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Homily:
1st Sunday of Lent – Cycle A
Well, you’ve already done it, haven’t you? On Wednesday, it wasn’t so hard to walk past
that jar of candy in the kitchen, but Thursday it wasn’t so easy, was it? Or perhaps a co-worker brought in donuts to
celebrate his birthday on Friday. Or
maybe it was that beer or glass of wine that you shared with a friend at dinner
on Saturday. I mean, Jesus himself said
that “when you are fasting, don’t make a show of it”, didn’t he? You certainly didn’t want to brag about what
you were giving up during Lent so you decided to give in—just that one time—so
as not to reveal what it was that you had given up. How very noble…
The enemy certainly doesn’t have to work very hard, does
he? He knows that within one of our
greatest powers lies one of our greatest weaknesses. Our ability to reason—that is, to think
things out—is the uniquely human characteristic that makes us most like
God. It allows us to order, to create,
and to exploit the characteristics of just about anything else in creation for
our own use. It also allows us to
convince ourselves of just about anything if we think about it long
enough. This is the weakness that the
enemy strives to exploit. He knows that
very often all he needs to do is to suggest something to us and that then, left
to our own devices, it won’t be long before we’ve talked ourselves into doing
it.
Just look at Eve (poor thing, she didn’t even know what was
coming). She knew well the abundance
that God had blessed her with and the instructions that God had given her. The serpent (cunning as he was) came and
simply suggested a lie, veiled in truth.
“You certainly won’t die”, he
said. “No, God knows that the moment you
eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is
good and what is evil.” All true… to a
point. That was all Eve needed, it
seems, to get her powers of rationalization going. “[She] saw that the tree was good for food,
pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.” All very true and, thus, by all perceptions
there was absolutely nothing about those fruits that would make them harmful to
eat it… except that God had forbidden
it.
“So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also
gave some to her husband, who was with her (by the way, what was he doing all this time?), and he ate
it.” And what do you know; everything
that that cunning serpent said was true!
They didn’t die (at least, not immediately) and they did come to know
what is good and what is evil (notice how they immediately recognized that they
were naked: in other words, they felt shame; demonstrating that they did have
knowledge of what was good and what was evil).
No, what the serpent said was true… except that it veiled a lie. As it turns out, they would die; even though it wouldn’t be immediately. And they were already like gods, because God has given them the power to reason. Was the act of eating the fruit sinful in
itself? No. Rather, their sin was that they chose to
trust their own reason instead of the providential will of God.
Contrast that now with Jesus. After forty days of fasting in the desert,
he’s hungry (which, in biblical terms, means that he’s weak: physically,
mentally, spiritually) and the devil comes to tempt him. And tempt him to do what? To deny his humanity and to assert his
divinity. The devil knew that if Jesus
denied his humanity and allowed his divinity to override it that his life would
be useless to save us—for Jesus had to be completely obedient to the Father’s
will using his human will alone in order to counteract the disobedience of our
first parents—and so he tempts Jesus three times to manifest his divinity over
his humanity.
In each of those three temptations, what did Jesus do? Did he try to reason his way into or out of
them? I mean, did he look at those
stones and say, “Gee, it really would be good if I ate something. I mean, my Father certainly doesn’t want me
to die of starvation, does he?” Or did
he say “I better jump so as to prove to this devil that my Father’s promises
are true”? Or how about, “You know, if I
was master of all of these kingdoms I could make sure that there was peace over
the whole world; and that would be good, wouldn’t it?” No, he didn’t say any of those things. Rather, he chose to trust his Father’s will
instead of his own reason and thus he overcame the tempter. (Oh, and by the way, what was the
result? As soon as the devil left him,
angels came to his aid, anyway!)
My brothers and sisters, in our efforts to fulfill the good
work that we’ve laid out before us—that is, our prayer, fasting and giving alms
this Lent—how do we fight off the temptations that come to us daily, trying to
thwart our efforts? Do we try to
rationalize our way into giving in, convincing ourselves that it’s “ok” to bend
our rules? Or do we rely, instead, on
God’s Word to us and Jesus’ example for us: the promise that if we remain
faithful to him that he will provide for all of our needs? God has breathed the breath of eternal life
into us at baptism and has placed us in the garden which is his Church. The fruits of the garden are the
sacraments—most prominent among them, the Eucharist—and we are free to feed
from this abundance as long as we obey God by remaining faithful to his
commandments.
Yet, we’d rather be like gods, wouldn’t we; rationalizing
our sins so much so that we’ve completely lost the one thing that we gained
through sinning: our ability to know what is good and what is evil? My brothers and sisters, we must regain a
balanced, yet strong compunction for our sins (many of our not-as-young
parishioners will “light-up” to hear that word being used in church again, but
it is exactly what we need to hear). To
do this, we must first regain our sense that God is truly near to us; that he’s
not some “divine watch-maker” who put the world together and wound it up and
now sits back to watch it work, but rather that he is intimately involved with
his creation and wants to lead and guide us along the way.
With this sense of God’s intimacy with us, we’ll deepen our
friendship with him. And as our
friendship deepens, so will our sense of compunction for any act that offends
him. Just as any of us would feel
horrible for doing something that deeply offended a good friend, so will we
feel horrible when we realize that we’ve offended God when we rationalize our
way into giving in to temptations. This
kind of friendship doesn’t happen overnight, however. It takes time.
And in order to make time for God, we’re going to have to
slow down our lives a little. We’re
going to have to fast from some of those things that we enjoy doing so that we
can have time to be with God in prayer—both as individuals and as families—and
to see him in need in our brothers and sisters.
And we’re going to have to come clean with him in confession (and trust
me all of us have something that we need to come clean about with God).
And when we do, my brothers and sisters, we’ll begin to see
the power of God working in us to overcome our temptations: that is, the power
of the love that we have for God which leads us to despise any temptation to
choose ourselves over him. With this
power working within us, we will truly glory in celebration of the Lord’s
resurrection on Easter Sunday: the joy of which we taste even now, here at this
table.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – March 9th, 2014
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