N.B.: A few grammatical and editorial corrections have been made to the text of the following homily.
The First Sunday of Lent (A)
Dear
brothers and sisters,
Earlier
this week, the Holy Father Pope Francis announced his prayer intention for this
month of March and asked us a direct question: “How many of you pray for
persecuted Christians?”[1] So
important is this question to Pope Francis that the Holy See produced a short
video to accompany His Holiness’ prayer intention “that persecuted Christians may be supported by the
prayers and material help of the whole Church.”
So
many of our fellow members of the Body of Christ experience daily something of
what the Lord Jesus experienced in the desert, “harsh conditions, utter
loneliness, and the gnawing discomforts of hunger” and, more than this, the
“assaults of [our] archenemy, the devil.”[2] We
make their situation more desperate by frequently giving too little thought to
them.
In his brief message accompanying this video, Pope Francis
said:
How
many people are being persecuted because of their faith, forced to abandon
their homes, their places of worship, their lands, their loved ones!
They
are persecuted and killed because they are Christians. Those who persecute them
make no distinction between the religious communities to which they belong.
I
ask you: how many of you pray for persecuted Christians?
Do
it with me, that they may be supported by the prayers and material help of all
the Churches and communities.
These
words of the Holy Father stand as a stark challenge for each us during these
days of Lent. Grateful for the riches of his merciful love and confident in the
certainty that “because [Jesus] himself has suffered and been tempted, he is
able to help those who are tempted,” so many of our brothers and sisters
willingly endure great hardships for the sake of his name, while we all too
often grumble about not being allowed to eat meat one day of the week, which we
sometimes forget or even give in to social pressure (Hebrews 2:18). It rather
puts things in perspective, does it not?
Some
Catholics seem to be under the curious impression that they must eat fish on
Fridays during Lent, which, of course, is incorrect. While we are obliged to
abstain from eating meat each Lenten Friday, this does not mean we have to eat
fish; though the eating of fish has because customary, it is not required. Here
many ask why we are allowed to eat fish and not meat.
Some
– speaking from an anti-Catholic bias – have claimed the Church first allowed
us to eat fish on Lenten Fridays to support the fishing industry in the middle
ages. This, however, is not true. In his book, A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, Ian Mortimer
includes a chapter on “What to Eat and Drink.” In this chapter, he notes, quite
rightly, that
The
medieval Church [that is, the Catholic Church] used to restrict the eating of
meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, as well as in Advent and Lent and
on the vigils on certain saints' feast days. In 1549 Edward VI [a Protestant]
reestablishes Fridays and Saturdays as nonmeat days, as well as Lent and other
religious feasts. In 1563 Elizabeth's government [which was also
Protestant] imposes fasting on Wednesdays too, including a prohibition on
slaughtering animals. There is an important difference compared to
pre-Reformation [that is, Catholic] times, however: avoidance of meat is no
longer a religious observance but secular law. The purpose of fasting on Wednesdays is specifically to encourage the
eating of fish, to support the fishing industry.[3]
It was, then, the
Protestant government of England and not the Catholic Church that banned meat
and allowed fish to support the fishmongers. If this is case, why did the
Church allow our ancestors in the faith to eat fish, but not meat, on certain
days?
For the Church, the
reason for the forbidding of meat and the allowing of fish was less temporal,
much simpler, and more spiritual than that of the secular government. In his Liber Festivalis, which he wrote in the
late 1400s, John Myre explains that “when God, for Adam’s sin, cursed the earth
and the land, he cursed not the water; wherefore it is lawful for a man to eat
in Lent that which cometh of the water.” In fact, centuries earlier, Saint
Isidore of Seville, who died in 636, wrote in his De Ecclesiasticis Officiis,
"We are certainly able to eat fish, because the Lord accepted one after
the resurrection. Neither the savior nor the apostles have forbidden
this."[4] From this, we see that the non-eating
of meat and the eating of fish was – and is – intended as both a penance, a small
communal sacrifice offered lovingly to God, and a reminder of God's merciful
and victorious love.
When we fail to realize
this connection, when we fail to see the value and importance to our fasting
and abstinence, it is because we have become, like our first parents, too
focused on ourselves and on our own pleasures. “Adam was placed in Paradise,
and there, seeking pleasure, he fell.”[5]
How often do we, too, fall into sin by seeking pleasure and running from the Cross
instead of seeking union with God? Unlike Adam, Jesus “was led into the desert,
and there, by constant fasting, overcame the devil.”[6]
In these days of Lent, then,
let us not seek our own pleasure, but let us go with Jesus into the desert. Just
as he fasted out of love for us, let us fast out of love for our persecuted brothers
and sisters who grow more numerous each day.
If we focus our thoughts
and our prayers not on ourselves but on others, we, too, can, with the help of divine
grace, overcome the sin of self-centeredness and experience the joy of salvation
(cf. Psalm 51:17). This is why Pope Francis has asked the Holy Spirit this Lent
to “lead us on a true journey of conversion, so that we can rediscover the gift
of God’s word, be purified of the sin that blinds us, and serve Christ present
in our brothers and sisters in need.”[7]
Let us then ask the Lord
to help us acknowledge our sins, to forgive our sins, and to cleanse our hearts
so that his compassion may be ours. Moreover, “let us
pray for one another so that, by sharing in the victory of Christ, we may open
our doors to the weak and poor. Then we will be able to experience and share to
the full the joy of Easter.”[8]
Amen.
[1] In “Pope’s Prayer Intention for
March: Support Persecuted Christians,” Vatican
Radio, 2 March 2017. Accessed 4 March 2017. Available at
http://www.news.va/en/news/popes-prayer-intention-for-march-support-for-perse
[2] Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: The
Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2010), 74.
[3] Ian Mortimer, A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan
England (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 215.
[4] Saint Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, 1.44[45].2.
[5] Saint Anthony of Padua, Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, 4.
In Paul Spilsbury, trans., Sermons for
Sundays and Festivals, Vol. I: General Prologue, Sundays from Septuagesima to
Pentecost (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero Padova, 2007), 73.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Pope Francis, Message for Lent 2017, 3.
[8] Ibid.
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