First Sunday of Lent
8 March 2003
Dear Friends in Christ,
"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel."
With these stirring words, the Lord Jesus began His public ministry of preaching and deeds of power which revealed His divine glory to those who followed Him. But before this proclamation of the Gospel and after His baptism at the Jordan, Jesus spent forty days in the desert. These desert days, described more fully by St. Matthew and St. Luke than by St. Mark, constituted a preparation for His mission. Moreover, that He passed forty days in fasting and prayer reveals that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets by completing the work of Moses and Elijah, both of whom also spent forty days in isolation as a preparation for their work.
If even the Lord Jesus, true God from true God, needed a time apart from the world to prepare for His proclamation of the Gospel, how much more do we require the grace of such periods of prayer and purification? Christians seeking to live the interior life intensely should from time to time spend days of prayer and recollection at monasteries, religious houses, or retreat centers as "desert" experiences, and each year the entire Church observes the Forty Days of Lent in imitation of Christ as a preparation for Easter. At the center of spiritual exercises of every sort is the living and active Word of God, which reveals to us most perfectly the God Whom we seek with all of our questions, yearnings, and strivings. As St. Matthew describes the first temptation of Jesus in the desert, Our Lord explains this saving truth to Satan: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Mt 3:4).
I exhort every member of this parish family to use these Forty Days to learn to live by the Word of God. If you do not yet have the custom of reading, studying, and praying with your own Bible (every day when possible) then please use this acceptable time, this day of salvation to begin that practice now. And if you are already immersed in the Sacred Scriptures, then use these Lenten desert days to delve ever more deeply into the limitless riches of the Word of God. We have several groups in the parish dedicated to Bible study, and we are always open to the formation of more. But whether you study and pray with the Word of God alone or with others, know with certitude that it is by our faith in the Gospel now that we come to live in the fulfilled time of God’s everlasting kingdom.
Father Jay Scott Newman, J.C.L.
Our Lady of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us