24 February 2026 - Tuesday of the first week of Lent
Homily
Since the beginning of Lent, the texts from the Old and New Testaments read at the Eucharistic celebration have warned us with sustained and truly impressive insistence against the falseness and futility of religious practice that does not translate into a life of concrete love and fraternal service.
God created everything through his Word. That same Word, which was addressed to us by the prophets of all times, came to us personally in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It penetrates and permeates us. The Book of Isaiah compares it to rain and snow that fall from the heavens and return to them. If we allow ourselves to be transformed by this Word, we will return to the Father in it, assumed into it. If we do not receive it as fertile soil, if it does not transform our lives, then it returns to the Father without us, like rain that evaporates on the surface of hardened earth; and we remain in nothingness.
Jesus gives a concrete example of this in the Gospel we have just read. This Gospel is taken from the Sermon on the Mount as reconstructed by Matthew. Towards the end, we find a teaching on prayer. First, there was the recommendation not to pray in public places in order to be seen, but to enter the solitude of our room and pray there, in secret, to our heavenly Father. Next comes the recommendation not to multiply words as if they were in themselves effective prayers. The Father knows all our needs and those of the rest of humanity better than we know them ourselves, says Jesus.
Jesus then gives the formula for the ‘Our Father’ and comments on only one of the seven petitions, the one concerning the forgiveness of sins or the remission of debts. ‘If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ I do not believe that these words should be understood as if God were ‘rewarding’ us for forgiving or ‘punishing’ us for not doing so. God would then be a god in our own image. Rather, it simply means that by forgiving others, we enter into the endless flow of the Father's merciful love, and by refusing to forgive, we cut ourselves off from that flow.
As always, Jesus leaves us the choice.