The Holy Father invites us to keep in mind, during this time of prayer, that “love of God and love of neighbor is one single love.”
Dear brothers and sisters:
When our God reveals Himself, He communicates freedom: “I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex 20:2). This is how the Decalogue given to Moses on Mount Sinai opens. The people are well aware of which exodus God speaks; the experience of slavery is still imprinted on their flesh. They receive the ten words of the covenant in the desert as a path toward freedom. We call them “commandments,” emphasizing the strength of love with which God educates His people. The call to freedom is, indeed, a vigorous call. It does not end in a single event because it matures along the journey.
Just as Israel in the desert still carries Egypt within itself — indeed, it often longs for the past and murmurs against heaven and against Moses — today too, God’s people carry within themselves oppressive bonds that they must decide to abandon. We realize this when hope is lacking and we wander through life as if in a desolate wasteland, without a promised land to which we can journey together.
Lent is the time of grace in which the desert becomes — as the prophet Hosea announces — the place of first love (cf. Hos 2:16-17). God educates His people to abandon their slavery and to experience the passage from death to life. Like a spouse, He draws us again toward Himself and whispers words of love to our hearts.
The exodus from slavery to freedom is not an abstract path. To make our Lent concrete, the first step is to want to see reality. When in the burning bush the Lord attracted Moses and spoke to him, He immediately revealed Himself as a God who sees and above all listens: “I have seen the oppression of my people, who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cries of distress, caused by their taskmasters.
Yes, I know very well their sufferings. That is why I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and to bring them up, from that land, to a fertile and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Ex 3:7-8). Even today, the cry of so many oppressed brothers and sisters reaches heaven. Let us ask ourselves: does it also reach us? Does it shake us? Does it move us? Many factors distance us from one another, denying the fraternity that unites us from the beginning.
In my journey to Lampedusa, faced with the globalization of indifference, I posed two questions, which are increasingly relevant: “Where are you?” (Gn 3:9) and “Where is your brother?” (Gn 4:9). The Lenten journey will be concrete if, upon hearing them again, we confess that we are still under Pharaoh’s dominion. It is a dominion that leaves us exhausted and makes us insensitive.
It is a model of growth that divides us and steals our future; that has polluted the earth, the air, and the water, but also the souls. Because, although our liberation has already begun with baptism, there remains within us an inexplicable longing for slavery. It is like an attraction to the security of what is already seen, to the detriment of freedom.
I would like to point out a detail of no small importance in the story of Exodus: it is God who sees, who is moved, and who liberates; it is not Israel that asks for it. Pharaoh, in fact, destroys even dreams, steals the sky, makes it seem unchangeable a world where dignity is trampled and authentic bonds are denied.
In other words, he manages to keep everything subject to himself. Let us ask ourselves: do I desire a new world? Am I willing to break commitments with the old? The testimony of many brother bishops and a large number of those working for peace and justice convinces me more and more that what must be denounced is a deficit of hope. It is an obstacle to dreaming, a silent cry that reaches heaven and moves the heart of God.
It resembles that longing for slavery that paralyzes Israel in the desert, preventing it from moving forward. The exodus can be interrupted. Otherwise, it would be inexplicable that a humanity that has reached the threshold of universal brotherhood and levels of scientific, technical, cultural, and legal development capable of guaranteeing the dignity of all, walks in the darkness of inequalities and conflicts.
God does not tire of us. Let us embrace Lent as the intense time in which His Word again addresses us: “I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex 20:2). It is a time of conversion, a time of freedom. Jesus Himself, as we remember each year on the first Sunday of Lent, was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tested in His freedom.
For forty days, He will be before us and with us: He is the incarnate Son. Unlike Pharaoh, God does not want subjects but children. The desert is the space where our freedom can mature in a personal decision not to fall back into slavery. During Lent, we find new criteria for judgment and a community with which to undertake a path we have never traveled before.
This involves a struggle, which the book of Exodus and Jesus’ temptations in the desert clearly narrate. To the voice of God, which says: “You are my beloved Son” (Mk 1:11) and “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:3), the lies of the enemy oppose themselves. More fearsome than Pharaoh are idols; we could consider them as His voice within us. Feeling omnipotent, recognized by all, taking advantage over others: every human feels the seduction of this lie within. It is a well-trodden path.
Therefore, we can cling to money, certain projects, ideas, goals, our position, tradition, and even some people. Those things, instead of propelling us forward, will paralyze us. Instead of uniting us, they will confront us. However, there exists a new humanity, that of the small and humble who have not succumbed to the charm of lies. While idols become mute, blind, deaf, immobile to those who serve them (cf. Psl 115:8), the poor in spirit are immediately open and well-disposed; they are a silent force of good that heals and sustains the world.
It is time to act, and in Lent, acting also means stopping. Stopping in prayer, to welcome God’s Word, and stopping like the Samaritan before the wounded brother. Love of God and love of neighbor is one single love. Not having other gods is stopping before the presence of God, in the flesh of the neighbor. That is why prayer, almsgiving, and fasting are not three independent exercises but a single movement of openness, of emptying: away with the idols that oppress us, away with attachments that imprison us. Then, the atrophied and isolated heart will awaken.
Therefore, slow down and stop. The contemplative dimension of life, which Lent will help us rediscover, will mobilize new energies. Before the presence of God, we become brothers and sisters; we perceive others with new intensity; instead of threats and enemies, we find companions on the journey. This is God’s dream, the promised land toward which we march when we come out of slavery.
The synodal form of the Church, which in recent years we are rediscovering and cultivating, suggests that Lent also be a time of community decisions, of small and large decisions against the tide, capable of changing the daily life of people and the life of a neighborhood: shopping habits, care for creation, inclusion of the invisible or despised. I invite all Christian communities to do this: to offer their faithful moments to reflect on lifestyles; to take time to verify their presence in the neighborhood and their contribution to improving it.
Woe to us if Christian penance were like the one that saddened Jesus. He also tells us: “Do not look gloomy, like the hypocrites, who disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting” (Mt 6:16). Rather, let joy be visible on our faces, let the fragrance of freedom be felt, let love that makes all things new be unleashed, starting with the smallest and nearest. This can happen in every Christian community.
To the extent that this Lent is a time of conversion, then, lost humanity will feel a shiver of creativity; the spark of a new hope. I want to tell you, as I did to the young people I met in Lisbon last summer: “Seek and take risks, seek and take risks.
In this historic moment, the challenges are enormous, the painful groans — we are living through a third world war in pieces —, but we embrace the risk of thinking that we are not in an agony but in a birth; not at the end but at the beginning of a great spectacle. And it takes courage to think this” ( Speech to university students, August 3, 2023). It is the courage of conversion, of coming out of slavery. Faith and charity walk hand in hand with this small hope. They teach it to walk and, at the same time, it is she who pulls them forward.
I bless you all and your Lenten journey.
Rome, San Giovanni in Laterano, December 3, 2023, First Sunday of Advent.
Image: Cathopic
