Are you prepared for St Valentine’s Day? Have you already planned out how to express your love for your special someone, or do you think it’s too early to consider? Perhaps you dismiss the holiday as a gimmick of “Big Commerce”. Certainly, the latter is on top of its game, as evidenced by the overwhelming number of Valentine-themed products available in supermarkets, which even overshadow the Easter-themed chocolates and decorations already on display. Regardless of your feelings about St Valentine’s Day, it is approaching, bringing with it both genuine and sometimes forced declarations of love. Personally, I feel relatively safe for obvious reasons, but I understand that many people value feeling loved and expressing love in return. It must be a wonderful experience, provided that such feelings are not confined to just one day each year. When it is just a one-off, followed by weeks and months of indifference, it undermines the gesture and raises doubts about how genuine the love is. The “unexpressed everyday love” is sometimes justified by the phrase “she knows I love her” or similar; it more often covers up either a lack of effort to show love (in the best-case scenario) or its effective absence. Sometimes love is expressed in what I call a “transactional form” when I seek someone’s approval, help, support, and the like in an enterprise that would benefit me mainly or exclusively. This form of “love” is the subject of today’s first reading.
The passage we heard a couple of minutes ago is the middle part of a much longer argument made by the prophet Isiah, speaking in the name of God; the whole thing is read at Mass on the first Friday of Lent, after Ash Wednesday. The Israelites, forcibly exiled from their homeland to Babylon, clung to the hope of returning to it, based on various prophetic pronouncements. Because their defeat and subsequent exile had been commonly interpreted as God’s punishment for their continuous unfaithfulness to the divine covenant, repentance seemed to be the obvious way to speed up their recovery and return. So they did as tradition told them, only to have it questioned: “Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast?” (Isaiah 58:5) In return, the Israelites questioned God and his lack of response to their self-debasement: “Why have we fasted and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?” (Isaiah 58:3) The swift response was devastatingly clear: “on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.” (Isaiah 58:3-4). It was followed by clear instructions on how to genuinely repent, how to make “fast” effective; that’s what we heard in today’s first reading; a list of actions and attitudes towards others that would benefit them at the expense of those who “fast”. Overall, it was a call to move voluntarily from the position of power, mercilessly and exploitatively exercised, to genuinely humbling themselves by using it for the benefit of the powerless: “loose the bonds of wickedness, […] share your bread with the hungry,” and so on. These instructions were followed by a promise of God heeding and swiftly responding to their prayers: “Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ However, the foretold deliverance wasn’t a swift return to their homeland as the Israelites expected: “Then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.”
The promised outcome was an internal change of heart and, consequently, a new perspective from which one’s own life can be assessed. Much unhappiness in our society seems to come from an increasingly individualistic approach to life (greatly fed by social media algorithms), in which we use others to achieve our purposes, disregard them as irrelevant, or fight or trample on them if they seem to stand in our way. Such an attitude can deliver short-term desired results, but it leaves a trail of destruction in its wake and hardly ever ends well, as illustrated by the ongoing, well-publicised scandal affecting the powerful and influential. It can be no less true on our own, though very small scale. In today’s gospel, Jesus described his disciples as “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” It followed on the heels of the Beatitudes (as we heard them last Sunday) and was a call to put them into practice rather than admire their literary beauty only. Turning our attention towards others and helping them charitably, not begrudgingly, can truly transform our lives in many ways. Paradoxically, turning our attention from ourselves towards others can free us from unhealthy self-obsessions, such as a focus on looks, possessions, and ambitions. Maybe the world is going to hell in a handcart, driven by overblown egos, ambitions, and greed. But, as Christians, we can try to turn it around by going in the opposite direction, driven by genuine, charitable love. And you don’t have to wait till Saturday to show it. You can start today.
Image by beasternchen from Pixabay
