This journey of ours often takes us in new and challenging directions: a different slant on a text, a new life experience, another year added to our lives or, as Robert Frost would have it --- ‘divergent roads’ --- and we are off on a new and uncharted leg of that journey.
We have now entered the Lenten Season. It is a time of retrospection as to how we are doing in our journey as disciples of Jesus and, also, a time for the recommitting of ourselves to the work of God in the world. May we all be open to the leading of the Spirit as we work our way toward Holy Week. But there is one thing, in my opinion, from which we need to be relieved: namely the notion that our sins crucified Jesus. The Romans crucified Jesus. They were the only ones who had the authority to carry out a death sentence. Not you; not me.
We are now well into the Lenten Season; a very important time in the life of the Christian Community worldwide. It is a time for deep reflection as well as honest repentance. It is a time to begin shaping responses that will lead us in new and creative directions as we live out our discipleship in the midst of a rather cruel, hateful and divisive world. Indeed, it is a time to take stock of where we are and where we need to go as we journey towards Holy Week, the Cross and beyond. No small order.
We declare our 350th Anniversary a Year of Jubilee. In our sacred texts, every 49th year the ram’s horn was sounded to signal the occasion of the Jubilee: a time of penitence, social transformation, and daring acts of ethical imagination (the release of prisoners, forgiveness of debts, redistribution of land, and relief to the poor).