ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

Dear Friends in our Lord Jesus Christ,

Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin an important journey. It is a journey that we make together with Jesus, and the journey takes Jesus and us all the way to Calvary. Our Lenten season will culminate in the Death of Jesus on Good Friday and then, finally, with His glorious Resurrection.

We know—as we ask ourselves the purpose of this journey on the part of Jesus all the way to Calvary, all the way to the shedding of His blood on the Cross—that this journey was made out of love for us. It was a journey by which Christ would gain His goal, and His goal through his death on Calvary was to take away the sins of the world, to take away our sins. Jesus knew that we needed redemption and His love for us prompted Him to make this journey to Jerusalem, to Calvary. For us, too, dear friends, our Lenten celebration is a journey of love in which we endeavor to return God’s love. In a very special way, we do this by a concerted effort to renounce sin.

We are called upon, in our first reading today, to turn to God. Lent is a wonderful opportunity in our life. God is calling us. And just as Jesus laid down His life out of love for us, so now He asks us out of love for Him and His Father in heaven to make the effort to turn to Him and to renounce sin, in order to live for God.

Did you notice in our second reading from Saint Paul the extraordinary expression that the Apostle used? Saint Paul said, as he was describing the fact that Jesus took upon Himself all the sins of the world on Calvary—and he uses a dramatic expression!—Christ became sin. It is this expression that helps us to understand just how much the sins of the world weighed upon Christ. So much so that Saint Paul says He became sin—He who was the Son of God, He who was absolutely sinless Himself. In taking upon Himself the sins of the world, our sins, He became sin. But Saint Paul goes on to explain that Christ became sin, with all this weight, precisely so that we might become the righteousness, the holiness of God, that we might become worthy of our vocation as children of God.

Today, dear Friends, during this special period of grace in the life of the Church and in our own lives, Jesus Himself speaks to us in the Gospel and He gives us an indication of how we might respond to His call, how we might turn to God during Lent. Jesus Himself suggests three things. One of them is prayer. Through prayer we have a wonderful opportunity to connect with God. And then Jesus also points out to us the possibility of fasting. Although the fasting of the Church is very mitigated, today is one of the days in which we are asked—just today and Good Friday—to make an effort to fast a bit. And the third thing that Jesus Himself speaks to us about is almsgiving. We who have received so much from God, we who have been pardoned our sins, we who have been redeemed are now asked to go out of ourselves, to turn to our neighbor, to turn to those in need, to turn in mercy and almsgiving to help relieve the tremendous needs of the world.

Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI has just encouraged us, since we are loved by God so much, to be mindful of all the needs of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, to be mindful of suffering, to be mindful of poverty. And so we have the possibility, which is a great thing in the tradition of the Church, to be generous, to give of ourselves, to give back to God a part of what He has given to us.

Dear friends, with determination, with great gratitude to God, with joy in our hearts we begin our journey to Jerusalem, we begin our journey to Calvary together with Jesus Christ. And just as His journey was motivated completely by love for us so our journey is motivated by an attempt to return the love with which we have been loved by God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.