What one word best sums up today? If you were to ask that question on campus today, you’d probably get a straightforward answer: love. It’s February 14, after all, Valentine’s Day. We know that behind all of the flowers and chocolate and jewelry and other commercializations, there is the simple idea of telling someone you care about that you love them.
Believe it or not, that same single word – love – is also at the heart of our celebration of Ash Wednesday. Yes, it is the start of Lent, that season of penance and purification. We will mark our foreheads with ashes and ask for God’s forgiveness. We think about what penitential practice we might want to take on – giving something up that we enjoy, doing something charitable or sacrificial for another, or both. But beneath it all is the theme of love: God’s love for us and our love for God.
It is precisely because God loves us that he calls us to repentance. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Those words are from the Book of Genesis, spoken by God to Adam, reminding him that this life is finite, and that we must use this time well to prepare for our judgment. God wants nothing less than for us as his creatures to flourish, to thrive in every way, especially at the level of soul. Our sinful habits and attitudes hold us back from being the temples of the Holy Spirit he has created us to be, and so he calls us to repentance so that we might leave behind our old ways apart from him and embrace the new life that comes from Christ.
Of course, as the old saying goes, the best intentions oft go astray. How often do we begin Lent with a firm intention to improve our relationship with God only to find that halfway through we have lost that determination altogether? Or worse, we simply never had it in the first place? In the Gospel today, Jesus knows that it can be hard to truly change, hard even at times to truly want to change. What we need is motivation – a reason to carry on with these things that are difficult. When the going gets tough, what will keep us going?
David O'Connell, Stations of the Cross: Fifth Station: Simon Helps Jesus (c. 1960), St. Richard Church, Chichester, UK
The only answer is love. Only out of love for God do we endure that which is hard, that which needs perseverance. We may be tempted – when the going gets tough – to put on a good show for others, to appear pious and penitential on the outside without truly giving it our all on the inside. But as Jesus says, God sees through such a false pretense. The Lord judges the heart, not the exterior appearance. Ashes on our foreheads are not enough to claim repentance; they must be accompanied by a true recognition of how far we have fallen astray. Our deepest motivation must always be the love of God – remembering constantly his love for us and renewing at each moment our love for him. If we seek his mercy, if we desire to do penance not to impress others or to better ourselves in a self-serving way but merely out of love for him, then Jesus assures us our heavenly Father sees our contrition and forgives us.
Thus, it is out of love that we take up again the penitential practices of Lent, not because they are fun but because they help us to love well. Prayer helps orient us toward God, remembering our love for him. Fasting helps us to love ourselves properly, training us to look away from worldly delights and to yearn for what nourishes our souls. Giving alms, or works of charity in general, help us to love those around us, helping us to remember the duty we have to care for those in need.
Friends, the season of Lent reminds us again that the greatest love story ever told is not a story of romance, told with valentines, but rather the story of God’s love for us – told most fully in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of God’s Son for us. It is the celebration of that wondrous event, the Easter story, that Lent prepares us for. As we receive ashes on our heads, remembering the mortality of this body, may we also yearn to be enlivened by the power of Jesus’s love to hope one day for eternal life. May the Lord who loves us so deeply inspire in us a love to turn back to him, to be renewed by his grace in these forty days, to echo his love in all that we do.
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