40 Days & 40 Ways - Year C

40 Days & 40 Ways

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Daily Meditations For Lent Year C

Henry Wansbrough

All booklets are published thanks to the generosity of the supporters of the Catholic Truth Society

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Ash Wednesday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 First Sunday of Lent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Second Sunday of Lent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Third Sunday of Lent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Fourth Sunday of Lent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Fifth Sunday of Lent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Passion Sunday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Holy Week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Monday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Tuesday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Spy Wednesday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Maundy Thursday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Good Friday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Holy Saturday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Easter Sunday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Images: Page 34: Icon of St Joseph, Church of St Catherine, Bethlehem © Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com Page 120: The Resurrection by Andrea Di Bartolo (Italian, active 13891428) The Walters Art Museum. Acquired by Henry Walters with the Massarenti Collection, 1902 All rights reserved. First published 2018 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY. Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. www.ctsbooks.org © 2018 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.

ISBN 978 1 78469 601 6

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Introduction The season of Lent comprises forty days of preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ at Easter.

It is a season of repentance, that is, not necessarily of misery, but of changing our ways. This is the attitude with which both John the Baptist and Jesus himself began their message, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is close at hand�. Both these figures were preparing a purified community for the Messiah; this implied not misery but purposeful change. Similarly during Lent Christians are preparing for the renewal of baptismal vows at the Easter Vigil. For St Benedict in his Rule for Monks this is a joyful time, since we are trying to live purer lives, closer to God. The journey of forty days provides also an opportunity to share with Jesus his final pilgrimage to his agonising death and joyful Resurrection.

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Ash Wednesday For our sake, God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God. As his fellow workers, we beg you once again not to neglect the grace of God that you have received. For he says: At the favourable time, I have listened to you; on the day of salvation I came to your help. Well, now is the favourable time; this is the day of salvation.

(2 Co 5:21-6:2)

 Jl 2:12-18 These two readings form an excellent trumpet blast or ram’s horn blast for Lent. We do not know the circumstances in which Joel made his short proclamation, but it was a warning of the imminent approach of disaster, which he represents as the Day of the Lord. Some date the Book of Joel to the time immediately preceding the Babylonian Exile; others to a later period. In either case, this was the traditional title for the day when the Lord would exact vengeance for Israel’s acts of rebellion and disobedience, a day when God would turn on sinners, sitting comfortably and confidently waiting for rewards of their acts of skulduggery and oppression; God would

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give them (including each of us) precisely the opposite.

The moment would be swift and unexpected, so they (and we) should be sure to put ourselves in a healthier frame of mind. An appropriate thought for the beginning of Lent.

2 Co 5:20-6:2 The Pauline passage follows up and strengthens the same message. It is one of the great passages in Paul’s letters where he lays out the unsparing efforts he has made and continues to make to spread Christ’s gospel, to persuade all people to accept the grace offered by God. He was prepared to put up with every kind of humiliation and discomfort in order to get the message across. Lent is precisely the moment when we should reflect on both our failures and the astonishing perseverance with which God offers us his faithful and enduring help to reform.

The Gospel reading for the day is Mt 6:1-6, 16-18.

Action: Decide on some practice of prayer or sacred reading to be done every day in Lent which will bring you closer to God and to the Lord Jesus.

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Thursday after Ash Wednesday If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin on you today, if you love the Lord your God and follow his ways, if you keep his commandments, his laws, his customs, you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to make your own. (Dt 30:16)

ď € Dt 30:15-20 The Book of Deuteronomy consists of three major discourses of Moses, of which this passage contains the final conclusion, setting before Israel the choice whether to obey or ignore the Laws which have been laid down. It is not so much a choice of obedience as a choice of love, for Deuteronomy is overall a Book laying down the love and the consequences of the love of God. Obedience to the divine Law is an expression of love of God. The days after Ash Wednesday are days of preparation, gearing the faithful up for Lent. The same choice lies before the faithful in Lent as before Israel in the desert, whether or not to take the season seriously enough to make the special effort to live in especially devoted loyalty to God’s commands. The forty years in the desert

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were looked back on in two ways: either they were a period of honeymoon in the desert, when Israel was alone with the Lord in the desert and the two were bonding together in love, like a honeymooning couple, expressing and intensifying their love for one another. Or they were looked at as a time when the murmuring and infidelities began, when Israel lusted to be back among “the leeks and garlic and onions” of Egypt, shying away from the challenges of life in the harsh and difficult desert.

Each Lent we need to ask ourselves, “Is Lent going to be a time of intensifying the love of God, or a time when we blind ourselves to the coming Holy Week, a time of Crucifixion and Resurrection, to carry on with our own comfortable mediocrities?”

The Gospel reading for the day is Lk 9:22-25.

Action: Who do you find most difficult to get on with?

Do something to express your recognition that that person too was saved by Christ’s Passion.

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Friday after Ash Wednesday Fasting like yours today will never make your voice heard on high.

Is that the sort of fast that pleases me, a truly penitential day for men?

Hanging your head like a reed, lying down on sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call fasting, a day acceptable to the Lord? (Is 58:4b-5)

 Is 58:1-9a This reading from the third and final part of the Book of Isaiah is an exhortation to true repentance, in the same sense as John the Baptist’s message at the ford of the river Jordan. It proclaims the uselessness of the outward trappings and liturgical appearances of repentance, “hanging your head like a reed, spreading out sackcloth and ashes”, while all the time continuing to maintain social injustice and unjust oppression even of fellow Israelites. They complain that the Lord does not see their fasting; the prophet replies that their fasting is worthless, for fasting has value only as a sign of a true change of values. It is the same lesson as the prophet Haggai

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proclaimed after the return from exile, when they were making no progress on re-building the Temple, when harvests were failing, food was failing to satisfy, and money was slipping through their pockets.

