Homily for the Ash Wednesday Mass: “Relearning to keep our eyes fixed on the Kingdom”

Wednesday 18 February 2026
Ash Wednesday – Year A

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1^st reading: Joel 2, 12-18
Psalm: 50, 3-4, 5-6ab, 12-13, 14.17
2^rd Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2
Gospel: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

If there's one thing certain, it's that one day we will die… The liturgy of ashes is there to remind us of this. In the second creation narrative, in the Book of Genesis, the creation of man is described with a very surprising image. It is written that "God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." (Gen 2:7). It would have been more difficult to find a more apt image to describe the fragility of human life: humanity is described as dust held together by the breath of God. In the following chapter, after the Fall, the Lord God announces to humanity that, since humanity has severed itself from God's friendship through disobedience, it, being dust, must return to dust. The words that accompany this gesture of the ashes, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return," lead us to realize that one day we will die.

But the Church offers us a second message: “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” which is the preaching of Jesus and the first words of Jesus in the Gospel of Saint Mark: a call to conversion, a call to life (Mark 1:15). Certainly, we are mortal, but God does not abandon us to death; he has even prepared the Kingdom for us.

The Lenten season we are entering is the beginning of a time of re-creation of our whole being, a time when we will relearn to keep our eyes fixed on the Kingdom. And on this path, Saint Thérèse is a most precious help.

In a letter to Céline:

Our thoughts are not on the land of exile; our heart is where our treasure is, and our treasure is up there in the homeland where Jesus is preparing a place for us with him. (LT 127 of April 26, 1891).

In another letter, the following year, again to Céline: Jesus has united our hearts in such a wonderful way that what makes one beat also makes the other tremble… “Where is your treasure, there is

your heart. » Our treasure is Jesus, and our hearts are one in Him. (LT 134 of April 26, 1892).

And then towards the end of his life, in a letter to Abbé Bellière:

Ah! Your soul is too great to cling to any earthly consolation. It is in heaven that you must live beforehand, for it is said: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Your only treasure, is it not Jesus? Since He is in Heaven, that is where your heart must dwell. (LT 261 of July 26, 1897)

Yes, brothers and sisters, in this Lenten season we are entering, it is important for us, while remembering that we are poor mortals, to also remember that we are made for the Kingdom, that we are made for Heaven. And since we sometimes allow ourselves to be bogged down in the worries of daily life, in disordered attachments to the fleeting things of this world, it is a matter of relearning to love Heaven and to live our lives in accordance with Heaven.

To achieve this, we must wage this spiritual battle, where today's Gospel gives us three main areas of focus:

That of alms which opens our hearts to our neighbor, which opens our hearts to the poverty that surrounds us. Almsgiving which brings us into the joy of giving — remember this saying of Jesus, the only one quoted outside the Gospels, which is reported to us by Paul in the Acts of the Apostles: There is more happiness in giving than in receiving "(Acts 20:35). While everything is done to make us accumulate, and we think we will find our happiness there, almsgiving shows us another path, which is that of attention to our neighbor and the sharing of our goods.

La prayerPrayer, which is an opening to God, makes our hearts available to the Lord so that He may come and dwell within us. Prayer allows us to contemplate the Kingdom so that we may live our lives on this earth as citizens of the Kingdom. A few Sundays ago, we heard the Beatitudes (Mt 5:1-12); these Beatitudes are like the charter of the Kingdom.

And then the youngFasting purifies our desires, it deepens our longing for Heaven; fasting questions our relationship to creation, our way of using the goods of this world, of using food.

Pope Leo centered his Lenten message on three points: listening to the word of God, fasting, and living it in community.

And regarding fasting, he writes this:

While Lent is a time for listening, fasting is a concrete practice that prepares us to receive the Word of God. Abstinence from food is, in fact, a very ancient and irreplaceable ascetic exercise on the path of conversion. Precisely because it involves the body, it makes more evident what we truly hunger for and what we consider essential to our sustenance.

Fasting allows us not only to discipline desire, purify it and make it freer, but also to broaden it so that it turns towards God and is oriented towards doing good.

Fasting from food is essential because it touches on something fundamental. God did not leave breathing to our will. At times, we breathe consciously, but most of the time, we don't think about it, and our bodies breathe on their own. However, food, nourishment, He has given back to our freedom: we don't eat automatically as we breathe automatically. It is up to us to obtain our food, to prepare it, to share it. And so, the question of food is an eminently spiritual one. This is why we pray at the beginning of each meal: to become aware that it is a gift from God and that it is meant to be received from God's hands, and not just any way. Fasting, which is depriving oneself of food and thus symbolically experiencing death—we know very well that if we stop eating altogether, we will die—fasting has a spiritual dimension that invites us to reconsider our way of nourishing ourselves.

But the Pope also speaks of other fasts, including this one:

I would therefore like to invite you to a very concrete and often unpopular form of abstention: refraining from words that hurt and wound others. Let us begin by disarming language by giving up harsh words, hasty judgments, gossiping about those who are absent and cannot defend themselves, and slander. Let us strive instead to learn to measure our words and cultivate kindness: within families, among friends, in workplaces, on social media, in political debates, in the media, and in Christian communities. Then, many words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.

We enter into Lent, becoming aware that we are mortal, but that the Lord has prepared the Kingdom for us and that it is a matter of preparing ourselves to welcome this Kingdom in which we can already live by seeking to live the Gospel.

This Lenten season leads us to the great feast of Easter: we will solemnly celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus. And then, for a period even longer than Lent, the great Easter season of 50 days, we will rejoice in the life of the Kingdom, rejoice in Heaven, rejoice in the presence of the Risen One among us.

Finally, we will end this Easter season with the feast of Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of God's breath which aligns us with him so that we may love like him, and so that we may already live by the grace of Heaven.

« The Lord formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. »

This is the whole summary of this great journey that leads from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost. Today we remember that we are dust, we hear the call to conversion in order to find Christ, who died and rose again, and to allow ourselves to be profoundly renewed by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Blessed be God who, each year, takes care of us to constantly recreate us and allow us to advance from grace to grace towards the Kingdom.

Amen.