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Return to me with all your heart (Joel 2:12). …
How many times, in our activity or indifference, have we told God: “Lord, I will come to you later, just wait a little… I can’t come today, but tomorrow I will begin to pray and do something for others.”
We do this, time and time again. Right now, however, [during Lent] God is speaking to our hearts. In this life, we will always have things to do and excuses to offer, but right now, brothers and sisters, right now is the time to return to God.
Lent is a journey that involves our whole life, our entire being. It is a time to reconsider the path we are taking, to find the route that leads us home and to rediscover our profound relationship with God, on whom everything depends.
Lent is not just about the little sacrifices we make, but about discerning where our hearts are directed.
This is the core of Lent: asking where our hearts are directed. Let us ask: Where is my life’s navigation system taking me—towards God or towards myself? Do I live to please the Lord, or to be noticed, praised, put at the head of line…?
Do I have a “wobbly” heart, which takes a step forward and then one backwards? Do I love the Lord a bit and the world a bit, or is my heart steadfast in God? Am I content with my hypocrisies, or do I work to free my heart from the duplicity and falsehood that tie it down?
The journey of Lent is an exodus, an exodus from slavery to freedom. These forty days correspond to the forty years that God’s people trekked through the desert to return to their homeland.
How difficult it was to leave Egypt! It was more difficult for God’s people to leave the Egypt of the heart, that Egypt they carried within them, than to leave the land of Egypt.
It is hard to leave Egypt behind. During their journey, there was an ever-present temptation to yearn for leeks, to turn back, to cling to memories of the past or to this or that idol.
So it is with us: our journey back to God is blocked by our unhealthy attachments, held back by the seductive snares of our sins, by the false security of money and appearances, by the paralysis of our discontents. To embark on this journey, we have to unmask these illusions.
But we can ask ourselves: how do we then proceed on our journey back to God? We can be guided by return journeys described in the word of God. …
We then need to return to Jesus, like the leper who, once cured, returned to give him thanks. Although ten had been healed, he was the only one saved, because he returned to Jesus (cf. Lk 17:12-19).
All of us have spiritual infirmities that we cannot heal on our own. All of us have deep-seated vices that we cannot uproot alone. All of us have paralyzing fears that we cannot overcome alone.
We need to imitate that leper, who came back to Jesus and threw himself at his feet. We need Jesus’ healing; we need to present our wounds to him and say: “Jesus, I am in your presence, with my sin, with my sorrows. You are the physician. You can set me free. Heal my heart”.
Brothers and sisters, our return journey to God is possible only because he first journeyed to us. Otherwise, it would be impossible. Before we ever came to him, he came down to us. He preceded us; he came down to meet us.
For our sake, he lowered himself more than we can ever imagine: he became sin, he became death. So, Saint Paul tells us: For our sake God made him to be sin (2 Cor 5:21).
Not to abandon us but to accompany us on our journey, he embraced our sin and our death. He touched our sin; he touched our death.
Our journey then is about letting him take us by the hand. The Father who bids us come home is the same who left home to come looking for us. The Lord who heals us is the same who let himself suffer on the cross; the Spirit who enables us to change our lives is the same who breathes softly yet powerfully on our dust.
This, then, is the Apostle’s plea: Be reconciled to God (v. 20). Be reconciled: the journey is not based on our own strength. No one can be reconciled to God on his or her own.
Heartfelt conversion, with the deeds and practices that express it, is possible only if it begins with the primacy of God’s work. What enables us to return to him is not our own ability or merit, but his offer of grace. Grace saves us; salvation is pure grace, pure gratuitousness.
Jesus says this clearly in the Gospel: what makes us just is not the righteousness we show before others, but our sincere relationship with the Father.
The beginning of the return to God is the recognition of our need for him and his mercy, our need for his grace.
This is the right path, the path of humility. Do I feel in need, or do I feel self-sufficient?
[On Ash Wednesday], we bow our heads to receive ashes. At the end of Lent, we will bow even lower to wash the feet of our brothers and sisters. Lent is a humble descent both inwards and towards others. It is about realizing that salvation is not an ascent to glory, but a descent in love.It is about becoming little. Lest we go astray on our journey, let us stand before the cross of Jesus: the silent throne of God.
Let us daily contemplate his wounds, the wounds that he brought to heaven and shows daily to the Father in his prayer of intercession. Let us daily contemplate those wounds.
In them, we recognize our emptiness, our shortcomings, the wounds of our sin and all the hurt we have experienced.
Yet there too, we see clearly that God points his finger at no one, but rather opens his arms to embrace us. His wounds were inflicted for our sake, and by those wounds we have been healed (cf. 1 Pet 2:25; Is 53:5).
By kissing those wounds, we will come to realize that there, in life’s most painful wounds, God awaits us with his infinite mercy. Because there, where we are most vulnerable, where we feel the most shame, he came to meet us. And having come to meet us, he now invites us to return to him, to rediscover the joy of being loved.
Excerpted from the pope’s homily, Ash Wednesday, St. Peter’s Basilica, February 17, 2021
