LENT: THE LONGEST SPIRITUAL RETREAT
Indeed, Lent is the longest spiritual retreat every Christian can or should embark on to prepare and enter joyfully into the Easter joy of the Resurrected Lord.
Lenten season is a moment of grace and mercy. We are inviting three actions of forgiveness, conversion and reconciliation with God, others and ourselves, with the attitudes of praying, fasting and almsgiving.
The Lenten season is a moment of grace given to us by God through his Church. It calls us to a profound interior renewal of our mind, heart and soul through prayers, fasting or penance and charity or almsgiving.
ALONE WITH GOD IN THE DESERT OF LENT
We all need the desert experience. Every Lenten season is a journey of grace into the desert. Where there are fewer distractions and noise. It is quieter and clearer in the desert to reflect upon our life and our commitments to it. Hence, it implies a place of detachment, sacrifice, reflection, prayer, solitude, encounter, and battle to be freed from worries, anxieties, cares, trials, temptations and entanglements to things or persons.
However, it must be an experience that is Spirit-driven if, not, it becomes a burden and misery. A desert is a place of boredom without a purpose short of experiencing silence, quietness, and aloneness with God. A moment of confronting our choices. A time to overcome our most inner cravings for self-aggrandizement to food, drinks, things, power, and self-importance or pride.
OUR THEME
The readings of this Sunday remind us that none of us is above temptation, not even God himself, as we see in the Person of Jesus Christ. There is temptation everywhere, from us, others, and even from or in the Church. However, temptations, tests and trials are the occasions to demonstrate fidelity to God because no trial, test or temptation is above our overcoming.
The principal reason why Satan tempted Christ was to make him become someone else than who God wanted him to be. The victory of Christ over his temptations is our way out of overcoming temptations too. That is, he rejected to become something or someone else than he was. That is to be a power-drunken or conscious person, seeking false glory or satisfaction in worldly things.
We, too, can learn from Christ not to become who God has not intended for us to be. We must also learn to live within the purpose and plan of God for us.
The readings provide for us the most effective way of overcoming trials and temptations of life: the Word of God. However, we are reminded that Satan can also cite the Word of God as one of his strategies to deceive us.
The power of the Word of God against the kingdom of darkness is indispensable when it comes to overcoming temptations of life. The Word of God is our guide and light in the dark valley of life when there are trials and temptations. Although, it is efficacious when we have the integrity and use the Bible correctly. And there are also sincerity and faith convictions behind its usage. This is the difference between Christ quoting the Bible and the Devil doing the same.
FIRST READING: DEUTERONOMY 26: 4-10
The slavery in Egypt and the desert experience afterwards to the Promise Land are remarkable experiences Israel would never forget. Hence, after gaining their freedom, they established the Shavuot called the Festival of Weeks. It is also known as the feast of the First Fruits. When religious offerings of the first agricultural produce of the harvest are presented to God as an offering of harvest and thanksgiving.
The first reading invites us to a conscious life of the presence of God in our midst or history. As well as his intervention in history to deliver us from slavery. It is reading that presents us with the divine providence of God working powerfully and constantly through what seem to be disasters of life.
PSALM 90 OR 91
The responsorial Psalm points to us the third temptation of Satan to Jesus in the desert as recorded in the Gospel Of Luke. It is a psalm that invites to call upon God at the moment of trials and temptations. The psalmist affirms with pleading voice: be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble or distress.
Thus, it is a prayer of divine protection. In it, we implore the intervening God who saves us from whatever difficulties of life.
SECOND READING: ROMANS 10: 8-13
It is only on account of the Holy Scripture that the Christian life and faith can be lived. The Holy Scripture gave us the Deposit of Faith, and at its core is our creed, which declared that Jesus is our Saviour and Lord.
This faith journey comes from the core belief through faith conviction, acceptance, proclamation and practice. Our victory over temptations, sins, and the devil is in our ability to come to this realization.
It is not a privileged grace granted to fess but to all who professed and called upon Christ as the Lord and Saviour of their lives. Actually, Romans10:9-10 are of the prime importance of the complex discussion of Paul with his Jewish brothers. In it, he gave us the basis of the first Christian creed.
A man must say Jesus Christ is Lord. That is, first, then, a man to be a Christian must have a sense of the utter uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
A man must believe that Jesus has risen from the dead. The resurrection was essential to Christian belief. The Christian must not only believe that Jesus lived, but also that he lives. He must not only know about Christ: he must know him. He is not studying a historical personage, however great. He is living with a real presence. He must know not only Christ the martyr: he must know Christ the victor, too.
But a man must not only believe in his heart, but he must also confess with his lips. Christianity is belief plus confession. It involves witnesses before men. Not only God should know our faith stand, but also our fellow-men must know what side we are on.
A Jew would find it hard to believe that the way to God was not through the law but Christ Jesus. This way of trust and acceptance was shatteringly and incredibly new to him. In essence, this passage was a kind of an appeal to the Jews. Paul tries to make them abandon the way of legalism and accept the way of grace.
It is an appeal to them to see that their zeal is misplaced. It is an appeal to listen to the prophets who long ago declared that faith is the only way to God and that that way is open to every man.
THE GOSPEL: LUKE 4:1-13
The context and scene of the gospel of this Sunday of Lent are all about the temptations of Jesus. In the wilderness, Christ was tested by the devil. The concept of wilderness implies being alone with oneself and his demons. It is a place of confrontation of evils and wild beasts. Hence, we could say Jesus went to the domain of evil.
