4th Sunday of Lent 2024

Last week’s Gospel told of the cleansing of the Temple, and last week’s reflection discussed Christ’s healing of wounds. This week’s readings focus on the wounds of sin—the voluntary wounds we inflict on ourselves through disobedience. In the prologue of St. Benedict’s Rule, he writes, the labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. (RB Prologue:2) And so we bring together many threads we’ve discussed since the beginning of Lent. The sloth of our disobedience, the disordered attachments which govern our lives—these are a spiritual cancer that eats at us inside. C.S. Lewis remarks, God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down. (A Grief Observed) The purpose of Lent is to bring us to a place of spiritual poverty, to realize the darkness that we love, as Christ’s haunting words in today’s Gospel portend, so that we can abandon it and come to the light. If a man were dying of cancer and pleaded with his surgeon not to cut it out, we would rightly call this man a lunatic for preferring death to salvation; but how often do we plead with God to let alone the cancers killing us—not temporally, but eternally?

I have often wondered about the things that happen in Lent—we know that Lent is a penitential season, and many of us know that the rules for this season were, at one point, much more severe than they are currently. Lent was conceived as a forty day season of fasting in imitation of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. Today we fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and the year long abstention from meat on Fridays is relegated only to the four Fridays of Lent (at least in the US). We all recognize that Lent is a time of spiritual warfare—the Enemy hates the coming of Easter and the new births of those to be baptized, and so he strikes out at us in retaliation. I am left with two thoughts: first, I wonder if perhaps the wisdom of the Lenten fast was found in counter-attacking the Enemy’s Lenten furor—meeting the arrows of Satan with the weapons of obedience, penance, and prayer. Second, I wonder if, because God wants us to do battle with the Enemy in the Lenten wilderness, since we have to such a degree put down our swords, He is now allowing the Enemy to strike us harder to impel us to the penance we have neglected on our own.

Do not mistake me, this is not a critique of the Church and her authority to govern the faithful. This is a critique of our own selves, and our continual habit of doing only the bare minimum we are prescribed and not an ounce more. A meat abstinence on the Fridays of Lent barely has the time for the novelty to wear off—but continued in perpetuity, how often might we actually find that it is a sacrifice not to indulge in a burger or pizza after a hard week at work? Or go out with friends and have to eat light because of lack of available food? Fasting at the start and end of Lent may make us hungry, but fasting throughout makes us truly learn what dependence on God in adversity looks like. The Church knows that a light weight carried a long distance becomes heavy, but we—faced with choice rather than compulsion—have largely decided not to carry it at all. Discipline is the keystone of obedience, and obedience is the path that leads us from darkness to light. Let us not prefer our darkness, lest the verdict of the Just Judge be our condemnation.