Welcome to this Holy Season of Lent. The Church gives us this time to prepare ourselves through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving; to strengthen our relationship with God and so come closer to Him. We are to begin a joyful walk over the next forty days toward the great Feast of Easter, and in a certain way, after our journey through Lent, nothing should be as it was before, since we are to rid ourselves of our old sinful ways and be renewed in “sincerity and truth.” This reform may bear upon things seemingly small but be of considerable importance for our spiritual life and our relationship with God and others. A journey towards God should always change us for the better. God will be with us, leading us through our wilderness, and giving us the grace we need to complete our journey. As he did with the ancient Jews in the wilderness.
The celebration of the ancient Jewish Passover commemorates this journey of the Israelites from their exodus from Egypt to their entrance into the Promised Land. The Passover is the memorial of this founding exodus, of the covenant, and all the great deeds of God who saves his people. Jesus, assuming and accomplishing what the covenant signified, made it into the sacrament of the new covenant sealed by his blood when he passed from this world to his Father; thus, he opened the path of the last exodus on which he draws us all. Lent, then, is strongly marked by the spirituality and dynamic of the Exodus.
Easter is the liturgical and sacramental celebration of renewal, of passage from death to life, of new birth by participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. Consequently, Lent, the preparation for the celebration of Easter, fosters a particularly characterised baptismal, penitential, and Eucharistic spirituality. This is our joyful walk toward a Holy Easter, a progression in the Church toward the summit of our liturgical year.
Lent is the only liturgical time that begins on a weekday, with a solemn celebration marked by particular practises: fasting and ashes. The liturgies of the next three days — Thursday, Friday and Saturday— prolong the liturgy of Ash Wednesday. The. Biblical texts read at the Masses stress the spirit in which we must begin Lent and practice its “works,” the meaning and goals of this liturgical time, the call to follow Christ, who revealed by his actions the mercy of God to which we must turn in a movement of genuine conversion. The threshold of Lent is crossed on Ash Wednesday. But the following days constitute a “porch” leading to the great door that will be opened on the following Sunday. (Today. The First Sunday of Lent). This is a threshold that we must take time to cross step by step, in prayer, reflection, and assessment of our strengths. This is a moment to throw aside what could uselessly weigh us down as we walk, and to check whether we are properly equipped for the Lenten exodus. This is a porch on which the whole Christian community is called to gather: because it is important to all start together, at a brisk pace, toward the Lord’s Pasch and its celebration. As did the Jewish people in their exodus from Egypt into the Promised Land.
The first reading today is an old creed that accompanies the liturgical offering of earthly goods and explains its meaning by recalling the long periods during which God has been forming his people. (Deut 26:4-10). Here then, is the basic outline of the main phases of salvation history: the time of the patriarchs, vagrant Arameans, a period ending with Jacob’s going into Egypt; that of the long years of of slavery under Pharaoh’s rod until God’s liberation of his people through Moses; finally, the period extending from the Exodus to the people’s entrance into the Promised Land under Joshua.
The recalling (anamnesis) of this history is a profession of faith in God, who gathers and leads his people. But this recollection does not turn us backward to a past not to be forgotten; it makes us contemporaries with the events that are recounted; that history, is our history today; it encompasses and assumes the future. The threefold dimension of the liturgy is yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the offering of what “earth has given and human hands have made” — all a gift from God “who was, who is, and who is to come.”
We now turn to the Gospels: and Christ’s journey through the wilderness being tempted by the devil. Before Luke tells us, Matthew and Mark have already said that Jesus, after his baptism, was led into the desert by the Spirit. But Luke’s Gospel introduces the story of the temptation in a more original way; we also recognise in this introduction other traits proper to Luke.
“Filled with the Holy Spirit,” Jesus leaves the banks of the Jordan, in which he has been baptised. Under the guidance of the Spirit, he goes into the desert “for forty days, to be tempted by the devil.” An impression of peaceful docility to the Spirit emanates from this introduction. Jesus obeys spontaneously. He will do so again at the beginning of his ministry when, after his test in the desert, “Jesus returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit” and begins to teach. The evangelist tells us that Jesus’ first sermon takes place in the synagogue at Nazareth. Having read the passage from Isaiah where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he has anointed me.” (Isa 61:1). He proclaims: “Today, this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” In his Gospel and in Acts, Luke reserves an important place for the Holy Spirit. Finally Luke suggests in his introduction that Jesus walked through the desert, unceasingly harassed by the devil. It is a discreet way of introducing us to the three confrontations later mentioned, three temptations presented in the wilderness to Jesus, who had to repel many others as well.
