Ps 51:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 17
Rom 5:12-19
Mt 4:1-11
Last week, I preached about the Stewardship of Time and I felt that the timing of the Stewardship of Time could not be better. Because the Season of Lent is here, we received our ashes and the time is now – if you haven’t already – to really put yourself into the desert with our Lord. Every first Sunday of Lent begins with Jesus’ temptation in the desert. The Church in her wisdom has given us these readings to give us the encouragement and inspiration to start us off on the right foot in the desert and to make it a good Lent.
Our Lord is tempted in the desert three times with three different things. What is the first one? Food - “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” After 40 days and nights in the desert, our Lord was hungry. Satan is no slouch when it comes to temptation; and he knows that if there’s a weakness with someone who has been fasting for 40 days and nights, the first place to attack would be the stomach. What is the second temptation? At the top of the Temple in Holy City Jerusalem, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you / and with their hands they will support you/ lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Our Lord is already weak in the body, now the Devil is tempting His faith – to test God with prayer. And finally, what is third temptation? The Devil taking Him to a high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, "All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.” Finally, an appeal to power and authority – a test and temptation of the mind – Satan has pulled out all the stops to try to make our Lord fall – body, spirit, and mind: the flesh, the faith, and the power. Doesn’t this sound a bit familiar? Perhaps maybe… what we are supposed to be doing for Lent?
I said it last week and again on Ash Wednesday: PRAYER, FASTING, AND ALMSGIVING are our Lenten disciplines. Fasting involves the body – giving up the things that are non-essential in life, paring back the clutter of our lives so that we can start to hunger and thirst for Him – not only physically, but most especially spiritually. How can we keep our Faith strong? How is our faith strengthened? Through PRAYER – time spent in prayer: be it devotions, silence and meditation, spiritual reading and contemplation. Specific time, dedicated time, consecrated time to God in addition to what you are already doing and supposed to be doing. Be specific and purposeful in your prayer and make it your time. Finally, as your relationship with God grows, you will be called to put your faith into action, which brings us to our third discipline of Lent: Almsgiving. Money is always a safe bet, but not always the best bet – everyone is blessed differently to give differently, but time spent in kindness to others, compassion for others, and acting justly and virtuously is always beneficial. It is up to your conscience to discern what your best spiritual practices are, but they should ultimately all be focused on one thing: growing in Holiness.
There should be some pain and suffering during Lent. How many of you really fasted and abstained on Ash Wednesday and then abstained on Friday? How many of you all did it for the first time? If you aren’t used to it, it most certainly will be a very painful experience. I compare it to the first day at the gym after the first workout. You go in all excited – I got my gym shorts, I got my Under Armor shirt, my brand new running shoes, my gloves, BPA-free water bottle, and protein shake ready to go!!! You walk-in, and you start working out, you’re feeling good, feel like you got a good sweat going, look at the time – it’s only be two minutes in to a 1 hour workout. At the end of it, you are a Complete. Mess. Yeah, that’s our spiritual lives too – we’re gonna be sore, we’re gonna look all disheveled and need a lot of icy-hot and Advil. But we are working out; we are exercising our Souls – our Spiritual Life. The rest of the year we’ve let it just sit idly, haven’t engaged it and now it looks like an obese couch potato.
This is a perennial problem ever since the Garden of Eden – spiritual weakness and concupiscence. The Good News is that we have the grace of God on our side. And what our Lord did in the desert is for us a model: He did it and so can we. “But Father, Father, He’s God! Of course He can do it!” I answer, “Yes, but He is also fully human – He is the New Adam.” He had to succeed where Adam and Eve failed. He had to do it right and make it right on human terms not on divine terms. Otherwise, the whole economy of salvation – redemption of man by man – would not have counted – as an early Church Father declared, “What He did not assume, He did not redeem.”
Notice that the Devil only acted AFTER the Father revealed that Jesus was His beloved Son when He was just baptized in the previous chapter. To have supernatural assistance against a supernatural foe would seem beyond our abilities in a battle in the desert, but do not forget that each one of you are baptized too! “What our Lord Jesus Christ has by nature, we have by adoption” to be called Sons and Daughters of God – that’s not some cheesy line out of Sunday School class – that is a fundamental theological reality that we quite often forget or don’t even realize. Therefore, we should not be scared to face these temptations of the flesh, of the mind, and of the spirit. The question is: What’s keeping you from entering into this journey?
Join me this Lent. Enter into today’s Gospel prayerfully as a way for you to imitate Our Lord – His suffering and temptations are your sufferings and temptations. Go into the desert and begin your fasting, your prayer, and your almsgiving. Take away all those things that won’t bring you closer to God and start drawing nearer to Him. He is closer than you think. I realized that all of the Lents that I have been through (it’s not that many, I’m not that old), I have noticed that the more I give up, the more I pray, the more I act charitably – the closer my walk is with God. I am a sinner, I am a coward, I am weak, and I know that. But I also know that the better the effort, the purer the intention, the greater the reward. My fellow brothers and sisters, let us journey to Easter Sunday – where the sweets will be sweeter; and the sweetest of all will be our relationship with our risen Lord in the Resurrection.
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