Peace be with you.
Is salvation fundamentally an individualistic pursuit or a group endeavor? What about forgiveness of sins? What about penitential acts? These questions come to mind as I read our readings for Mass today. The first reading describes God calling everyone together for a communal penitential liturgy. The Prophet Joel encouraged God’s people to do communal acts of fasting, weeping, and mourning for their many sins. The priests are to blow the shofar, a hollowed out ram’s horn that our reading calls a trumpet, to gather all God’s people in prayer to beg God to forgive them so that the neighboring nations will know that the one true God exists.
In the second reading, St. Paul explains how evangelization works with human beings acting as ambassadors for God. He doesn’t go into detail about how reconciliation with God takes place but he recognizes that it is done through Christ because “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” That is the most confusing yet profound part of our faith and certainly one that I’ll return to in the coming weeks and months. I bring it up to highlight the fact that St. Paul says, because Jesus has made us the righteousness of God, we are supposed to work together to live out our life of holiness. So it seems like both the first reading and second reading say that salvation, forgiveness of sins, and penitential acts are all group acts, things that we, the members of the church, are to do together.
That’s what makes the gospel so confusing. It offers a kind of formula of how to handle prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. In all three cases, we aren’t supposed to do them publicly so that others will see them, but keep them entirely private, so that your Father, who sees in secret, will repay you. Jesus even goes so far as to not allow your right hand to know what your left hand is doing. That’s super private, not letting your entire person know the good works you are performing!
Still, we have two readings that seem to favor a public performance of penitential acts and one reading that prefers strictly private acts. This is important to iron out. In the early church, if you made a break with the church by sinning and wanted to come back, you’d have to profess your sins at Mass and go through a process of standing by the door of church, possibly for as long as a year, without receiving Holy Communion. I’m guessing none of us want to return to that, if for no other reason than because I know I would be standing by the door and then who’s going to celebrate the Mass? But I worry that certain aspects of our faith have become so personal, so private, that we can forget about them. For instance, as Catholics, we are supposed to go to confession at least once a year and we are supposed to go when we are conscious of committing a mortal sin. Yet, given the number of confessions I hear every week, and that this is a rather typical experience in terms of numbers of confession I’ve heard in my twenty two years as a priest, I have a feeling some of us aren’t going once a year. Has the privacy of confession meant that we don’t feel any communal pressure to go?
I think one challenge is that I’ve conflated three different readings with three different agendas into one message. The first reading is a desperate act by a desperate people. The people feel punished because they have turned away from God and so they’re communally turning back to prove to their neighbors, not how great they are, but how great God is. In the Gospel, Jesus is encouraging his followers not to become like the Pharisees who make public spectacles of their penitential acts but don’t take the time to let it sink into their hearts. In both readings , the point is St. Paul talked about in the second reading, that penitential acts are meant to confect a personal conversion of heart above all else, whether they are done communally or privately. They can’t just be done for show. They have to be done to draw us away from sin and closer to God.
Now let’s think about whatever we’re doing for lent. Are we really doing it for self improvement, to lose weight, or to get other people’s attention at how prayerful or generous we are? Or are we trying to draw closer to God? If it’s not entirely to draw closer to God, we should take some time today to rethink what we’re doing.
