A NEW HEART CREATE FOR ME LORD

ASH WEDNESDAY, EIGHTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Joel 2:12-18; Ps 51:3-6,12-14,17; 2 Cor 5:20-6:2; Mt 6:1-6,16-18

The Importance of a Broken Heart

The Ash Wednesday celebration launches us into the season of Lent. It is a season the Church emphasises the practice of penance as an important aspect of our Christian life. The three central activities the Church puts before us are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These activities aim to promote or solidify the foundation of our Christian faith and life, which we have conceived as repentance. In other words, they help break our hard and sinful hearts. In this season of Lent, the Church brings what ought to be a common feature of our Christian life, repentance, and penance, to the focus of all. The aim is to deepen our conversion experience and promote our growth in the Christian life. It is a time to intensify our desire to do the will of God, as the prophet Joel calls out in the name of God. “‘Now, now—it is the Lord who speaks—come back to me with all your heart, fasting, weeping, mourning.’ Let your hearts be broken, not your garments torn, turn to the Lord your God again, for he is all tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in graciousness, and ready to relent.” Thus, the three major activities are to break our hardened and sinful hearts. Therefore, these activities are means to a necessary end for all of us, namely, union with God’s will. The understanding helps us put our Lenten observance in perspective.

We break our old, sinful, and hardened hearts to commence a new life through a new love. We started the week by understanding ourselves as clay in the hand of the Potter, God. If God is to achieve anything worthy of him in us, we must be plastic or malleable in his hand. The malleability property is the defining property of clay, and all the preparatory activities of the Potter on the clay are to accentuate this feature. Hence, the graces from the Sacraments, the word of God, and everything the Lord brings to us daily are for making us plastic in his hand. The process commences with the breaking of our hardened and sinful hearts. A broken heart, in this context, stands for a heart that has acknowledged his sins and has understood, to an extent, how grievous his sins and offences are to the infinite majesty of God, his nothingness before the infinite glory and goodness of God and feels inconsolable in his expression of sorrow for his sins against God. This emotion, produced in us by God’s presence or grace, breaks the heart into dust, which God sieves to produce fine clay for his moulding work. God’s grace breaks our old and sinful hearts so that he may create a new and righteous one in us. We need a broken heart for God to lay the foundation of a new life in us. The Church proposes the three activities for this noble end: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

The importance of a broken heart derives from the necessity of a new heart made like that of Jesus Christ. Thus, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are to work with God to produce a new heart within us. “A pure heart create for me, O God, put a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, no deprive of your holy Spirit.” Since the intention is to produce the heart of Jesus Christ within us, the main feature of our prayer this season is being in the presence of Jesus Christ to meditate on his life and sacrifices for us. He makes us into his ambassadors when we dwell in his presence. In his company, we acquire his mind and heart. Saint Paul writes: “We are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God.” Producing the mind and heart of Jesus Christ in us from our old broken hearts is entirely a divine and interior project, which rests on our desire to do the will of God. Thus, Jesus bid us to work in the interior as we carry out the three activities. “But when you give alms, your left hand must not know what your right is doing; your almsgiving must be secret, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.” Likewise, we must pray and fast to please God alone. We stated yesterday that the desire to do the will of God is the mark of true religion; it is the reason for this holy season of Lent.

Let us pray: Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.