Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent, C

The devil tempts Jesus three times with the little word, "If." "If you are" is supposed to cause Jesus to doubt that he is the Son of God and feel the need to prove it.

I am off this weekend. Next Sunday I will have Mass @ St. Isidore at 7:30/9:30 am and St. Andrew @ 5 pm.

frjoedailey@gmail.com

Transcript

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke. 

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days and when they were over, he was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live on bread alone.'" Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. 

The devil said to him, "I shall give to you all this power and glory, for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours if you worship me." Jesus said to him in reply, "It is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve.'" 

Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you to guard you, and with their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus said to him in reply, "It also says, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 

When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time. 

The Gospel of the Lord.

The night before the Israelites left Egypt, they were instructed to take the blood of the lamb, and to spread it on the lintel and the two doorposts of their houses. The blood symbolized their own death. They were leaving behind their old identity as slaves in Egypt. The Israelites walked into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. Their journey on the dry ground mirrors their journey through the wilderness, caught between two identities, the slaves they used to be and the people they are becoming. 

In the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 26, verse 1, the Israelites are standing at the threshold of the promise on the banks of the Jordan River. Moses reassures his listeners with a little word, "When." "When you have come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you." "When" is the trust that eventually creation will be complete. There will be a time when we will finally enter the promised land. There will be a time when all people and all creation live as one in abundance and bounty. 

The devil tempts Jesus three times with the little word, "If." "If you are" is supposed to cause Jesus to doubt that he is the Son of God and feel the need to prove it. "If" is the trigger for me to foreclose, to grasp my identity before time, to settle for a fake identity, rather than to wait for the identity that is mine already, but not available to be grasped. 

To live by "if" is to reject the promise of "when" and to choose to manage things ourselves. "If" is the pretense that we somehow are in charge and able to manage our own destiny. The decision not to trust "when" to decide that "when" cannot happen is a decision not to trust God. 

Jesus knew that without the grace of God there is nothing but futility. The agony is that to embrace "when" means to let go of our illusions of safety. The choice Jesus makes is living in the promise of the "when" of the promised land, not "if" but "when." 

The spiritual writer Nora Gallagher once asked a therapist how to stop projecting onto others her own fears and weakness, that is, how to love. Her therapist responded, "You must enlarge your capacity to suffer. The work of Lent is to rewrite the story by enlarging our capacity to take in the parts that we always want to leave out." 

Andrew Pryor suggests that Jesus is trapped, like all of us, between the way of God and the way of Rome, Babylon, and Egypt. These empires, he writes, are metaphors for the path taken by humans determined to sort out and manage their own salvation. If Jesus rejects Babylon and rejects the devil, his only other option is to suffer. This is because if we will not enlarge our capacity to suffer, then we will inevitably project our suffering upon others. 

In the end, Pryor writes, "That's all Babylon and Rome are. For all their grandeur and power, they are, finally, a refusal to suffer. They try to avoid the suffering that is unavoidable if we are to live." As Parker Palmer reminds us, "A heart that is broken open enters into the largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one's own and the world's pain and joy." 

Suffering, like love, shatters the illusion of self-mastery. Because Jesus can suffer the distress of his own complete dependence upon God, he is capable of endless compassion. "The whole world," Carl Jung said, "is God's suffering." 

On Ash Wednesday, we heard the prophet's call to begin the Lenten journey. "Even now," says the Lord, "return to me with all your heart. There is no part of our hearts that God does not welcome." As the psalmist assures us, "A contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn." 

I listened to a talk this week by David Brooks. At the end of his talk, Brooks quotes James Baldwin, the American activist and writer who lived most of his life in exile from the United States. Baldwin chose to live in hope rather than bitterness. "There doesn't seem to be all that much love in the world, but there is enough," Baldwin wrote. "The world is held together by the love and the passion of a very few people. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that monster. You could be that saint. You have to decide who you're going to be."