FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT YEAR C

Deuteronomy 28: 4-10 The confession of faith of the elect

Be with me Lord when I am in trouble

Romans 10: 8-13 The confession of faith of the believers in Christ

Luke 4: 1-13 Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness where his tempted.

Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness and after a few weeks of fasting and solitude he is exhausted.  It’s then that the temptations kick in, tormenting him, draining him of his last energy, pushing him to his limits.

It’s the wilderness of the heart that is hardest to bear. There’s the loneliness which is the other side of the coin to solitude.  There’s the lack of support of any kind.  There’s the experience of having to rely on one’s own resources when those resources seem far from adequate to cope with the challenge at hand.

The wilderness of the heart is the place where all our pretences to greatness, goodness and status are stripped back.  We are important to no one.  We have no role, no function and we are of no use to anyone.  The wilderness of the heart leaves us stripped bare.  There’s not much humour here, nothing to laugh at.

The wilderness of the heart is the place we all need to inhabit now and then in order for our true self to emerge into the light.  The wilderness of the heart is the only place where our utter dependence on God becomes real and stares us in the face. The wilderness of the heart is the place where real conversion begins and where real freedom is born.

The wilderness of the heart is the place where the deepest healing can begin and the burdens that seemed so important, the roles that we relied on for our identity, the image that we spent so much time refining and practicing, all fade into nothingness and there is just me and the desert.

The wilderness and deserts of the world are full of surprises.  At first glance they seem barren and devoid of all life, but on closer inspection they turn out to be full of the most fantastic fruitfulness.  A little bit of water and there is a carpet of flowers, flocks of birds, shoals of fish and all kinds of wild and wonderful life. Even in the dry times, life is never far from the surface for those who look for it.

The wilderness of our heart behaves in much the same way.  Watered by a little contemplation, a little bit of fasting, a little listening, new life quickly appears.  This new life is uncluttered and vibrant like the wild-flowers in the desert.  Its refreshment is so complete that we come to value even the smallest drop of water, the gentlest breeze or the quietest word of comfort.  The littlest breath of grace becomes a treasure and we find ourselves noticing and rejoicing in the smallest blessings.

In the wilderness of course there are other forces at work too, and like Jesus we come face to face with our greatest temptations. Just as they were for Jesus, these temptations are usually to power, prestige and possessions.

We love to be in control and we love to imagine that God is on our side.  Bob Dylan’s masterly song from 1963, “With God on our Side” catches up the way in which we recruit God to our cause.  The song is a poignant musing about the history of the US in which God has always “been on our side.”  “You don’t count your dead, you never ask questions” with God on your side.  The temptation to power is behind so much of our world’s pain, and probably our own personal and family pain.

We love our prestige, our good image.  We love to be recognized around the place and to be honoured for our amazing talents, our great beauty or our mighty humanitarian work.  We make political decisions on the basis of image.  Sometimes we choose the place where we live or the church where we want to marry, or the school where we send our children because of  our need to look good, to belong in the right circles and to fit in where we think the real action is.

Then our possessions take over.  We can’t imagine living without most of them.  You’d think we are married to them the way we lock them up, protect them from prying eyes, and pamper and polish them as if they were alive. We almost treat our possessions as equals!

We all need to allow the Spirit to lead us into the desert.  With Jesus we can be stripped down to what really matters and what is of enduring value.  With Jesus we will know the temptations to run back to the comforts that our power, our prestige and our possessions bring us.  Like Jesus, we have the Spirit for company and this Spirit will be enough to sustain us and draw us through these times of turmoil to a peace so deep and satisfying that it is beyond our imagining.

When the times of wilderness are upon us, let us not be surprised, but rather let’s embrace this moment of grace with courage and boldness.  Let’s take hold of the opportunity that the wilderness provides and grow free and true in a way that is only possible in this wild seemingly empty place.

The devil leaves Jesus at the end of today’s gospel story,  to return at the appointed time!  One visit to the desert is never the end of the story.  It’s part of the cycle of life that is as inevitable as the seasons.  We pray for one another that our desert times will bear great and abundant fruit through our embrace of the living and dying that the wilderness provides.

In our wilderness the words of today’s psalm may find a real resonance in our hearts as the psalmist puts these words into God’s mouth: