Year C / Lent / Week 1 / Sunday
Readings: Deuteronomy 26.4-10 / Psalm 90-.1-2, 1-11, 12-13, 14-15 / Romans 10.8-13 / Luke 4.1-13
“The Lord brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm…He brought us here and gave us this land…where milk and honey flowed.”
Here is Moses speaking to his fellow Israelites. He reminds them of God’s faithfulness as they journeyed from being slaves under the Egyptians to God’s freed and chosen. It is good we hear this assurance for here we are, about to go further on in our Lenten journey.
To do this, we need an effective roadmap to walk with Jesus to the Cross and into his Resurrection that is God’s Easter promise for you and me. We need this roadmap because Lent – if we seriously let its grace work – will draw us into the wilderness within. Into that space of our failures and regrets, our barrenness and desolation. That space wherein we’ll honestly know how lonely and empty we are. That space of spiritual dryness. One we create and perpetuate with our bad habits, poor choices and sinful living.
This roadmap will guide us through the wilderness within where God will meet us in our temptations and sinfulness. There, God will help crack open our hearts for conversion, that grace Lent offers us.
Ours readings today offer such a roadmap. Let’s us consider it and how it will enable us to navigate our way through Lent to Easter, through the darkness of sinfulness to the light of conversion. Three parts make up this roadmap.
First, God’s faithfulness. Today we hear Moses speaking to his own people of God’s fidelity. It is strong and constant for God has always walked with them throughout their history. Moses calls them to pause and reflect upon how God has carried them through adversity, sheltered them from danger, and raised them to new life.
Lent also calls us to do the same – to pause and reflect on God’s presence in our lives. I wonder if doing this enable us to better understand that God’s faithfulness is the sure foundation for us to journey through Lent. That we are not going through Lent alone, on our own, but that God is with us. Doing this will help us to value how faithful God has been in the rush of our everyday life, the burdens we carried, the regrets we had and the sinfulness we struggled with. When we recognise God’s faithfulness, we might we begin Lent differently – not beating ourselves up as are bad and unworthy but that God is with us, even in our sinfulness, because we are His own.
St Mark tells us Jesus went into the wilderness after God said: “You are my beloved with whom I am well pleased.” We too are God’s beloved. Let’s not just settle into Lent with this same truth; let’s let our belovedness draw us into God who converts us.
Second, God’s trustworthiness. The responsorial psalm proclaims this message. We can indeed turn to God for his help. Yes, His angels will protect us. Yes, His love is upon us. Yes, He himself will rescue and protect us. Indeed, when we cry out, He says. “I am with you.”
Isn’t this assurance we need to return to God in Lent? On Ash Wednesday, God, speaking through the Prophet Joel, called out to us, “Come back to me with all your heart.” We all to but don’t we fear going into the wilderness of our lives and there, see how disfigured we are because of sin? Yet God invites us to trust his mercy that forgives. Even more, to trust his saving love that will lead us through the wilderness to safety, even more, to conversion this Lent, if we choose it.
Third, God’s Word is our life. In our second reading, St Paul focuses us on the Word of God. He teaches, “The Word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.” We hear this echoed in the Gospel Acclamation: “One does not live on bread alone, but on every Word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” Truly the Word of God, Jesus himself, gives us life. In Lent, we’re to focus on Jesus, God’s Word made flesh because shows us how we pray, fast and give alms. Will we make time to focus on Him who is proclaimed in the Scriptures and speaks in our hearts, and so, contemplate God’s love and His will in our lives?
God is faithful. God is trustworthy. God’s Word is our life. These make up the roadmap for our Lenten journey. They point us to Jesus, whose very name means, “God saves.” He comes to do battle with all that continues to enslave us: the power of sin, the power of Satan and the power of death itself. He can do battle because of how God is in his life – faithful, trustworthy and life-giving.
In the wilderness, the three temptations that Jesus battles with the devil are the same temptations to which every human heart — yours and mine too — is vulnerable.
“Turn these stones into bread” is the temptation to live depending on material things as the only source of life. “I shall give you all this power and glory” is the temptation to amass reputation and wealth as false gods. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down” is the very subtle temptation to presume no responsibility for our actions, since “God will take care of everything.”
Through these, the devil is tempting the man Jesus to put aside his humanity and act like God. Jesus resists by fully embracing his humanity and depending on God alone. He shows us that there is no other way to make our Lenten journey than to be be ourselves, human, vulnerable, and ever dependent on God.
So let us bring our hearts and lives before God this Lent, especially those places within us that are still held captive to sin. Let us do this by trusting that Jesus remains the God who saves us, who continues to do battle on our behalf so that when Easter comes we will no longer be slaves to sin but set free for the fullness of life God.
Now isn’t this good news to carry on our Lenten journey?
Preached at the Church of the Sacred Heart
Photo: www.jewishpolicycenter.org
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