Our Gospel reading as we start our Lenten season is a familiar one (Mt 6:1-6, 16-18). Jesus is warning us that if our pious practices are intended to raise our status with those around us then they are worse than useless. We are better off to keep our penitence hidden and purely between us and God.
There is however another perspective on penitence which is presented in our first reading from the Book of Joel (Jl 2:12-18). We don’t know exactly when Joel was writing or what events were the background for his prophecy. However his call is to the people as a whole. The Lord says ‘return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning’, not to us individually, but to the community. And it is a call so urgent as to interrupt even weddings and feeding babies.
There are times, maybe the majority of times, when a focus on our private penance and our private relationship with God is the right course. And if we are ever tempted, as the Pharisees were, to look for praise for our efforts to help others then we need to take Jesus’ warning to heart. However it is a warning against the corruption of good, as he directed against the thinking of the Pharisees in many situations. It is not a general recipe for all penance and almsgiving.
This Lent, as we face the reality of a new and terrible war, the continuation of an epidemic which has claimed the lives of millions, and the knowledge of horrific crimes of abuse committed by those in positions of trust within our Church, we might focus more on the need for a general repentance. We can also say “Spare, O Lord, your people, and make not your heritage a reproach”. We have not individually been a cause of war, or of unnecessary deaths in a pandemic, or of abuse – but we have to recognize and accept that the communities that we are part of are in this position. We are party to wars that are fought in our name; we are part of communities that are unable to agree on steps to protect the vulnerable among us, whether in health care, housing, old age, or fleeing terror; we are part of a Church which is stained by many crimes, in the past and in the present.
Joel didn’t say to the newly-weds or to the breastfeeding mothers – no don’t worry, I know this isn’t your fault, we’ll just get the people who are responsible together and make them sort it out.
Our answer cannot be to walk away, to pretend somehow we can disconnect, or to ignore what is happening around us. We can “proclaim a fast, call an assembly, and say ‘Spare, O Lord, your people, and make not your heritage a reproach'”. We cannot fix these problems alone. We can pray for those that are working directly to fix them, for those that even are causing them. Ultimately the solution lies only in God’s hands, not ours.
Our Lent is a time to recognize our failings, our failings as a people, and to renew our trust that God will be “stirred to concern for his land and take pity on his people”. Lent is first and foremost a time to be humble, humble in our prayer and almsgiving, humble in our dealings with others, humble in regard of the failings of our Church, our neighborhood, our Country – of all those human structures which are inevitably flawed, as we are flawed. But God does have pity on his people, he will repay us for our efforts even when they seem invisible.