As we begin another season of Lent, it is always important to recognise the suffering Christ endured for us. It was a sacrifice, an act of love, which rendered onto to us not what we deserved under justice but what God gave onto us under His love and mercy.
In his Lenten message for 2010, the His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI mentions, “Just as man needs bread, so does man have even more need of God. Saint Augustine notes: if ‘justice is that virtue which gives everyone his due…where, then is the justice of man, when he deserts the true God?’…Adam and Eve, seduced by Satan’s lie, snatching the mysterious fruit against the divine command, replaced the logic of trusting in Love with that of suspicion and competition; the logic of receiving and trustfully expecting from the Other with anxiously seizing and doing on one’s own, experiencing, as a consequence, a sense of disquiet and uncertainty. How can man free himself from this selfish influence and open himself to love? – God has paid for us the price of the exchange in His Son, a price that is truly exorbitant…Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship…This happens in the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.”
Let us then make use of these Sacraments and draw closer to God. It is by sharing in His passion, be it by voluntary penance or by accepting and offering up the sufferings He allows, that we shall partake in the glory of His Resurrection.