This First Sunday of Lent is a time for us to reflect on the Lord Jesus and His struggle with the devil. The passage teaches us how to overcome our struggles against the devil and all evil in our own lives.
THE TEMPTATIONS OF CHRISTFirst, the lust or inclination for the flesh contrary to the spirit of fasting. The spirit of Lent is the spirit of mortifications to sacrifice oneself to overcome the power of the Word of God, Lk. 4: 1-4.
Second, the lust of the eyes is contrary to the spirit of almsgiving and sharing. Again, Jesus overcame with the Word of God, Lk. 4:5-8.
Third, the lust for power, control, and dominance is contrary to the spirit of humility. Prayer, reliance and dependence on divine providence of God Lk. 4:9-12.
Evidentially, Jesus overcame his temptations through the power and knowledge of the Word of God. In this way, our trials and temptations are overcome through the power of the Word of God. As well as its appliance to our daily life.
OUR TEMPTATIONS
The tempter launched his attack against Jesus along three lines:
(I) Turning stone to bread – is a temptation of selfishness and abusiveness of power. Our quest for material power and the seeking of easy and shortcut solutions is the root of problems and difficulties of life. (II) Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple of the holy city and with the promises of God no harm – is a temptation of the abuse of powers and privileges through pride for spiritual fame, recognitions and power; a miracle-seeking faith is not God-oriented faith but superficial and fluid
(III) Worship Satan to get all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. This is also the temptation of lust and desire for worldly glory or material things. Thereby, we compromised to worldly standards by all means to gain political power, control and affluence.
The biblical concept of temptation from the etymology of the Greek language shed clearer light on the theological concepts of temptation today in modern times. Temptation always means to entice a man to do wrong. That is, to seek to seduce him into sin, to try to persuade him to take the wrong way.
While the Greek word is “peirazein”, temptation has a different element in its meaning. It means to test far more than it means to tempt in our sense of the word.
Hence, there is great and uplifting truth in temptation as testing.
a. What we call temptation is not meant to make us sin; it is meant to enable us to conquer sin.
b. It is not meant to make us bad. It is meant to make us good.
c. It is not meant to weaken us. Rather, it is meant to make us emerge strong, finer and purer from the ordeal.
d. Temptation is not the penalty of being a man. Temptation is the glory of being a man.
Fundamentally, it is an indisputable fact, the man or woman God wants or wishes to use for his purposes, God probes or tests him or her out for worthiness and usefulness.
WILLAMS BARCLAYS ON THE TEMPTATIONS OF CHRIST
Jesus deliberately retired to this lonely place and for forty days wrestling with the problem of how he could win men. It was a long battle that never ceased until the cross, and the story ends by saying that the tempter left Jesus–for a season.
STONES INTO BREAD
(i) The first temptation was to turn stones into bread. This wilderness was not a wilderness of sand. It was covered by little bits of limestone like loaves. The tempter said to Jesus, “If you want people to follow you, use your wonderful powers to give them material things.”
He was suggesting that Jesus should bribe people into following him. Then came Jesus’s answer in a quotation of Deuteronomy 8:3, “A man,” he said, “will never find life in material things.”
The task of Christianity is not to produce new conditions, although the weight and voice of the Church must be behind all efforts to make life better for men. It has the real task to produce new men, and given the new men, the new conditions will follow.
THE GLORY OF THE WORLD
(ii) In the second temptation, Jesus in imagination stood upon a mountain from which the whole civilized world could be seen. The tempter said, “Worship me, and all will be yours.”
This is the temptation to compromise. The devil said, “I have got people in my grip. Don’t set your standards so high. Strike a bargain with me. Just compromise a little with evil, and men will follow you.” Back came Jesus’ answer, “God is God, right is right and wrong is wrong. There can be no compromise in the war on evil.” Once again, Jesus quotes scripture (Deut.6:13; Deut.10; Deut.20).
It is a constant temptation to seek to win men by compromising with the truth of Christ with the standards of the world. It is said that the nature of the world is to see things in terms of an indeterminate grey. However, the Christian has to see things in terms of black and white. As Carlyle said, “The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite, damnability of sin.
THE PINNACLE OF THE TEMPLO
(iii) In the third temptation, Jesus in imagination saw himself on the pinnacle of the Temple where Porch Solomon and the Royal Porch met. There was a sheer drop of 450 feet down into the Kedron Valley below.
This was the temptation to give the people sensations. “No,” said Jesus, “you must not make or use the power of God senseless experiments (Deut.6:16).
Jesus saw quite clearly that if he produced sensations. He could be a wonder of nine-day. And he also saw that sensationalism would never last. The hard way of service and suffering leads to the cross, but after the cross to the crown.
OUR PRAYER
Lord, Jesus Christ, Lenten journey is an important one for faith experience: a journey of struggles and failures that leads to the glorious Resurrection of Easter. Help us take advantage of the season by becoming freer, closer and nearer to you practising Lenten observances: praying, almsgiving and penance.
The practice of almsgiving of my time, talent, kind words, smiles and resources with the less privileged, sacrifice of fasting not from only food and drinks, but also from habitual sins of hate, lying, backbiting, etc.
As well as a spirit of praying with the strength to overcome trials and temptations. Thank you, Lord, for giving this period of grace and the Word of God to help us to conquer and overcome all strategies of the evil one. Amen.
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