FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
18 FEBRUARY 2018
In
the passage preceding today’s Gospel, Jesus emerges from the waters of the
Jordan, and a voice is heard from the heavens:
“you are my beloved Son. On you
my favor rests.” Then, the Spirit drives
Jesus out into the desert. The desert is
that barren wilderness home to wild beasts.
The desert is that place where the ancestors of Jesus had followed Moses
for forty years to pass from slavery to freedom. For them, the desert was a place of encounter
with God, who formed the Covenant with them.
But the desert was also a place of testing, and they had flunked the
test many times, not trusting in God and his promises. It was through the desert that the Prophet
Elijah traveled for forty days to renew the Covenant that had been abandoned.
Saint Mark tells
us very little about the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. He only says that Satan tempted him. We can use our imaginations about the
specific ways in which Satan tempted him.
We can be sure that he tested him to see if he really acts as God’s
beloved Son, the Messiah who will conquer the power of Satan not by force or
power, but by entering into death.
Because he is completely alone in the desert, no one is watching. With no one watching, he could have taken
care of his comfort with his divine powers.
But, he chose to remain faithful to his identity and to his mission by
trusting the will of his Father.
The Spirit
has also driven us into the desert of Lent.
In this desert, we too are tested.
Are we faithful followers of Jesus Christ or not? How do we behave when no one else is
watching? Do we display signs of God’s
love that make the Kingdom of God a little more evident in our world? Pope Francis lists a number of attitudes that
keep us from manifesting the Kingdom more clearly: selfishness and spiritual sloth, sterile
pessimism, the temptation to self-absorption, constant warring among ourselves,
and the worldly mentality that makes us concerned only for appearances, and
thus lessens our missionary zeal.
When we
embrace acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving in this desert, we are making a
commitment to free ourselves from these kinds of attitudes. If we are serious, then we can expect a
battle with Satan. The devil, who is the
father of lies and prince of darkness, wants us to be selfish and lazy. He wants us to be pessimistic and absorbed with
ourselves. He loves it when we fight
with each other and worry only about our appearance. That is why the focus of
Lent is so clearly on baptism, on being incorporated into the Body of Christ. We anoint those preparing for Baptism with
the Oil of the Catechumens every week. We
will use the readings from Cycle A for the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays of
Lent, as we pray the Scrutinies over our Elect.
Those Rites for the Elect reveal the ways in which we have not been living
our Baptismal promises and have turned away from an authentic encounter with
Jesus Christ.
In his
letter, Saint Peter reminds us of the centrality of Baptism in this Season of
Lent. He reminds us that Baptism is not
a removal of dirt, but a complete washing away of sin, just as the flood washed
away the disintegrating effects of sin from the earth. Those who will be baptized at the Easter
Vigil will renounce Satan and all his empty promises. They will emerge from the Baptismal Font
completely one with Jesus Christ, with their sins washed away. Then the rest of us, who have been baptized,
will renew our Baptismal Promises.
Just as no
one knew what Jesus was doing in the desert, no one really knows what each of
us is doing with our own Lenten exercises.
We can freely choose to use the Lenten disciplines to practice dying to
our own concerns and comforts, trusting that we will share in the transforming
life of Jesus Christ. The Kingdom of God
is definitely in our midst. Lent opens
our eyes to see how we have obscured that Kingdom. Lent prepares us to renew our trust at Easter.
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