They turned their backs, not their faces, to me and walked in the hardness of their hearts. The seventh chapter of the Book of the prophet Jeremiah from which today’s first reading is taken concerns Jeremiah’s oracle on the abuses in worship. The Lord was not pleased with the worship undertaken by the community because it lacked sincerity. For although engaging in the act of worship was meant to indicate that the people were close to the Lord, in reality, this was not the case. The community, led by its leaders, had strayed from the path the Lord had set for it. The community’s worship was a mere lip service that was not reflected in the actions of the people. 
In the passage we have read today, Jeremiah addresses the reason for God’s displeasure with the community’s worship. The covenant(s) that bound them to the Lord contained dictates on how they were to conduct themselves before God: they were to remain faithful to God’s commands. The Lord God had sworn to remain faithful and to journey with the people even as he urged them to do their part by walking in the right path. The Lord God’s only desire was to journey with the community. It is to this end that the Lord had been sending his messengers the prophets to remind the people of their obligation to the terms of the covenant. Unfortunately, as the Lord lamented through Jeremiah, these efforts by the Lord God had been thwarted by the stubbornness of the people. Not only did the people harden their hearts, they also turned their backs on the Lord their God!
The Lord God desires that we walk with him, that is, that we remain in the life-giving relationship with him. It is a relationship that is marked by some kind of “equality” in the sense that we have become partners with the Lord God in the covenant. Partnership endures as long as both parties remain together. However, when one party walks away from the covenant, the covenant ceases to be and the terms that had bound the two partners become obsolete. Walking away from the other equals turning one’s back on him/her. When, therefore, the community turned its back on God, it basically walked away from God. The community’s act of turning her back and walking away from God meant that the people could no longer hear and carry out the commands of the Lord. 
The sacred period of Lent is all about reversing our act of walking away from the Lord by making a return to the Lord. We cannot make a return to the Lord unless we make an about turn so that we can once again look God in the face. We make an about turn so that we can walk towards God and listen to God. The sacred time of Lent is an opportunity to turn our faces to God so that we can read God’s lips and understand the words of life pronounced by the mouth of the Lord. Lent calls us to turn our faces, not our backs, to God so that we can once again be partners with God in the covenant.