Fifth Sunday of Lent

As we enter the fifth week of Lent, the Church continues to call for “true faith, conversion, and an opening of the heart” to our brothers and sisters.  The Holy Father, Pope Francis, reiterates in his message the essential elements of Lent: “giving thanks to God for the mystery of his crucified love.”

“Specifically, it means consciously resisting the pressure of a culture which thinks it can do without God, where parents no longer teach their children to pray, where violence, poverty and social decay are taken for granted,” he said during a Lenten message.

Lent is also a time for self-denial, penance, and thanksgiving and challenges us to imitate Christ’s example of becoming poor but in the process enrich us by his poverty. Pope Francis quotes Saint Paul on this insight of Christ’s poverty: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).

We ask ourselves then what can we give up in order to help others by our own poverty. May we be inspired by the challenge that Pope Francis posed on the whole church: “Let us not forget that real poverty hurts: no self-denial is real without this dimension of penance. I distrust a charity that costs nothing and does not hurt.” During this fifth week of Lent, may we ponder and practice in our daily lives acts of charity that truly requires self-giving sacrifice from us and bear witness to Christ’s enduring love.