The First Sunday in Lent

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

After his baptism, Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit and tempted by the devil. As usual, it is important to see how the authors of the Gospels are drawing on Israel’s holy writings to show how the events described in them were a shadow of the reality of Jesus. Just as the Israelites, who as a nation where called “God’s firstborn Son,” were liberated from slavery in Eygpt, crossing the Red Sea, so Jesus is baptised through the waters in the Jordan to be identified as the Son of God.

Just as, after crossing the waters Moses fasted for 40 days before receiving the 10 Commandments, so Jesus fasts for 40 days in the wilderness after his baptism, before he then starts to do what the 10 Commandments were pointing towards, bringing God’s kingdom on earth.

There is lots more to say about the context of these passages which move from baptism through tempation to covenant renewal, and there’s lots to say about the temptations themselves - I’m having to hold myself back a horrible amount - but I want to focus on 1 thing: God does not override our hearts.

The tempation I want to highlight is the temptation to turn stone into bread. After fasting for forty days Moses received the law. After fasting for forty days, rather than receiving a law, Jesus is dared to turn stone into bread. How are these linked? One of the great themes of the Jewish scriptures is how God can get Isreal to be a faithful covenant people, a kingdom of priests on earth. God gives them the law but the great problem is that the hearts of the people are like stone and the gift of the law is abused by its users and turned into an oppresive system.

How can God turn our stoney hearts into hearts which are a source of life for others? After forty days Jesus is dared to turn the stone into bread by miracle, so that the stone would cease to be stone. But he refuses. Just so, even though God desperately wants our hearts to learn how to love much quicker than they currently are, God doesn’t override our hearts. If God did simply override them so that we followed the law like automatons, even the law of love, we would no longer be ourselves and that is not what God wants. No, Jesus knows, or perhaps is working out during this testing he is receiving, that God wants us to open ourselves up to being changed and that his sacrificial love for us on the Cross is needed for our hearts to be changed.

That is one of the ways of describing the purpose of coming to Mass and participating in a sacramental life. God won’t just zap and override a heart which deep down really doesn’t want to learn how to love in a complicated world. But if a heart really does want to know how to love, God will teach it to mourn the grief of the world, to hunger for justice, and to seek peace. And, as Fr Neil always says, God will relentlessly give us second chances to learn. This teaching can happen in all sorts of ways but a good way for it to happen is in the Mass where, if we come with contrite hearts, we can learn all sorts of things about love and sacrifice.

One thing I like to do at the Mass to open my heart to this teaching, is to close my eyes as Fr Neil says the words, “Take, eat, this is my body” and “Drink this, all of you; this is my blood.” And as I close my eyes, I like to imagine that it’s Jesus saying those words to us. I then open my eyes as the bread or the wine is lifted up and the sanctus bell is rung along with the incense and then afterwards I try to keep the image of the raised bread or wine in my mind, along with those words of Jesus. I’d be interested in hearing about other ways you might open yourselves to receive the message of Jesus in the Mass.

To summarise what I’ve said, in reading that Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by the devil, it is important to remember that one of the moments in Israel’s story it points back to is Moses and his forty day fast in the wilderness before receiving the law. But it is also a pointing forward to the Cross, which is itself the fullness of the Word of God become flesh. It is the Word of the Cross, its meaning for us, which echoes and refracts throughout all history and throughout the Church’s sacred writings. And it is the Word of the Cross through which our hearts are learning how to love. To draw from one of the other 3 temptations, where else is Jesus tempted more to “cast himself down from a high place” into the hands of his father’s angels than on the pinnacle of the Cross?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.