ASH WEDNESDAY 2024

14 FEBRUARY 2024, ASH WEDNESDAY, JOEL 2. 12-18; 2 COR 5.20 – 6.2; MAT 6. 1-6, 16-18 Focus: Reflect, Repent, convert and live rightly! Indicative: Conversion is the constant invitation for us. Blessed are they who hearken to this call for a worthwhile life and live accordingly! 1.      Today we celebrate Ash Wednesday, a very unique day whereby we step into a new liturgical season. It is the holy season of Lent. Lent is very special in the life of the church and of many Christians. Not that the other seasons are not important. But lent makes a difference because of its very nature, the process and the purpose. 2.      Lent addresses directly our human fragility. It lays bare before us our vulnerability that is prone to fall. It reminds us of our basic transience. Ashes with which we are smeared today indicate this sense of earthly nothingness, perishability, and impermanence. This sense is quite explicit in the pronouncement, “From dust, you have come and unto dust, you shall return”. 3.      Thereby the holy lent urges us to focus our attention on our sinfulness that fails us in faith and charity. In Lent, there is a focused concern with sin and evil. But the purpose is not to feel guilty, melancholic, and discouraged. The purpose is essentially positive. It is to repent and return to the Lord. 4.      That is why in the first reading, God summons us through prophet Joel, “Rend your hearts and not your garments; return to me with all your heart”. In the second reading, in his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul exhorts, “Be reconciled to God… so that we might become the righteousness of God”. 5.      How to tread this journey of repentance and conversion? In the gospel, Jesus takes our attention to the three fundamental means of our whole Christian living and growth. These are in fact the three Jewish pilastric practices. 6.      They are namely prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Jesus cautions us against hypocrisy in practising them. It is not to make a show or display one’s religiosity. All these should be done in a spirit of humility, and right intention. 7.      The purpose is to grow righteous in the sight of God and toward others. Accordingly, our prayers must help us to draw closer to God. Our fasting must help us to be more self-disciplined. Our almsgiving must deepen our sensitivity, fraternal responsibility and charity. Imperative: Behold, now is the favourable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. God will certainly listen to us and help us. For He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; He will relent over disaster. He will reward us  (Reflection 2) 1.      Today is a very special day. We enter the season of Lent, a season of grace, a call for repentance and conversion. The reason is that our life, which is often failed, disordered, and disfigured because of sin and evil, can be remitted, rearranged, transformed, and elevated. Thus we can live a more beautiful, more tranquil, more joyful, and more pleasant life. 2.      Therefore this season is also a season of joy, This is not of sadness, as many think or imagine. Repentance and penitence are not signs of sadness, but the expressions of our awareness of sin, of our desire to make reparation and recuperation 3.      They are manifestations of our firmness to detach ourselves from everything that separates us from God, of our concrete effort to grow in faith and charity, and in sum, to enhance in a life of devotion and virtue. Therefore, when there is work and the increase of grace, there is certainly an increase in holy joy. 3. Today, the ashes we place on us indicate and teach us how we must spend these days of Lent 1) First of all, the ashes indicate our origin and our end: therefore the words are pronounced: you have come from dust, and you will go back into dust. God created us, He gave us this life, He breathed His own life inside us, He shaped us in his own image. So we must always have a deep and lively sense of gratitude, of dependence, of an inseparable bond, and then always try to grow in the spirit of trust and likeness. We must never forget our origins. But unfortunately, it happens in our days, that man neglects God and the spiritual side, because of development, material comfort, of human capacities. The world thinks it is self-sufficient and does not need God, and therefore tries to organize its life, throwing God out of the space of life. Truly a situation that reminds us and relives the time of the "tower of Babel". 2) We must always remember our end. Our goal is to re-go to God where we came from. Reaching our origin is the last point of this earthly journey. Therefore we must always recognize the transience of life on earth. Life on earth is only a limited duration. Everybody someday and in some way has to go away. The earthly life is like a journey, a pilgrimage, with a stabilized destination, with a destiny beyond. So we cannot attach ourselves to this world, we cannot behave like we are permanent on earth. As St Paul says to the Corinthians in his second letter in 5. 1, 9-10: when this dwelling of the body, the tent of earthly life, is destroyed, we all have an eternal home, prepared and made ready by God for each of us. On that day everyone must stand before the Lord for his judgment, and each one will be judged according to his good works and evils, according to the quality of his way of life. How many are foolish, living without any sense of responsibility and accountability? How miserable their fate will be! Those who refuse imperishable in preference to the perishable will certainly be rejected for the same imperishable. We reap what we sow! 3) The ashes also denote our weakness, our fragility, our human unworthiness. Without God, without His help, we are nothing like dust and ashes. Without the breath of His Spirit, we will be without life, without energy. This awareness must safeguard us against arrogance and unbridled autonomy, and grow in us the spirit of humility. 4) The ashes still indicate the state of annihilation. Nothing remains at the end. This fact must arise in us a profound spirit of detachment, of sacrifice. Be careful of too much attachment to things, to worldly profits, to great avarice. What is worth acquiring the whole world, but losing our soul? How much stupidity to cling to superficial things but to let go of the essential things! How much sadness to accumulate useless things but not obtain anything worthwhile! 4. The three pillars, that is, prayer, fasting, and charity, help us in this Lenten journey. Then let us begin our steps forward with confidence and firmness. (Reflection 3)  Focus: Lent is a God-gifted time to be bent on God, to repent for evil, and to be intent on good. 1.      We step into the holy season of Lent. Let us entrust our whole journey of Lent to the loving guidance of the Lord, so that this time may be truly a duration of renewal. 2.      This is Ash Wednesday! What does this day of ashes signify? What do the ashes denote? In the practical sense, ashes indicate total annihilation and nothingness. Hence the expression: "gone/reduced to ashes". 3.      In the ordinary common religious sense, ashes denote sacrifice, renunciation, and detachment. Hence the expression: "I have nothing but ashes". 4.      In the biblical spiritual sense, ashes denote repentance and penance. We find in the Bible, applying ashes to atone, to repent, and to do penance. 5.      The day of the ashes, with the call, “from dust you have come, and unto dust, you shall return", or "repent and believe in the gospel", reminds us of the temporariness and transience of our earthly existence, and also our origin from God and our destiny to Him. Life is a temporary transit, we are due to God, we are his due, destined to reach him and be with him. 6.      Therefore, in this temporary and impermanent sojourn, toward our eternal destination, how to conduct our lives? With the spirit and lessons of the ashes positively. That is, in surrender to God, with a sense of nothingness; in attachment to God, with a sense of detachment; and in renewal and transformation, with a sense of repentance and penance. 7.      In the light of the gospel, to conduct and travel this journey, 3 acts are proposed as effective means: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. However, the insistence is not so much on the activity itself, i.e. prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, but rather on their purpose and end 8.      They are namely, love and intimacy with God; self-discipline and self-restraint; and concern and charity. Therefore, in love, let us grow close and surrendered to God; in renunciation, let us grow more disciplined and charitable; in renewal, let us grow more and more transformed!   Direction: Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are not merely religious practices, but are true means and testimonies of religious spirit and living.