Homily

Wednesday we began Lent. The proposal is simple and direct, as it needs to penetrate into the many habits and convictions in that jungle of defences and mistrust, which always makes us the same as ourselves - not very vulnerable and incapable of humbling ourselves in a beginning which is always necessarily poor: "Change your heart and believe in the good news." Jesus confronted evil in the desert, "tempted by Satan," says Mark’s Gospel. Thus begins Jesus’ agony, the struggle between life and death. Yes. This is why the time is fulfilled. The Lord, lover of people, comes to do battle against humanity’s enemy, the one who sows division, who is behind the instinct of pride and love for self. This is why he asks for conversion. It is not a pious exercise, something additional for the righteous, or an option for the mediocre. The Lord asks us to change because he loves the world and cannot accept it as it is; he does not want your life to be lost, he does not consider it lost; he wants it to be better. Those who do not change maintain themselves and end up, even without choosing to, giving themselves over to deaf and dumb idols. How often we prefer these idols to a passionate lover like Jesus! Yes, because we really fear love, we reduce it to our narrow limitations, we flee from the one who loves, like the rich young man bound to his riches, who chooses affliction because he does not know how to abandon himself to the one who had fixed his gaze on him and loved him.
Lent is an itinerary. For those who love fast, easy, immediate solutions, who rely on first impressions, who have distaste for the humiliation of a discipline of the heart; who become victims of their own superficial judgments, for a generation like ours who mistakes complexity for indecision and thinks that all choices are always open, Lent is an insistent invitation, reiterated and affectionate. The one who changes is the one who is aware of the abyss of his or her heart and begins the way of repentance. Lent is a time of forgiveness and joy because we find our heart again, listening to a father who loves and renews. The righteous ones find no joy. They do not ask for forgiveness and do not know how to forgive. They must finally grab unto their hypocrisy so as not to fall into the abyss of sin, since they do not believe in forgiveness. They do not know how to cry tears; they flee the pain of bitterness, the humiliation of discovering themselves as they are and asking for help. But they remain as they are, though sad. The sinner finds consolation. Are we not poor in love, cold, fearful, aggressive, unfaithful, inconstant, full of grudges, ruled by instinctive pride? Is the heart not perhaps easily filled with so many fears and enmities, mistrusts, hostility? Does our heart not become limitless, voracious for satisfaction, confrontations, and small affirmations of our self? There is great need to change our heart because the world is full of enmity and violence. Can the world live without a heart? Who can give a heart to a world that is passionate only about material things, about the market, about that which doesn’t count? Who will give back the many years that hunger and hardness of life have robbed from millions of poor people in the third world? Who will take away from the hearts of many people the many habits of violence, the path of barbarity that annuls mercy and compassion?
This is why we receive the joyous proposal to change, beginning with our heart. Like sin, complicity with evil always has an effect on others; similarly when we change we will be building a better world of peace, decontaminating it of violence. A good heart makes the life of so many beautiful and human. Jesus’ disciples have a heart and take others to heart. Believe in the Gospel, in the naivety of the father who embraces the son and clothes him with his forgiveness, undeservedly, without atonement, just because he has come back to life. Believe that the Gospel is a way of peace, that the world is not unchangeable. Believe that a heart full of good feelings and spirituality overcomes the logic of war and can hasten the day of peace. Believe in the power of prayer, open up the Gospel frequently, silence your reasoning in order to listen to him, plea alongside the psalmist, implore God next to a sick person, one suffering, one struck by evil. You will thus rediscover God’s new covenant of love. God has granted the world to humanity, but he admonished them to respect human life, their blood, that no one live uninterested in another’s life. God’s commandment is against violence. The one who converts, who becomes peaceful, reconstructs this covenant, which is like a new creation. In the depths of the human heart there is a desire for peace. Lent is again finding within one’s own heart and that of one’s neighbour that rainbow of peace, so that the flood of violence may end - the tempest of love for self, of resignation - so that the many who scrutinize heaven, imploring help and protection, who ask for peace and hope, may be able to see that rainbow soon.