Fr William Fennelly OSB
This week sees us begin our annual observance of Lent. We may want to consider: ‘Am I willing to allow myself to be changed in this lenten season this year?’ The word ‘Lent’ apparently comes from the Old English word lencten meaning spring-time or ‘the lengthening of days’; it is a time of renewal, of coming back to life in nature; a time for the birth of young animals, and of looking forward. We usually think of lent as about self-discipline but it’s also about growth and these two elements remain in constant tension. In keeping with this season, our Lent can be an invitation to our own renewal in the ways available to us live with and for God; a time to recognise the love of God made visible to us in the creation all about us; it’s a time to notice those ways in which we fall short of the desires that God has for each one of us
and for our world, and to pray for the gift, the grace, to live more fully according to God’s ways.
We are familiar with ‘giving up for Lent’: perhaps this year our ‘giving up’ may be of those things in our lives that are getting in the way of valuing what God has given us, perhaps this year it’s a question of allowing God to deepen God’s life in us. It may help to take time, it may take patience to notice and to speak with our Lord, to pray about what lent means for me, or maybe just be quiet and be with for a bit.
The readings today speak about our choice to listen to the voice of God or to be tempted by evil: Adam and Eve are seen to succumb to the tempting voice, but in the gospel Jesus holds fast in his rejection of temptation. The Psalm today is a prayer of someone who knows their own sinfulness, but that person also knows that God’s love and mercy are more powerful than their weakness. St Paul celebrates the freedom
from sin that Jesus brings us. Jesus’s gift of love overcomes our sin and brings us to life.
Through our Lent, we ask for the grace to become more and more aware of God’s compassion and love for us, ready to journey with Jesus to his death on the cross and to celebrate his resurrection. The first temptation in the gospel temptation for food (like the two temptations that follow it) food does not entice Jesus to do evil things. In the first temptation the Seducer wished to induce the Saviour, instead of trusting in God and patiently enduring hunger, to create bread by His own power, against His Father’s will. He sought, therefore, to make our Lord sin by sensuality and an unlawful desire for food, or in other words by gluttony. All three temptations rather encourage him to do good things, but for the wrong reasons or at the wrong time. Jesus’s answer here is rooted in Scripture: he quotes from Deuteronomy (8: 3; 6: 16; and 6: 13), one of the great law books of the Old Testament. Jesus is not denying the importance of food, but stresses that there is another larger dimension to life.
For the second temptation, the scene is moved to Jerusalem, the Holy City, where Satan invites Jesus to give a convincing sign of his miraculous powers. This time the devil himself uses scripture, quoting Psalm 90 (91): 11–12. The Seducer tried to awaken a spiritual pride in Jesus, saying: “Throw yourself down; God will help you and see that no evil befalls you!” The cunning seducer wished by this clever ruse to
change a humble and submissive confidence in God’s mercy into a proud presumption. The reply Jesus gives, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’, foreshadows the episode where the Pharisees and the Sadducees will test Jesus by asking him to give them a sign (Matthew 16: 1–4). He resists the temptation to show his power for vain effect.
In the third temptation Jesus is brought up a mountain with a view of all the kingdoms of the world, of course no mountain exists which allows you to see all the kingdoms of the world. There may also be a parallel with Moses standing at the top of Mount Nebo (Deuteronomy 34: 1–3). Jesus doesn’t give into the threat of gaining political power over others. Matthew had an ecclesial purpose in the telling of these
temptations. He tries to explain to the first-century Church the kind of Messiah that Jesus was. By implication, he also showed the kind of society the Church should be, and how it should overcome its own temptations to temporal, political or spiritual power instead of focussing on love of God and the other.
Part of what all these battles against temptations reveal is that one of the main places we can meet God in the very weaknesses that seem to shut us into ourselves and shut us off from each other and from God. Just as our world seems to become ever more emancipated from the presence of God who might judge us paradoxically Pope Francis recently said that the fragility of each one of us, is a theological place of
encounter with the Lord,” Powerlessness, the state of being shipwrecked, is an experience we all share anyway, if we are sincere, but Bill Wilson (1895–1971), co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, discovered we are not very good at that either. He called it “denial.” It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our wounds are buried in the unconscious. So, it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes. It’s as if there is another exile—a "second space"—deeper and more enduring than his
geographic one. We could call this the banished metaphysical dimension in our culture, with its inability to see beyond the little “here” and the little “now.”
Volodymyr Zelensky: yesterday said that “Two things I had luck with – my country and my family. I am immensely thankful to my wife. I love my parents and my children whom I sadly never see now…”. But yep” he said “Ukraine, my country, wins because of two things. One is courage. The other is love”. Courage to understand and stick at the task and love to make sure that it matters at the heart of us and to
those who matter most to us.