Sunday 13 March 2011

Lent I 2011

Homily for Lent I 13 March 2011

Today’s Gospel is the well known story of Jesus being tempted in the desert in the period of forty days fasting and prayer during which he prepared himself for his public ministry. This event in Our Lord’s life is recorded in Mark – very briefly, just two verses- and in Luke, but Matthew describes it in his own special way, as we shall see. You remember that Matthew is writing his Gospel principally for Jewish Christians and uses many references and allusions to place Our Lord’s life and mission in the context of the Old Testament, often comparing Jesus to a second Moses, a second lawgiver and deliverer of his people, and so on. He expects his audience to pick up on all sorts of links to Genesis, to the creation of the world, so that we can understand that Jesus is bringing in a new creation, a new way of being human, a new Adam- as Newman’s hymn has it “a second Adam to the fight and to the victory came”. And in the first centuries of the Church the patristic writers knew this very well, as the mediaeval Gloss comments “that which Luke states seems more in accord with the facts; Matthew relates the temptations according to what was done to Adam”.
Let us see what this means. St Gregory the Great, who was pope at the turn of the seventh century, explains that the temptations of Jesus are an exact parallel to the temptation of Adam and Eve: it all begins with greed, with our carnal appetites, so the Devil begins with fruit in the garden of Eden, and here he starts with bread –“tell these stones to turn into loaves”; it goes on to pride, to taking God’s rightful place for ourselves- so the Tempter tells Eve that if she yields to temptation “you will be like gods” and tells Jesus that if he throws himself off the roof of the Temple, his divinity will be proved because God “will put you in his angels’ charge”; and then we have the appeal of the Devil to ambition, telling Adam and Eve that they “will know good and evil” for themselves, and offering Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour”. This threefold series of temptation is also an echo of the teachings of the rabbis, that looks back to Deuteronomy, where we shall see Our Lord finds the texts he quotes to answer the Devil, it is all in chapters 6-8. Chapter 6 verses iv-v contain the great Jewish statement of belief in the One God, that is known by its first word in Hebrew as the “Sh’ma”. This is the prayer that to this day Jewish people have on a little scroll in a container on the doorpost of their front doors to kiss as they come and go. It says: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”. Your heart, your soul, your might- and these correspond exactly to the three temptations of Jesus. For the early rabbis, these were the ways of sinning against this one great statement of belief. Heart- the impulses within us to good or evil; soul- life, or the voluntary giving up of life in martyrdom; might- wealth and property. In other words, the great temptation we all face is not to love God with a unified heart, to keep something back, and not to put our life or our livelihood on the line. Basically, what we see here, as always with the Devil and his tricks, is the temptation to take the easy way out, to fake it- faking is what the Devil likes us to do, he is after all known as the Father of Lies, whereas of course we are followers of the One who said “I am the Truth”, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. Satan says to Jesus, don’t go without anything, just magic up a meal from these stones, no one will know; do something spectacular that will be death-defying, like jumping off a building, but I’ll fix it so you don’t break your neck and die; and you want to inaugurate a kingdom, I’ll fix that too- you can have all the power you want, just go along with me from now on. Of course, Jesus was operating on a far different level from all this. He will indeed create food from an unlikely source, giving his followers through the centuries their spiritual food from the bread that becomes his Body at every mass; he will indeed perform a death-defying act, by his death on the Cross and his rising again, and he will indeed inaugurate a kingdom, a kingdom “not of this world”, the reign of peace and concord that we are all as Christians engaged in bringing into being in our daily lives.
There are important lessons for us here. The first is, that, as the patristic writers liked to point out, no one is so holy that they are safe from temptation- look, even Our Lord himself went through it. But at least that means he understands our temptations and deals kindly with us when we fall. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are”. (Heb 5 xv) The second is, that nowhere is so holy that we are safe from the Devil when we are there- St Rémi, bishop of Reims in the seventh century, says that the second temptation took place in the Temple to show us “that the Devil lies in wait for the faithful even in holy places”. Anyone who has been in a monastery or on a pilgrimage, or in any gathering of clergy, will know the truth of that. Ste Thérèse on her trip to Rome saw that very clearly. And the third and most important, is that we see how to combat temptation- how does Our Lord do it? He does it by using the Scriptures, by quoting the Bible at the Devil. He quotes from these chapters of Deuteronomy that we have mentioned earlier, that he obviously knows intimately, he has an answer for every cunning and cleverly worded suggestion that the Devil makes. Dear friends, we have begun our Lent, which is when we attempt in however small a way to go into the desert, that is to say, to put a bit of distance between ourselves and the normal routines of our daily lives- taking more time to say our prayers or to come to mass or the stations, giving up some small pleasures in food and drink, thinking more about those with needs greater than our own. Once we are in the desert, we must expect a visit from Satan. In fact, if he doesn’t come, that will be a very bad sign, it will mean he doesn’t think we are enough of a Christian to bother about! We must prepare ourselves for our visitor, the visitor from Hell, and I cannot think of a better way to be prepared than by our prayerful reflection every day on the words of Scripture, where God speaks to us if we will hear him. Let us make Our Lord’s words our own-“You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone”, and in this single-mindedness let us go forward into the desert of Lent, and may the angels come to us and look after us. Dear Jesus, never did we mean these words more: lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil! Amen.