Homily for the First Sunday of Lent — Year C

The story of the Temptations of Christ is so familiar to us (we hear it every year on the First Sunday of Lent) that some of the subtleties can be overlooked, and we could miss their profound meaning, not only for our Lenten observance, but for the whole of our lives.

 

When I was much younger, I found the story somewhat bereft of meaning: Jesus is, after all, the Incarnate Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and therefore incapable of sin. So why was the devil so stupid as to even try to tempt Jesus into sin? But the devil knew, as we do, that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. So, he attacked the Lord’s humanity, looking not so much for weakness, but for how he could get Jesus to misuse His strengths for His personal benefit, rather than for the Mission for which He was sent to earth.

 

And these were not your garden-variety sins. Spectacular in their own right, no one else would know that this power, these miracles were not from God. Nor did the Temptations seem intrinsically evil:

+a desire for self-sufficiency

+a personal need for recognition/affirmation

+a lust for life

 

Yet, sin is often the flip side of the coin of goodness. By this I mean that we’re sometimes attracted to the immediate, but false “good” which presents itself, aware, perhaps, of the falsehood of evil, but at the same time attracted to its purported benefit and immediate gratification.

 

Temptations can be pretty tantalizing, so that putting up a fight can be hard work. Yet the fight for self-mastery in preference to self-indulgence is but one of many skirmishes in the ongoing struggle for holiness. 

 

Sin tends to proliferate, so that if we don’t resist the temptation toward venial sins, we break down our resistance to mortal sins. The devil knows about our weaknesses, and will disguise them in order to trick us into acting upon them, rather than turning to the Lord in the hour of temptation.

 

The devil had been successful in tempting Adam; thus Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden, into the wilderness for his failure. But the devil will not be successful in tempting Jesus, this time meeting Jesus in the wilderness where Jesus sets Himself resolutely toward a different garden — the Garden of Gethsemane. And still the devil is not ready to give up on Jesus. When the Lord successfully resisted the devil’s temptations, Saint Luke tells us: “When the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.” 

 

That opportune time came at Gethsemane when the Lord, in His humanity, prayed that He might be spared His coming Passion and Death. Thus, at both the beginning and ending of the Lord’s Public Ministry, the devil was there, tempting Jesus to be untrue to Himself. 

 

The story illustrates that no one is exempt from temptation. This awareness, however, does not grant license for sin, even those less-spectacular sins that we think no one will find out about. Saint Teresa of Avila described herself as “the greatest of sinners.” It’s hard to imagine that: safe from most of the world’s temptations, living, as she was, behind cloister walls, and having the built-in support of religious life with its Rule and scheduled prayer. But her insight was that since the structure of her life moved her and her sisters toward life in Christ, then her failures became more pronounced, and because of her love for Christ, more egregious.

 

Looking again at the Lord’s Temptations, note how crafty the devil is. First of all he begins his sentences with the word “If.” “If you are the Son of God,” he hisses. In wording things in this way the devil is hoping that Jesus will respond from either of the opposite ends of the spectrum of self-knowledge, raising either self-doubt, wherein the human Jesus might question His relationship with God… or gross egotism, wherein Jesus might wish to say to the devil, “I’ll show you what I’m capable of doing as the Son of God.”

 

Then the devil offers a great and immediate reward, enticing Jesus to grab what He is entitled to without the suffering and death that He knows is the better — indeed the only— way to win mankind’s redemption.

 

This is how the devil tempts us as well. First, he gets us to question or even forget our identity as sons and daughters of God. Living in the world as we do, we are subject to the enticements of secular values. But because of our Faith, which forms our truest self-knowledge, and because of the Grace that comes to us from prayer and the Sacraments, especially the Sacrament of Reconciliation, our identity as the Beloved of God strengthens us against temptation and renews us in our “Original Goodness.”

 

Then the devil’s promised payoff loses its meaning, value and delight, because we remind ourselves that there is no “if” concerning our self-knowledge as sons and daughters of God. 

 

It’s important to know that God does not leave all the work in overcoming temptation and sin, to us. He takes an active interest in our successes, small as they sometimes are. Look to these following words of God, spoken by the Prophet Ezekiel in a passage from this morning’s Office of Readings:

 

“I will take you away from among the nations, gather you from all the foreign lands, and bring you back to your own home.

 

I will sprinkle clean water upon you, to cleanse you from all your impurities.

 

I will give you a new heart, and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your hearts of stone and giving you natural hearts.

 

I will put my spirit within you, careful to observe my decrees.

 

You shall live in the land I gave your fathers; you shall be my people and I will be your God.”