At the end of forty days of absolute fast, Jesus is hungry. If Jesus is the Son of God, let him “command this stone to become bread.” The devil speaks to Jesus in the same manner as the soldiers did at the crucifixion, “If you are King of the Jews, save yourself” (Luke 23:37) In the desert, as later on, Jesus refuses to use the power of his word solely to save himself. He will use this power in order to save others, when, with a single word, he will free the demoniac: cure the sick: call the disciples: raise the dead; and forgive sins.
Then Luke records another kind of temptation that in a certain way is an extension of the first; for again it is a question of power. Power characterizes his ministry and teaching (Luke 5:17). But it is from the Father that Jesus gets his power, because only the Father has the initiative to give it to whomever and whenever he wills. Jesus will communicate it to his disciples with the gift of the Spirit, so that they may be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. This power has nothing in common with that of “the ruler of the world” already “condemned” (John 14:30) However, this illusory “power” and “glory” that the devil has, are none the less tempting, as was proved in the case of Adam, the first man, whom Jesus would save along with all of Adams descendants. In any event, the power and the glory that God gives to his Christ, and through him to the disciples, are fully revealed only at the end of their paschal journey. Then “the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 22:69); the disciples will eat and drink at the Lord’s table in his kingdom and “will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Then all will be “recapitulated.” Of course, Jesus was aware of this, since he taught it to his own. But he does not discuss it with the demon. He merely murmurs in his heart the daily Jewish prayer, the Shema Israel: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve,” as he will do at the time of the ultimate trial in Gethsemane, “Father…..not my will but yours be done.”
The third temptation that Luke records takes place in Jerusalem, on the parapet of the Temple. This precise locale comes as no surprise in Lukes Gospel. Everything began in the Temple with the announcement of John the Baptists birth. In the Temple, the infant Jesus was recognized by Simeon and Anna as the light of the nations that had been foretold. It is in the Temple that he first manifested his extraordinary wisdom. These references to the Temple found in the Third Gospel are landmarks on the road that leads Jesus to Jerusalem, where he must die and rise from the dead where the Christian community will be born on the day of Pentecost.
The temptation in Jerusalem, “on the parapet of the Temple” is a prelude to the ultimate confrontation that will take place in the city “at the appointed time.” On that day, Jesus will not yield to the voices of those who challenge him to come down from the cross. In an act of supreme trust, he will commend his spirit into the hands of the Father.
“Having exhausted all these ways of tempting him, the devil left him, to return at the appointed time.” The conclusion of the battle between Jesus and the devil will take place later on. In fact, he reappears at the beginning of the passion narrative when “Satan enters into Judas, the one surnamed Iscariot, who was counted among the Twelve” — “Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat” but Jesus prays for Peter that his own faith may not fail and, having turned back that he may strengthen his brothers. Jesus does not falter either when hung on the cross, he hears railing voices challenging him again, “Let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Messiah of God.” At the culminating point of the drama, Jesus addresses not the tempter but his Father, to express, one last time, his unfailing attachment and confidence. In Gethsemane, in the throes of his unspeakable agony and anguish, he had said, “Not my will but yours be done.” Now he turns to his Father to implore forgiveness for his executioners; then, before breathing his last, to say “in a loud voice, Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.”
What happened after the Lord’s baptism finds its epilogue here. The devils first attack against Jesus helps us to understand the drama played out in the passion. At this time, as at the temptation, the true question concerns the person of Jesus, Son of God. The answer lies in his obedience to the Father unto death itself. In this obedience the Lord’s sovereign power is manifested. To one of his companions in suffering he says, “Amen, I say to you, this day you will be with me in paradise.” And the centurion who witnessed what had happened glorified God and said,
“This man was innocent beyond doubt.” — “When all the people who had gathered for this spectacle saw what had happened, they returned home beating their breasts.”
Christians and the Church as a whole do not find themselves confronted by the same temptations as the Lord, because we do not know and will not know the sort of test that only he had to endure. We will have however, our own trials during this holy season of Lent, trials which we can only surmount by following our Master, whom the devil never succeeded in persuading to deviate from his path.
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High and abides in the shade of the Almighty says to the Lord: My refuge, my stronghold, my God in whom I trust!”
