Becoming a new creation
THE Holy Week is here. It is that time of the year when we reflect on how Jesus died on the cross to save us from our transgressions. It is the time when the pace of life seems to slow down. Government offices are down to skeleton workforce. Classes are out. Most restaurants close down, especially on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. City folk move out to their towns, leaving virtually empty city streets.
The grittiness of Catholicism, in which Lent began with priests etching ashy crosses in our foreheads, will culminate in the holiest week and the grandest liturgy of the year — the Easter Vigil Mass.
In celebrating with great detail the last days of Christ’s worldly life, the church will bring out her palm branches, sacred incense, and holy oils. She will put wooden crucifixes for the faithful to kiss, and in churches she will offer us the chance to ponder Christ’s sufferings and his way to the triumphant cross, that saved all of us.
Because Christ courageously rode into Jerusalem and faced death to fulfill God’s grand plan for our salvation, because he offered himself to the indignity and humiliation of the cross for our redemption, because of these tangible and factual deeds of human and divine love, we have the Christian faith, the true passageway to God. If we overlook and disregard these moments, we risk turning Christianity into a principle for our moral living.
Undeniably, Christ made incomprehensible acts of love for us, and so we follow him to the ends of the world, give up our time, offer our skills, our very livelihood, and everything that we have to the very one who loved us first.
Let us not forget to spend a day reflecting and thanking God for the blessings He continues to give us and for sending his son Jesus Christ to save us from our sins.
The message of Holy Week is aimed at individual Christians who, along with fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, are asked to make new beginnings in their lives.
In his Lenten message this year, Pope Francis exhorted all Catholics to become God’s new creation.
He said that “the path to Easter demands that we renew our faces and hearts as Christians through repentance, conversion and forgiveness, so as to live fully the abundant grace of the paschal mystery,”.
“Lent is a sacramental sign of this conversion. It invites Christians to embody the paschal mystery more deeply and concretely in their personal, family and social lives, above all by fasting, prayer and almsgiving,” the Holy Father’s message concluded.
By becoming a “new creation”, we can become a true instrument to renew the face of the Earth according to God’s will.