HOW MUCH LONGER?

The Monday after the Fourth Sunday of Lent

We’re half-way through Lent. By this time, if you’re still plugging along with your Lenten disciplines, you’ve learned a thing or two about yourself you didn’t know when you started. You may be surprised at your resiliency—you’ve handled your Lenten temptations better than you expected. That may be because you didn’t expect much—your Lenten rule (say, to give up skeet shooting when you’ve never shot a skeet) wasn’t really a challenge and you haven’t been tempted to break it at all. You may have discovered that not only can you live without television for a few weeks, but you’re enjoying not having it blaring in the background. You may even have found when you pray about real temptations, God actually will give “grace to help in time of need.”

Even if you’ve pretty much given up on Lent, you’ve learned something, too. Without a firm intention we won’t obtain a meaningful result. If we can’t see any benefit from Lent, why bother? If the whole focus becomes giving up ice cream, how does that help your spiritual life? It is possible to keep a Lenten rule and profit nothing from it. What do we want from Lent?

St John tells us in the Gospel appointed for today that the people crowding around Jesus were excited by His miracles, amazed at His healings and stirred by His words. They wanted Him to do something spectacular, like miraculously kick the Romans out of Palestine or evict the Jewish hierarchy from the Temple. “But Jesus did not commit Himself to them,” St John writes, “because He knew all men…and what was in man.” The Psalmist says the Lord “knows whereof we are made, He remembereth that we are but dust.”

Many times, Lent doesn’t fulfill our expectations. We start out with a bang and end up with a whimper. It doesn’t turn out as we’d hoped: our Lenten zeal becomes as stale as a piece of last year’s birthday cake in the back of the refrigerator. That’s okay. “He remembereth that we are but dust.” You should remember it, too. Jesus knows us, He knows how we are, how easily we promise and how quickly we forget. Lent is not about perfection—that’s for later—but growth. Growing our lives with Christ; that’s why we set out after Jesus and are following Him through the forty-day desert.

We’re half-way home. If your zeal has flagged, if Lent has been reduced to “ho-hum, how many more days left,” don’t be surprised. “We—you and I—are but dust.” The Lord didn’t dance His way through the desert. He did what you do when you travel through a desert—He sweated, got tired, hungry, thirty, lonely and His feet hurt. In a desert you either keep going or drop into the dust, shrivel up and blow away. Jesus knows all men, women, boys, girls, babies—He knows all of us and what’s in us; He knows we are but dust—that we get tired and discouraged and sometimes give up.

Knowing that, He calls us on. “If any man will come after Me,” He says, “let him deny himself, and pick up his cross every day, and follow me.” He concludes with another of those hard-to-accept statements: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.” Lent is not our Victory Over Sweets. It’s our daily trudging after Jesus in the desert—because that’s where He is.

He won’t be coming to the Civic Center or stopping by the Mall. Jesus meets us in the tangle of our daily lives—where we often don’t expect Him, and sometimes don’t want Him. That’s one of the things we discover about Lent. There are parts of our lives we want to keep to ourselves—sins we cling to, animosities we cherish. Lent intrudes, challenging our beloved—or at least unacknowledged—sins. “You should be able to keep something to yourself,” the Tempter whispers consolingly. Just the words we want to hear.

If your Lent has lost its luster, polish it up over the next few days. Renew your struggle, pick up your cross. It’s three weeks till we sing the Easter Alleluia, and even if you only start in earnest today, there’s still plenty of time for a good fight in the desert. Yes, you are but dust—but you’re dust on a mission, and you know where you’re going.