This year Pope Leo in his annual message for Lent invites us to listen and fast through Lent. He connects those two practices. It is so easy for us to walk through life blind and deaf to everything that is going on around us and concentrate on our own needs. Fasting helps us to see that we don’t need so many things for ourselves and that God has given us enough resources to attend to ourselves and other. Fasting helps concentrate our life on others and to renounce those false idols that we worship in our lives.
The rich man’s sin in today’s Gospel is not being rich. The sin is his blind indifference to the needs of the poor who surrounded him and his active deafness to the urgings to charity found throughout the Old Testament. The daily presence of poor Lazarus at his door was a constant call to conversion and charity. Conversion is the process of moving the center of our lives from our own person and needs to center our lives on listening to the Word of God and the needs of others. The rich man seems surprised to find himself in the place of torment and complains to Abraham, the father of faith. Abraham points out to the rich man that the call to conversion runs through the entire Old Testament – the Law (Moses) and the Prophets. Through his whole lifestyle, the rich man wove a tapestry of hard-heartedness, blind indifference, selfishness, and deafness to the needs of others and the urgings of God’s will. He built an earthly life of separateness from God and others. His life after death just continued on within the same tapestry of self-centered separateness.
Whether one is economically rich or poor, we are all called to conversion, to renounce ourselves, to serve God and to serve others. We are all called to share or give away our lives. Lent is a time to move the center of our lives towards God and others through fasting, prayer, and alms giving. This is the only way that leads to Easter.
‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded
if someone should rise from the dead.’
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