All our lives are characterized by the ups and downs of our daily experience and the range of our emotional responses to them. There is a temptation to treat Lent as a sort of liturgical low point when we concentrate primarly on the struggle and our sinfulness. But there is another possible approach, which may be more fruitful, and that is to accept that we are weak and sinful people, born into a beautiful but broken world, and then joyfully to renew our faith in the meaning of our baptism. For it was through our baptism that we entered into the mystery of Christ as Redeemer. This is the Christ who went into the desert to wrestle with the powers of evil and who then fulfilled His Father’s mission and began to heal the hurt of sin and its consequences.
It will help us to be authentic followers of Jesus of Nazareth if we firstly acknowledge the power of evil in our world and in our lives. Then we can renew our faith in the power of the one who overcame evil, and pray that He will free us from temptation and deliver us from evil. At the end of Lent, when we celebrate the glory of Christ’s triumph in the resurrection at Easter, we will be invited to renew our baptismal vows. Think about what an extraordinary act of faith we make as we renounce all that is evil, and then profess our belief in the God of love. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One thing that may give added meaning to our Lent is to try, as individuals, or better still with our families and friends, to find time to explore the meaning of our baptism and see whether it is truly helping to shape our lives. If you are a parent or godparent, ask yourself how seriously you have taken your responsibility to ensure that the children entrusted to you are growing up to appreciate the meaning of their baptism. And then on Easter Sunday our response, “I do,†to each of the baptismal questions will ring out across the church with real resonance, and with real joy.