The First Reading: Joel 2:12-18
The Second Reading: 2 Co 5:20–6:2
The Gospel: Mt 6:1–6, 16–18

The priest traces a cross on our forehead with blessed ashes and exhorts us: "Remember...you are dust and unto dust you shall return." To the uninitiated this might seem a macabre rite of some primitive group. To us it is a solemn and serious moment of truth and grace.

The ashes are the remains of the palms blessed last Palm Sunday. Palms waved by an enthusiastic throng eager to crown Jesus as their king on a Sunday long ago. Instead they crucified him on Friday. So rapidly do the whims and wishes of mobs change. And even more swiftly do the tastes and choices of our modern world evaporate. Here today and gone tomorrow refers to ourselves as well as the things about us. Not one of us can count on being alive long enough to finish reading this sentence. The ashes are a vivid, stark reminder "that we have not a lasting city here" on earth, that our future and our lasting city is in heaven, in eternity. Here and now we have time but time will eventually run out on us. We must use our remaining moments well.

In the first reading of today’s Mass, the prophet Joel writes: "Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart...Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God." The essence of the Lenten season is our return to God. Each of us looking within, recognizes times when we have been less than we should have been, when by our choices, we have turned away from our God. The core of our conversion, or return to God, is in our heart. How do we change our hearts?

"Rend your hearts" Joel writes. Let us determine to OPEN our hearts to God in prayer, asking his help. "Without me, you can do nothing." "Return to me with your whole heart". In the sacrament of Reconciliation, we acknowledge our sins, receive God’s forgiveness and his help to avoid our sins in the future. We rend and open our hearts to God. As St Paul writes: "We implore you, in Christ’s name: Be reconciled to God! For our sakes God made him who did not know sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the very holiness of God...

Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!" "...Forgetting all that lies behind me, and straining forward...I am racing towards the finishing-point to win the prize of God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus...

Let us go forward from the point we have each attained."

Joel 2:12; 2 Co 5:20–6:2; Ph 3:13b,14,16.