The same of course applies to us in Lent. There is no point in giving up chocolate if we do not change our ways for the better. Far more valuable is an examination to see where we are failing in our duties and attention to others, harshness, discourtesy, dishonesty, carelessness of the property and rights of others.

The Gospel reading for the day is Mt 9:14-15.

Action: Pick some action or prayer for the Fridays of Lent which will remind you each week that Good Friday is approaching. Perhaps reflect on one Station of the Cross each week.

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Saturday after Ash Wednesday The Lord will always guide you, giving you relief in desert places.

He will give strength to your bones and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never run dry. (Is 58:11)

 Is 58:9b-14 The reading is a continuation of yesterday’s reading, but gives the positive side, the rewards of true fasting and repentance, the answering gifts which God will give to true repentance. God is never to be outdone in generosity. The first qualities which are demanded in this reading are sensitivity to those in need: no clenched fist or malicious word, but awareness of the needs of the needy. The second quality is honour for the Sabbath and refraining from work; the importance of this is giving time to the Lord and making space for the appreciation of the Lord’s gifts, rather than a determination to work feverishly for one’s own purposes, so the achievement of a leisure in which God can approach us and mould us as he wills.

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The concept which sets the tone for the reading comes at the beginning: the saving justice of God will go ahead of you and the Lord’s glory follow behind you. The saving justice of God is not like human justice. Human justice consists in obedience to law, but divine justice consists in God’s own observance of his promises, which makes it in itself a saving justice. It is often paired with ‘salvation’ or such concepts as ‘forgiveness’, ‘mercy’, ‘rescue’. From the human point of view it is not really justice at all, for it does not pursue us according to our deserts, but goes far beyond them in generosity and forgiveness. It is God’s initiative in salvation, to which we open ourselves by generous repentance. That is also the glory of God, which will follow behind us.

The Gospel reading for the day is Lk 5:27-32.

Action: Saturdays are traditionally the days of Our Lady.

Decide on a prayer to Our Lady for each Saturday of Lent. Say a decade of the Rosary, perhaps the Sorrowful Mysteries?

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First Week of Lent First Sunday of Lent …and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. He brought us here and gave us this land, a land where milk and honey flow.

Here then I bring the first-fruits of the produce of the soil that you, Lord, have given me. (Dt 26:8-10)

 Dt 26:4-10 The Sunday first readings during Lent each year are wonderfully arranged to lead us from the very beginnings to the immediate preparation for Christ, each Sunday working further forward in the history of God’s promises to his People. This year begins with the profession of faith about God’s care of his People, which Israelite priests had to make when presenting their offering. Surprisingly it begins not with the promises to Abraham but with the wanderings of the nomadic tribes down to Egypt. It was first in Egypt that God made them his People, rescuing them from slavery. In this version of the history of Israel

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the decisive moment was not the call of Abraham but the Exodus from Egypt. But in the next Sundays we will work forward through the call of Abraham, the call of Moses, the first Passover in Canaan and the promise of a new covenant at the return from the Babylonian Exile. It is a record of God’s constant care as he prepares the People for the coming of his Son at the incarnation, and the full revelation at the cross and the Resurrection of Easter. In what sense are Christians still a Pilgrim People?

Rm 10:8-13 In the Letter to the Romans Paul is struggling with the problem of the salvation of the Jews: how is it that the People so carefully nurtured for so long should refuse to acknowledge that Jesus is the fulfilment of God’s plan of salvation? To Paul, himself a fervent Jew, it was agonising that so many of his own people should refuse to acknowledge Jesus. But he saw that their refusal opened the door to the gentiles. The Christian community at Rome was composed of both Jews and gentiles. It was important for Paul to show that even Scripture proclaims that the door is open to all who profess their faith in Christ, not one party to the exclusion of the other: so, no distinction between Jew and Greek. This is, however, a very different profession of faith from the profession in the first reading: that was a belief in a Lord God who rescued from Egypt.

This is a belief that the Lord God raised Jesus from the

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dead, and raised him to the status of Lord. Paul never uses the word ‘God’ of Jesus, but does call him by the special personal name that is so sacred that it is never pronounced in Hebrew. The word used then and now is ‘Lord’. Is there any special reason why Christians should be concerned about the salvation of the Jews?

Lk 4:1-13 To remind us that Lent is a time when we are tested out the Gospel reading of the First Sunday of Lent is always about the testing of Jesus. By our fasting, or whatever the extra little offering we make to the Lord during Lent may be, we enter into solidarity with the hardship undergone

by Jesus in his Passion. Of course Lent is not a matter of testing out how far we can push ourselves (a sort of macho self-torture). Rather it is a period of preparation for the Passion and Resurrection, like the forty years of Israel in the desert, preparing for the Promised Land, or the prophet Elijah’s forty-day preparation, or the forty days during which Christ prepared the apostles between Easter and the Ascension. The point of Jesus’s forty-day fast is to give some force to the devil’s first taunt. To each of the devil’s taunts Jesus replies with a word of Scripture: if you rely on God’s word you are unshakably safe, for God has created and arranged everything.

Matthew and Luke have a different order for second and third temptations: Matthew climaxes with Jesus as

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the Second Moses, like Moses seeing all the territories from a high mountain. Luke ends the scene as he begins and ends his Gospel, at Jerusalem, the turning point of the Gospel.

Questions

1. If the devil came to distract you from your Christian vocation, what would he/she dangle before you?

2. In the solitude of the desert Jesus prayed to his Father. Do you find solitude helpful in prayer?

Action: Sunday is a family day. Do something which will bring joy to the youngest member of your family.

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