YEAR A: HOMILY FOR FRIDAY OF THE 1ST WEEK OF LENT (1)
As long as you have repented of your sins and have confessed them, God forgives you. Your past becomes history, and they can no longer stand against you before God.
YEAR A: HOMILY FOR FRIDAY OF THE 1ST WEEK OF LENT
HOMILY THEME: WORSE THAN OUR PARENTS?
BY: Fr. Ben Agbo
HOMILY: * Ezek 18:21-28, Matt 5:20-26.
Like the Jews of Ezekiel’s era who used to quote a proverb disowning personal responsibility for their calamity: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’, ours is a generation that is morally evasive – often pushing the causes of our calamity to ancestors. But God made it clear to Ezekiel in today’s 1st reading : ‘If a son of a wicked man turns from all the sins which his father has committed and does what is right, he shall not die…for the righteousness which he has done he shall live’.
But the real tragedy we see today is the tragedy of negative conversion: ‘When a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and does abominable acts, shall he live?’ What we are seeing in today’s society looks more like negative repentance. Many are ‘being born against’ their parents’ ways. Look at the immoral lives our Youths are embracing in broad daylight – the music they play and enjoy: Flavours and Finos – with all the vulgarity of language, exalting the most immoral of values. Our Youths consume this music and willy nilly it affects their lives.
I don’t know what many think today about salvation but Christ has not, to the best of my knowledge, reduced the standards. In today’s gospel, he makes it clear: ‘Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’. Those people claimed to be religious but their moral lives were hypocritical and extrinsic. They prayed bad prayer by heaping up empty phrases, did bad fasting by showing off and made bad offering by quarreling with people even as they made their offerings. Christ wants us Christians to go deeper in eradicating sin – a kind of ‘sanatio ad radice’ – cleansing from the root of every sin. For example, the root of murder is anger and malice. The root of adultery is impure thoughts. The root of stealing is avarice. The root of slandering is lack of charity and humility in judgment.
Only a positive process of repentance / conversion will save us, especially during this lenten season. Today’s 1st reading makes it clear that all the troubles we go through about cleansing a Christian family from the evil effects of their wicked ancestors are not as necessary as the trouble of preaching deep repentance in that family. The bigger trouble I see in the Church today which calls for “special family ministrations” (oru ezi n’ulo) is that the children of righteous men are turning into evil in geometric progression. We can’t afford to be worse in morality than our parents. We can’t afford to be worse in morality than these Scribes and Pharisees. That tantamounts to spiritual retrogression. We can’t afford to commit sins at a young age that our parents never dreamt of committing at an older age. We must beware of turning away from a background of righteousness to wickedness. I think this is the greatest tragedy of our time! May God bless you today!
