It’s an interesting phenomenon:  if we take a calendar and do a straight count of the days from Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, to Easter Sunday we come up with 46 days.  But isn’t Lent supposed to be 40 days?  Doesn’t Lent recall the 40 days that Christ spent in the desert, which we heard about in today’s Gospel?  And, of course, Lent is 40 days. 

If we take our calendar again and count the days, this time skipping the Sundays, we come up with 40 days.  So why do we skip the Sundays?  Because every Sunday is the Lord’s Day, a “little” Easter, even the ones in Lent.  That is why we are required to come to Mass on Sundays.

And just as every Sunday is a “little” Easter, so every Friday is a “little” Good  Friday.  That is why we abstain from meat on the Fridays of Lent, to remind ourselves of the day on which Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried.  Previously, Catholics abstained from meat on every Friday of the year, and in many, many parts of the world they still do.  The universal law of the Church still calls for abstention from meat on Fridays.  It is only in the United States and a few other places that the local conference of bishops have reduced this requirement to the Fridays of Lent.  In case you are wondering, the law does give a bishops’ conference the right to do that.

Why do Catholics do this stuff?  Why do we say that it is so important to come to Mass on Sunday, that it is a sin if we don’t?  Why do we abstain from meat on Fridays?  Why do we have these devotional practices like the Stations of the Cross?  Why do we even observe Lent?  Many Christian denominations don’t.  Some say that the only important thing is to come to church on Sunday, but even those do not regard it as a sin if you happen to miss. 

So why are we so wrapped around the axle about all this?  Isn’t all this mere external observance?  It is not supposed to be.  It can be, if we let it be, but it is not supposed to be.

All of this: coming to Mass, abstaining from meat, going to Stations of the Cross, fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and everything else that we do as Catholics are meant to be means by which we connect our lives to Christ.

The Word was made flesh.  The Second Person of the Trinity assumed our humanity.  That is how we come to have salvation: our humanity is united to the humanity of Christ.  The life of faith, the faith that Saint Paul talks about in our second reading, is to recognize this central truth, and to live our lives in accordance with that truth.

In the letter to the Galatians (2:20), St. Paul says, “yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.”

 In the first reading today, Moses doesn’t tell the people to do those things – to bring the first fruits of the harvest and offer them to God, to recount their enslavement in Egypt, to tell how God brought them out of that slavery and gave them the gift of their own land – merely as an external observance, merely for the sake of doing it.  He tells them to do those things so that they will remember what God has done for them and make that truth part of their lives.

 As Christians, we do the same thing: we recall what God has done for us.  We remember that the Second Person of the Trinity has assumed a human nature.  We recall that He was born like one of us.  We recall that He ministered to us and ministers to us still.  We remember that He suffered for us, that He was crucified, died, and was buried.  We remember that, on the third day, He rose again.  And we remember that it is because of what He did that we have salvation and that death has no power over us, not because of anything we did.

We should be doing that every day of every month of every year of our lives.  But all of us know that we don’t always do that.  There are times when we simply give this truth no thought at all.  And there are times when we may be aware of it, but it just sorts of sits out there, external to us, without any real impact on our lives and our actions.  Those are the times when we sin: when we do things we should not do, and when we do not do things that we should do.

 And so we have this special season every year – the time to remember, the time to connect, or to reconnect, our lives with Christ.  It is the time to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary, to die to ourselves there with Him, so that we may also rise with Him at Easter.

 We have all these wonderful things that our Catholic faith gives us to help us in this task, including the Mass and the other sacraments, devotions like the Stations of the Cross, prayer, novenas, and everything else.  If we don’t see the value in them, then we need to admit to ourselves that the problem is not with the practices.  The problem is with us.  And in that case, we need all the more to turn to the Lord in our need and ask Him to enlighten our hearts and minds with the knowledge and love of Him.