Enter into Passiontide with Daily Meditations
We need to end Lent strong!
The forty days of Lent enter into Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the desert. After his Baptism, the Spirit drove him into the wilderness to fast, pray, and do battle with the enemy. Lent imitates these days of spiritual combat, finding strength in Christ’s own triumph as the impetus to deeper conversion. We pray to put God first, fast to grow in hunger for the needs of the spirit, and give alms to others to love as God does.
Passiontide gives us a new focus for the final stretch of Lent. We shift attention from the desert to Calvary as the completion of the combat that Christ began there. On the Cross, he works his definitive triumph over evil and sin. The Cross offers us an invitation to walk the path to Calvary with Jesus. As he sets out to Jerusalem for his Passion, Jesus tells us, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). We can follow Jesus into his perfect offering to the Father out of love and obedience, an offering that overcomes our sin and disobedience, bringing us into his own freedom.
Passiontide traditionally begins two Sundays before Easter, marking the last two weeks of Lent. To honor this time, Exodus is switching over to the Gospel of Matthew for the daily reflections of Exodus 90 and Lent, walking each step of the way with Jesus to Jerusalem and into his Passion. In addition, we will offer a retreat based on St. Alphonsus Liguori’s meditations on the Stations of the Cross. The retreat follows the character of Rob and his fraternity as they come to a monastery for reflections from the monk, Fr. Benedict. The daily reflections and the retreat together will provide a concrete way to meditate on the Passion for each of the final days of Lent.
End Lent strong with Exodus this year. If we enter into Jesus’s Passion and Death in prayer, we will be ready to celebrate his Resurrection with a renewed heart. As St. Paul says, “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Romans 6:8). Passiontide invites us into his death, dying to sin and the bondage of this world, so that we can truly live as sons of the Resurrection.
