Year C
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This Sunday’s reading from Deuteronomy has a special resonance for me which I dare to mention in this reflection. It was during my first year at seminary. It was half-term, and I took my mother to Mass. Today’s readings are the ones we heard and two days later she died.
My mother had Jewish ancestry, as of course do I, and so the Deuteronomic credal statement, beginning with “My father was a wandering Aramaean” has particular significance for me, especially as we both heard it two days before her death.
What has this to do with preaching? Implicit in the Deuteronomic statement is the people of Israel’s experience of wandering in the wilderness; the ‘wilderness’ of Egyptian slavery, the 40-year wilderness in the desert and the wilderness of the exile, and the many personal wildernesses that continue to inflict the people of Israel. And it was in their wilderness that the people of Israel were tested. It was their faith and trust in the presence and action of God that was tested and they continually failed.
Lent is a time to face up to the same kind of testing as we journey through our own personal and communal wildernesses. Like Israel, the ‘testing’ will offer an opportunity to turn away from what inhibits our trust and hope and to rely entirely on the goodness of God. When we fail to turn away from that tendency to ‘do it our way’ instead of allowing the power of God to work in our lives, we are moving in the direction of sin. I think it was St. Augustine of Hippo who said that God wants to come close, but we are the ones who prevent him.
St. Luke takes us today into the wilderness of Judea where we meet Jesus undergoing the same ‘testing’ that his own people had experienced for centuries and for centuries failed. Jesus faces the ‘devil’ who stands for that tendency within each of us to be complicit in the power of evil. And let’s be clear, that tendency is within each of us, whether lay or ordained, bishop or pope.
It’s important to look closely at each ‘test’ or ‘temptation’ with which the ‘devil’ confronts Jesus.
The first is to turn stones into loaves of bread. Given Jesus’s probable hunger in the wilderness, this is not an unreasonable request. For most of us it would not have been wrong to accede to the request even if we had the power. Jesus’s response, quoting Deuteronomy 8.3, “one does not live on bread alone” indicates his trust in God and his commitment to give his life for others. As St. Paul says in Romans 15.3: “Christ did not please himself”.
The second temptation invites Jesus to worship the ‘devil’ and all political power and authority would be his. Again, the temptation to receive all authority is not unreasonable given that Jesus is the ‘Son of the Most High’, as Gabriel put it, and the Messiah. Do we not honour him as Christ the King? But the condition was wrong, and Jesus could not accept. Yes, all power and authority would be his but not through the methods and strategies used by the political leaders of Jesus’s day and our own day, namely military might and the power of the strongest. The only way to that authority was through hope in God and through the method revealed on the Cross and in the words of Jesus that he came “not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many”. (Mark 10.45).
The final temptation again, in my view, is not unreasonable. But for Jesus of course it is, because everything he has is gift from his Father. To jump from the pinnacle of the Temple would be to test God, which his people of Israel had done for so long and failed in their relationship with God.
The testing for Jesus is not over and the devil would return to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In terms of our own experience, two things strike me. The first is that we can become experts in sin and which ones we commit. Some are clear and we know where we are, thanks to the clarity of our tradition. These would include murder, adultery, illicit sexual experience and unchastity and the list is endless. But our expertise can be deceptive. Jesus’s testing reveals that the possibility of sin can lurk where it is not immediately obvious. Perhaps in the areas of food consumption, power and the desire for reputation and the respect of others at the expense of love, faith and hope.
The other thing that strikes me is that testing or temptation can so often be recognised in the thoughts, words and actions that emerge from the desire to ‘do it my way’ at the expense of others.
I’ll leave it there with two questions:
1. Is Lent a time to pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit that I may recognise the times I refuse to trust in the goodness of God and his providence, especially in the thoughts, attitudes and actions I take for granted and are firmly part of the culture in which I live?
2. The Jubilee Year invites us to be Pilgrims of Hope. What are the moments and experiences in my life when hope invites me to ‘put out into the deep’ with complete trust in God’s love?
First Sunday of Lent
CCC 394, 538-540, 2119: the temptation of Jesus
CCC 2846-2849: "Lead us not into temptation"
CCC 1505: Christ frees from evil
CCC 142-143, 309: faith as submission to God, response to God, answer to evil
CCC 59-63: God forms his priestly people through Abraham and the Exodus
Traditionally, the Mass of the First Sunday of Lent was begun with a procession chanting the Litany of the Saints, to invoke their intercession for the keeping of Lent.
The Collect for this First Sunday of Lent speaks of Lent as a sacramentum – a word of many meanings which our English translation here renders as ‘observance.’
The proper Preface of today’s Mass speaks of the Lord’s fasting and temptation (NB the Latin has ‘forty days’ and not ‘forty long days’) as a sort of template for our Lenten penitential observance. By its reference to the ‘ancient serpent’ it reminds us that the ‘tempter’ of Jesus is none other than the serpent of Genesis 3. Its final reference to the Paschal Mystery and the ‘eternal paschal feast’ remind us that Lent only has meaning in relation to Easter, as a preparation for that greatest of Christian festivals and, eschatologically, for eternal life.
In the General Intercessions, a bidding might be added such as this: “For the gift of discernment, to recognise and name what is evil and to acclaim and encourage what is good, let us pray to the Lord.”
The Prayer after Communion is taken from a Preface text which appeared in ancient Gallican sources, and again in the 18th century French missals as a Preface for Lent.
The Missal provides a ‘Prayer over the People’ which may be said throughout Lent before the final Blessing.
Note: These hymns have been chosen from different sources.
Do not be afraid (CFE147, L972, LHON240)
You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord (On eagle's wings) (CFE832, L952, LHON759)
Guide me, O thou great Redeemer (CFE233, L960, LHON307, TCH221)
Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us (CFE351, L315, LHON416, TCH235)
Forty days and forty nights (CFE185, L206, LHON264, TCH50)
Key
CFE - Celebration Hymnal for Everyone
L – Laudate
LHON – Liturgical Hymns Old and New (Mayhew, 1999)
TCH – The Catholic Hymnbook (Gracewing)
Do you have questions about the liturgy and how we are called to participate in it? Explore how the Church councils, saints, and popes have answered this key question and many more.
Every movement of the Mass is rich in meaning but we can become over-familiar with it. Rediscover the Mass and explore how it relates to the Exodus story, where many of its rituals come from, and how it makes Jesus present to us today.
