out of the darkness and into His light once again.

Let our fasting and abstinence today mark the beginning of a renewed desire to come closer to the loving and merciful Presence of God, and accompany them with the genuine change and conversion of hearts and minds, heeding the call which the Lord had made to each and every one of us, and be reminded of the great and most generous love, mercy and compassion that He has always had for us and which He has shown us from the very beginning of time. Let us not take for granted everything that He has always patiently and generously provided for us, and let us open wide the doors of our hearts and minds to welcome Him once again, this blessed time and season of Lent, so that we may prepare ourselves for the upcoming celebrations of Holy Week and Easter.

Let our whole lives, our whole existence, way of life, actions, words and deeds from now on be truly worthy of the Lord, and let God be our guide and strength, the source of our courage and inspiration, our power and our hope. Let us all live through this season of Lent, spending each and every moments as always, filled with the strong desire to purify ourselves from the corruptions of sin, evil, of all of our ego, pride, desire and greed, of all the things which have kept us away from the Lord and His path, and use this time and opportunity given to us so that we may continue to do our part in walking down this path that the Lord has guided us through, and be better Christians in all things. May the Lord continue to bless us and empower us all in our every good efforts and endeavours, now and always, and may He bless our Lenten journey to come, that we will make best use of it. Amen.