“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”
Every year we celebrate the season of Lent and the Holy Week. It is part of our Christian tradition, and I am sure that most, if not all Catholics, are serious in this yearly celebration. I mean, this is the time of the year when most of us would go to church to confess our sins, repent, and renew our lives. Lent, for most of us, is the time when we really want to make sacrifices in our efforts to be united with the sacrifices made by our Lord, especially when he made that ultimate sacrifice on the cross. We know that it all happened because of God’s immeasurable love for us, even in our sinfulness. It is only fitting for us to meditate, reflect, and even share in these sacrifices of Jesus Christ in our little ways. Hopefully, we can all journey with him to the cross because our Christian faith must always lead us to the cross of Christ. Good Friday is the day we remember the crucifixion of Jesus, but there’s more to it than remembering; our task as preachers is to call people to the Cross. We want to embrace the resurrection, but Jesus calls us to embrace the Cross, too.
The First Sunday of Lent told us about how Jesus was tempted after his fasting in the wilderness for forty days. Yes, temptations are a reality in our lives. We know how Satan tempted Jesus. A man feeling hungry and tired was tempted to use his power to soothe his hunger by making bread out of stones. He felt so alone and powerless during those forty days of fasting, and he was tempted to have the entire world subject to him right away. In that poor state, he was tempted to be popular if he would only worship Satan. Of course, Jesus passed all these tests, and he was able to resist all the temptation, not just because he is God, but it was because he has that unwavering faith in his Father’s love.
Temptations are part and parcel of our human existence. It is hard to resist temptations because, just like what Satan did to Jesus, he knows how to make us fall for those temptations. He will always entice us with riches during those times when our pockets are empty, and we know that many people became victims of this temptation to get rich even if the process is illegal and unacceptable in our society. Even priests had been victims of this temptation towards material wealth. Many other forms of temptations can come to us and sometimes they just arrive without us being aware that they are already dragging us to a sinful lifestyle. But one thing good about temptations is that they are the reasons why people become holy. Resisting temptations make us faithful to the will of God and they can help us pattern our life to that of Jesus. We will be forever tempted by the Devil for as long as we are alive.
Jesus prayed and fasted for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. It made him strong and detached from the world, and it helped him resist those temptations the Satan hurled against him. We know that prayer is our line of communication with God. It is through prayers that we thank him for all the gifts that he has given us. It is through our prayers that we come to him with bended knees asking for his forgiveness for all the sins that we have committed against him, against ourselves, and against our neighbors. It is through our persistent prayers that we ask for his help and give us what we need in our daily lives. It is through our sincere prayers that we come to him in our own nakedness and offer ourselves to him to be his servant. Prayer is particularly important for every Christian because we find solace and comfort in our prayers. We are assured of God’s forgiving love and mercy in our prayers. Of course, we believe that, when we pray, God is listening to us on the other end of the line, and he will surely answer our prayers if it will help us in our efforts to be less and less imperfect.
Fasting is a way of detaching ourselves from worldly things. The current way of fasting is fasting from food and drinks. But there are other ways to fulfill our obligations to fast especially during this season of Lent. As Catholics, we were taught to observe fasting especially during Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. However, we can also observe fasting at any given day and we can try fasting even better by avoiding things or activities that have become our alter ego.
We have the tendency to rush Jesus up to heaven. I believe that we just do not know how to put the scene of the cross into our lives. But we must not forget that Friday is our road to Sunday. We cannot never appreciate the triumph of the Easter Sunday if we have not been into the Good Friday of our lives. The last words of Jesus on the cross: “Consummatum Est! (it is finished!)” are the words which ended his earthly life, but those are the same words which gave us life! How I wish that we will also arrive at our own utterance of those words. It is finished, because we are done from a sinful life and have accepted our need for the grace of God’s redemption. It is finished because we have finally decided to choose God even if our choice must lead us to the foot of the cross. It is finished because we won the battle by detaching ourselves from the world and have accepted the life that Jesus is offering us. Yes, my dear friends, it is truly finished because Christ had won the battle for us long time ago. Now, let us finish what Christ had begun in us.