Dear St. Rita Families,

            This coming week, we enter into the season of Lent, and if you haven’t begun already, it is good to be pondering how you would like to live out your journey to the Cross with Jesus. Normally – and rightly, I might add – we associate Lent with the 40 years’ wandering of the Israelites in the desert, and likewise with Our Lord’s 40 days in the desert after His Baptism, when He faces and conquers the devil’s temptations. I would also like to draw your attention this year to the 40 days spent by Moses fasting on the top of Mount Sinai, while awaiting God’s gift to His people – the Mosaic Law.

            The moment in the Book of Exodus is profound. In a scene prefiguring Jesus’ Transfiguration (cf. Lk 9:28-36), Moses and 3 (named) others go up Mount Sinai, where they behold the God of Israel (Ex 24:9-10), no small privilege. Then, God invites Moses alone to go further in order to receive the stone tablets of the Commandments. A cloud descends upon the mountain (v. 15, cf. Lk 9:34), and after 7 days, God calls to Moses, “And Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights” (v. 18). You may recall, too, that St. Luke tells us that on Mt. Tabor at the Transfiguration, Jesus, Moses, and Elijah “spoke of [Jesus’] departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem” (9:31). The word Luke uses for “departure” is the Greek word “exodus”. The meaning is simple: Jesus is going to fulfill the Law (Moses) and the Prophets (Elijah) by accomplishing the New Exodus in Jerusalem, which is later revealed to be His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. 

            What then about the 40 days? Well, do you remember what happens when Moses comes back down the mountain with the stone tablets? He hears cries of revelry, and he quickly discovers that the people of Israel have abandoned the God who led them out of slavery in Egypt in order to worship a golden calf (Ex 32). Moses, in anger, then breaks the tablets upon which God Himself had written and enacts justice on the people who sinned.

            We can see in the events of those 40 days another prefiguring of the Passion of Christ. Jesus is the Incarnate Word and Law of God, making present much more clearly than stone tablets that which God wanted to say to His people. Jesus is also the New Moses, the true Lawgiver. When the people of Israel lose faith and do not accept that which God had spoken to them, not only did they break the Law figuratively by their actions, but also the Law Himself had to be broken like those stone tablets of old. And He was broken, on Good Friday, because we did not obey the commands of God.

            Now, you and I have become members of the Body of Christ by our Baptism. You and I have become bearers of the Law of God in our bodies. Both our lips and our lives proclaim that which God has definitively spoken, namely Jesus Christ. Lent, then, is a time for us to go up the Mountain of God, to fast and pray, to be closer to our God who has deigned to unite us with Himself. We are the ones who must become the sign of contradiction to the world that still revels in base delights, worships its multitude of golden calves, and has lost faith in the God who has created us and saved us.

            When we come down the mountain when the 40 days are over (Lent ends, technically, on Holy Thursday morning), we will be prepared to enter into the Holy Triduum, the sacred moment where the Law Himself, God’s Word, allowed Himself to be destroyed. With Him, we too gladly accept the vocation of being rejected by the world and its idolatry. We want nothing of its filth. We cling unwaveringly to Christ, even – especially – in His Death, because we know that only through that Death are we able to receive Resurrection.

            This Lent, therefore, I ask you to ascend the mountain with Jesus Christ. Leave behind earthly attachments. Enter into the cloud, which is the Holy Spirit. Persevere through the 40 days, combat the world with your almsgiving, the flesh with your fasting, and the devil with your prayer. In this way, you will emerge as a shining image of Christ, indeed an “alter Christus” – “another Christ”. The world couldn’t handle Him, and they won’t be able to handle you, either!

In Christ,

Fr. Christensen