Lenten Station Masses
Wednesday, Week One
 
 
Dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy to be with you as we make our way through our Lenten journey into Easter. 
 
In our Station Masses so far we have reflected on how the season of Lent is God’s special gift to us because He wants our discipleship to be filled with joy inside as we await with increasing expectancy the New Life He brings. It is a truly a joy we feel when we sense the Lenten grace raising our minds from the mediocrity of ordinary life and enkindling in us a fresh zeal to follow Christ, Our Lord, in Faith.  The season of Lent summons us to rebirth, as a Church and personally as disciples, so we can share the fulness of Jesus’ life as sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father.
 
In our first three Station Masses our catechesis reflected on our Christian spirituality of prayer and fasting and almsgiving, that strong triple cord that lifts our souls out of this passing world to fix our minds on Heaven, and things that are eternal.  As Christians we are called to be a people of prayer, fasting and almsgiving every day of the year, and more intensely in the Lenten Season.  
 
This spirituality, of course, is not something new brought by Christianity to the world.  In Old Testament times prayer, fasting and almsgiving were already the sure path to conversion for all who wanted God’s forgiveness and new life.  So, when Jonah preached to the Ninevites about the coming wrath of God and news reached the king, he ordered fasting: ‘ Men and beasts are to taste nothing; they must not eat, they must not drink water. He already knew that fasting was a necessary element in prayer to God to change his mind and relent so that they did not perish.  In that sense Christian spirituality is a continuation of the Old Testament. 
 
But Jesus declares Himself to be something greater than Jonah, and a greater witness of the Heavenly Father to our generations.  He and His Gospel are a wisdom greater than Solomon, for which the Queen of the South came from the ends of the earth to hear. 
 
Just as Jesus is so much greater, so the path of discipleship He invites us as His disciples to take is so much higher and noble than anything that has gone before.  To all His disciples, in whatever the circumstances of their lives, Jesus proposes the higher way of what we call the evangelical counsels, of poverty or simplicity in our personal lives, of chastity in our relationships, and of obedience in our social life.  Although this way of life is the particular way of religious sisters, brothers and clergy, the Vatican Council and Catechism open up its invitation to all of us according to our own state in life.
 
In essence, all those who want to follow Jesus perfectly in His love of God and others will journey along this path as far as they can. To live simple and chaste lives, and obedient to a spiritual rule of life allows us, as Christ’s disciples, to know Him more intimately; to see Him more clearly, love Him more dearly and follow Him more nearly, as it were, in the life of His Kingdom on earth and, in doing so, we become prophets greater than Jonah of conversion to the glory of the world to come.  In these times where our Church seems so under the cosh we sorely need generous disciples, priests and people, to embrace sincerely this sort of evangelical life.
 
Jesus remind us, as His disciples, that our virtue has to be greater than the Pharisees if we want to enter the Kingdom and the evangelical counsels call us to give that bit more of ourselves, in a measure beyond the base line of the commandments, so as to be more fully conformed to Christ, Our Lord
 
They invite us not to settle for just scraping a pass in the test of faith but to really strive for holiness and perfection in our own particular state of life, and so to guide aright the deepest desires of our souls.
 
The first evangelical counsel invites us to make our lives more simple, and to live and with poverty of spirit.  It asks us to let neither the things of this world nor the attachment of riches hinder us in our quest for Christ’s perfect love. Even though we have to live in the world as Christians and use this world, we never want to look for such a permanently home in it that we forget how this world, and all it contains, is coming to an end.
 
Through Baptism we already died to sin and were consecrated to God, but the fountain of our Baptism has never stopped flowing on top of our heads and it means to bring forth life ever more abundantly in us.  In the same way the first evangelical counsels of simplicity of life causes us to grow in our fervour for God and others.   It consecrates us more radically to service in the Church, by binding us more closely to Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ in His uncomplicated dedication to His Father WhomHe loved beyond all things.
 
The poverty or simplicity that Jesus calls us to is a poverty of spirit that is totally dependent on Him and lives not by our own bread but by every word that comes from His Father’s mouth.  It is about wanting to feel how only Jesus can satisfy the true hunger inside our human heart. When we have Jesus we have everything, even though we possess few earthy goods. Those who live simply in Him are the richest people on earth. Jesus invites us to be "poor in spirit’ with Him and promises us the most blessed life of all.
 
This Lent may Jesus invite us to follow Him in His evangelical councils and to a simplicity strips away everything that hinders our perfectly free love.
 
We turn to Mary our Mother, Who followed Her Son in the very perfection of the Gospel, Who made Herself the handmaid of the Lord to the point of being nothing, and Who rejoiced to see the same Lord work marvels in Her such that now every generation calls Her blessed.