Feb 26 – Homily – Fr Ignatius: Prayer of the Centurion
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Homily #090226 (
07min) Play - Prayer is powerful because it is the key to becoming humble. It recognizes the truth of how great God is and how small and needy we are, especial for mercy for our sins.Ave Maria!
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Lent, which constitutes an itinerary of more intense spiritual training.
Lent dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy, casts out hatred, brings us peace and humbles earthly pride”
Indeed, Lent recalls the forty days of our Lord’s fasting in the desert, which He undertook before entering into His public ministry.
Like Moses, who fasted before receiving the tablets of the Law (cf.Ex 34,28) and Elijah’s fast before meeting the Lord on Mount Horeb.
We might wonder what value and meaning there is for us Christians in depriving ourselves of something that in itself is good and useful for our bodily sustenance. The Sacred Scriptures and the entire Christian tradition teach that fasting is a great help to avoid sin and all that leads to it. For this reason, the history of salvation is replete with occasions that invite fasting. In the very first pages of Sacred Scripture, the Lord commands man to abstain from partaking of the prohibited fruit: “
Saint Basil observes that “fasting was ordained in Paradise,” and “the first commandment in this sense was delivered to Adam.” He thus concludes: “ ‘You shall not eat’ is a law of fasting and abstinence” Since all of us are weighed down by sin and its consequences, fasting is proposed to us as an instrument to restore friendship with God.
In the same way, the people of Nineveh, responding to Jonah’s call to repentance, proclaimed a fast, as a sign of their sincerity, saying: “Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not?” (3,9). In this instance, too, God saw their works and spared them.
In the New Testament, Jesus brings to light the profound motive for fasting, condemning the attitude of the Pharisees, who scrupulously observed the prescriptions of the law, but whose hearts were far from God. True fasting, as the divine Master repeats elsewhere, is rather to do the will of the Heavenly Father, who “sees in secret, and will reward you”
Fasting certainly bring benefits to physical well-being, but for believers, it is, in the first place, a “therapy” to heal all that prevents them from conformity to the will of God.
Freely chosen detachment from the pleasure of food and other material goods helps the disciple of Christ to control the appetites of nature, weakened by original sin, whose negative effects impact the entire human person.
Christian life during Lent should be characterized by “more intense prayer, by an austere and penitential style of life,” Pope Benedict XVI said during an Ash Wednesday service at the Roman basilica of St. Sabina.
Does anyone really look forward to Lent?
The 40 days in the desert sun and the pangs of hunger and thirst conjured up the demon for Jesus.
The whole focus is on presenting the temptations of Jesus as part of the great struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan.
In the first temptation in the desert, Jesus responds to the evil one, not by denying human dependence on sustenance (food), but rather by putting human life and the human journey in perspective. Those who follow Jesus cannot become dependent on the things of this world. When we are so dependent on material things, and not on God, we give in to temptation and sin.
The second temptation deals with the adoration of the devil rather than God. Jesus once again reminds the evil one that God is in control.
In the third temptation, the devil asks for a revelation or manifestation of God’s love in favor of Jesus. Jesus answers the evil one by saying that he doesn’t have to prove to anyone that God loves him.
Temptation is everything that makes us small, ugly, and mean. Temptation uses the trickiest moves that the evil one can think up. The more the devil has control of us, the less we want to acknowledge that he is fighting for every millimeter of this earth.
We meet God in the midst of our deserts of sinfulness, selfishness, jealousy, efficiency, isolation, cynicism and despair. And in the midst of the desert we hear what God will do if we open our hearts to him and allow him to make our own deserts bloom. The ways of the desert were deep within the heart of Jesus, and it must be the same for all who would follow him.