Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
"Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted by the devil."(Mt. 4:1)
And so the Church insists that this is what we must hear on
the first Sunday of Lent, Lent, that preparation for Easter and more deeply the
wake up call to deepen our spiritual life.
This reading, this gospel, is not didactic. It is not meant to inform us
of something we did not already know. We are not children sitting here
listening to the teacher’s lesson. The readings at Mass are not primarily
teaching instruments. We have heard this
same gospel so many times. The gospel is
sung in a rigid tone, without emotion, without personality, because these words
transcend immediate comprehension. They presume not intellectual judgment but
rather the openness of the heart and mind to what is being heard. In this way
the gospel of the temptations of Christ, in the words of all of the
evangelists, is iconic. It is not like a
speech or a lesson. It is more like a
painting, but a sacred painting like an
icon that points to the truth of what is painted on the icon. It is painted in
a traditional way because this in the only way to convey the meaning of the
words. That is why the readings are sung
in fixed tones that allow no interpretation by those who sing the
readings. This is not mere
objectivity. This is the subject taking
on the radical objectivity that is the Word of God who is the subject of the
readings.
Jesus goes out into the desert, the place of danger and
silence, to confront Satan, the personification of evil, of rebellion against
God. And today’s gospel is the icon of
that confrontation, an icon that is unemotional, is clean, is to the point. The
temptations are iconic, are radically human after- the- fall, and we know this
is true because we are human, we are men and women who live in this world after
the fall, the world of temptation and sin. But there are dangers in
contemplating this icon of the temptation of Christ. The first danger is that we can put this icon
and this reading on a beautiful religious shelf and make it part of a religious
world that has nothing to do with the real world in which we live. Then our religion is reduced to a sentimental
longing for what we think is real, for what will satisfy us, for what will
satisfy our particular longings.
But the second danger, and the one that I would suggest is
the more deeply dangerous, is to annul that bond of humanity that binds us to
the person of Jesus Christ. It is here
that the image of the icon breaks down, or at least is shown to be less than
complete. Because the temptations of
Christ have ultimate meaning only if they are real temptations that have
something basic and real with respect to our own temptations. In other words, the temptations of Christ in
today’s gospel are real and not a mere acting out of something that transcends
our reality. What Christ confronted in
that desert was not a mere acting out of something humanly inevitable. It was a
real human temptation to refuse to do the will of God. If this is not true, then we are not saved,
for if Christ is not man as we are men, save for sin, then we hope in vain, our
faith is in vain, for if his temptations are not real, if he did not have the
freedom to say no to the demands of his body, to power and to making himself a
god, then the icon is just a painting that should be hung in a gallery of
religious history. What is at stake here
is Christ’s real humanity, the humanity that he shares with us. For if he is not fully human then he could
not save us . If he is not truly God he cannot save us.
Our emphasis is
always on the latter. Christ’s sinlessness is not a denial of being human. It is the reality of being a man or woman. But the reality of his temptations, which
reality is a mark of being human after the fall and which affirms his divinity,
is crucial to our salvation. Christ’s
temptation was to not do the will of God, was to not be the Savior, was to not
die on the Cross for the likes of you and me, a temptation that is
understandable for us all who know
ourselves, who in the estimation of the world or the world of common sense are
not worth dying for. For Christianity is not a religion that is based on a myth
about a dying and rising god. The dagger
of our faith into mere reality is the
Incarnation, that God became man, and that the understanding of that assertion,
that creed, that belief, that faith, is radically different from any religion, infinite
into the finite, and the purpose of that irruption is not platonic perfection
nor Aristotelian or modern perfection, but
rather, and rather in an absolute way, salvation.
Just the other day there was the announcement of the
detection of gravity waves that were predicted by Einstein and that are the
blips of evidence of the colliding of black holes. This is awesome, for it deepens the wonderful
mystery that is our universe. But it is
nothing compared to the God who created the universe and all that is therein to
die on a cross to save mankind from sin and eternal death. This is no blip on a screen from billions of
years ago. This is an event in human
history that is measured not in light years.
This is an event in human history that is measured not in light
years nor detected by ultra sensitive instruments buried under the
earth. What we do here at the Mass transcends and yet is deeply involved with
black holes and with you and me and
everything that exists. Lent is that
season of struggle, of our struggle with our fallen humanity and our God-given
grace to transcend our fallen-ness by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Lent is that time, that God given time, to
do, to really do what we have to do to return to the Lord and to shed ourselves
of the illusion that the Catholic faith is a choo choo train to eternal bliss
in a heaven made by own longings and desires.
Lent is an opportunity to use the grace of God to convert
our stony hearts into hearts on fire with the love of God and therefore love of
neighbor. Reminding ourselves that grace
is a gift to be used and not magic, let us pray that each of us may keep a
truly holy Lent and that we may grown in faith, hope—and above all, love.
