DEAR FRIENDS IN CHRIST,
Each year in Lent, the Church invites us to meet the Lord on his way to Jerusalem. The experience is bracing. The crowds are gone. The many healings and deliverances and the stirring discourses on mountain and plain are in the past. The beautiful prophecy about the bread of life is but a puzzling memory. We meet a man determined to do his father’s will, a man whose “face was set toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:53).
The stark nobility of Jesus Christ reminds us that we are called to holiness. St. John Henry Newman captured this essential dynamic of our faith with his customary precision:
He sacrificed every wish of his own that we might understand that if he, the Creator, came into his own world not for his own pleasure but to do the Father’s will, we too have most surely some work to do, and have seriously to consider what that work is.