Today’s Gospel Reading is the one that we traditionally proclaim on Ash Wednesday as we begin the Penitential Season of Lent, but it is good for us to hear it again.

We are confronted with two antithetical attitudes and their corresponding actions regarding three concrete ways of following Jesus. What is our motive in giving alms? What is our disposition in prayer? What is the role that penance and fasting play in our lives?

On the one hand, is everything we do in prayer, fasting, and almsgiving focused on us and how good, faithful, and penitential we are? Or is what we do give glory, not to ourselves, but to God as a means in which we can more fully enter into the Mystery of our relationship to God in Jesus?

Specifically, as Eucharistic-focused people, what is our model and impetus? Each time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, we first ask pardon and forgiveness, and we hear the Word of God proclaimed. Then we join ourselves to Jesus who invites us to be broken and poured out in the service of him in our sisters and brothers, especially those who are poor, abandoned, persecuted, lonely, the prisoner, the refugee, the homeless, and hungry.

Several decades ago, shortly after a peace treaty in El Salvador brokered the civil war, I made a pilgrimage to that country whose people had suffered so profoundly and for so long. I prayed at memorials where an archbishop, the faculty of Jesuits who advocated for justice, and Cleveland Ursuline Dorothy Kazel, and two Maryknoll Sisters, and a lay missionary who had selflessly and dangerously ministered to the poor, had truly been broken and whose blood was poured out. What does that call us to?

Let Us Pray:

Lord Jesus, you call us to be your presence in our own time and place. Give us an abundance of your grace to be willing to be broken in our attitudes of self-absorption and our willingness to pour ourselves out in the service of those most in need of your love and compassion. Amen.