A Special Forty Days in the Desert with Jesus, First Sunday of Lent (B), February 18, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
First Sunday in Lent, Year B
February 18, 2024
Gen 9:8-15, Ps 25, 1 Pet 3:18-22, Mk 1:12-15

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today St. Mark tells us in the Gospel, “The Spirit drove Jesus into the desert and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.” The First Sunday of Lent every year is a time when the same Holy Spirit who drove Jesus into the Judean desert wants to drive all of us, so that we can recapitulate Christ’s 40 days away from everything and, apart from every distraction, can focus on our relationship with God and others and on who we are — and, with Christ’s help, confront and overcome the way that the devil seeks to distort those relations and that image. As we likewise talk about on the Second Sunday of Advent each year when we meet John the Baptist in the desert at the Jordan River, most of us, even those who experience brutal winters, have no desire at all to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a brief visit. At a spiritual level, however, we should always have a great love for going to the desert with Jesus, because the desert is what helps us to understand the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent, in which we join and imitate Jesus in the desert and ponder the fruits of what he learned.
• To go into the desert is increasingly difficult for people today. Most people are so connected that if we lose our cell phone signal or battery juice we can easily feel totally disoriented. When I preach weekend retreats for lay people, and ask them voluntarily to surrender their phones so that they can give their full attention to Jesus, the expressions on some people’s faces makes it seem as if I’m asking for permission to saw off their arms or their legs. While the Lord is not calling us all physically to go to the Sahara, Gobi, Mojave or Judean deserts, he is calling us to the state of the desert, removing ourselves from distractions, from our screens and devices, newspapers and magazines, and the various things that may be fine in themselves but crowd our lives with noise so that we can’t hear God and with clutter so that we can’t see God. The first temptation we face in Lent is to refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that our Lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up sweets. We need silence. We need prayer. As Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea wrote in his recent book The Power of Silence, “God is silence, and the devil is noisy. … God’s first language is silence.… In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God. [God] waits for our silence to reveal Himself. Regaining the sense of silence is therefore a priority, an urgent necessity. … The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and toward others.” The devil wants us to remain in noise where we can’t hear God’s gentle whispers, in the cacophony of modern life, of anxieties, worries, worldly pleasures and allurements. New York is a place in which life is noisier than most places on earth. And so it’s essential that we allow the Holy Spirit permission to drive us into the desert with Jesus. The first big hurdle for us in Lent is to hear Christ’s voice from the desert calling us to this silence and prayer with him, as he says, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31). He wants us to take his yoke upon us and learn from him, to bind ourselves to him for this annual 40-day spiritual retreat. What is our response to him and this holy summons?
• There’s a clear purpose to this time with him in the desert. Jesus reveals this to us as soon as he departed from the desert. St. Mark tells us that Jesus emerged preaching, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” These are the words he shared with us earlier this week, as we were marked with ashes on Wednesday. To repent — what metanoia means in Greek — is to revolutionize the way we look at things, the world, ourselves, and others, so that we might adopt Christ’s perspective. It means to turn our thoughts around, or better right side up. It’s as if we’ve been going in one direction and Jesus tells us, “Stop, turn around and go in this new direction, following the path I will show you.” Jesus is not calling us to a minor course correction in Lent; rather, for most of us, he’s summoning us to something far closer to a 180-degree turn. He wants us to examine all those parts of our life that are not in alignment with him and convert in such a way that we begin to turn with him full-time — which is what con-vertere means in Latin — and to follow him. That’s what he hopes to accomplish in us by our 40-days with him in prayer and silence. He’s offering us a new life and wants us to seize it.
• The desert experience with him is meant to help us to learn to repent and believe in the Gospel, to commit ourselves to living by faith in him and all he teaches. St. Mark tells us today, very concisely, that when Jesus went into the desert, “he was among wild beasts and the angels ministered to him.” In Lent and in life, we will experience with Jesus both “wild beasts” and angels. Let’s begin with the wild beasts. Pope Francis described them symbolically in his Angelus meditation this morning in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. He said that, in the spiritual life, we can think of the wild beasts “as the disordered passions that divide the heart, trying to take possession of it. They entice us, they seem seductive, and if we are not careful, we risk being torn apart by them. We can give a name to these ‘beasts’ of the soul: the various vices, the coveting of wealth, … the vanity of pleasure, … and the craving for fame. …  are like ‘wild’ beasts, and as such they must be tamed and fought; otherwise, they will devour our freedom. And Lent helps us to enter the inner wilderness to correct these things.”
• If we look at St. Matthew’s and St. Luke’s much longer accounts of Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, which Jesus himself must have conveyed to his first disciples since no one else was present, we see the types of ‘wild beasts” with which the devil sought to attack Jesus. They tell us that the devil subjected Jesus to “every temptation” (Lk 4:13), to every form of attack, in order to try to get him to disorder his relationship with God, with others and within himself. It’s important for us to come to know these wild beasts well, and how Jesus tamed and fought them, since they attack us not only in the desert but right here on the Columbia campus.
• The first class of beast Jesus fought was the temptation to disorder his relationship with God the Father, indicated by the devil’s seductive appeal for Jesus to throw himself off the parapet of the temple, presuming that God the Father would save him by sending his angels to prevent his even dashing his foot against a stone. The devil similarly seeks to tempt us to believe that God will prevent any harm to us or others whenever we do something risky and fatal. The devil wants to get us to think we can smoke several packs of cigarettes a day and not get cancer, speed drunk behind the wheel and never get into an accident, blow off study and not fail a test, sleep around and never get an STD or conceive a child. He wants us to jump off various cliffs and then blame God for not preventing our suffering. He tempts us step-by-step, and day-by-day, toward spiritual suicide. Jesus shows how to tame and fight this beast by committing ourselves never to put the Lord our God to the test, but, instead of tossing ourselves from dangerous precipices into sin, to throw ourselves lovingly into God’s arms and remain them.
• The second beast that St. Luke and St. Matthew describe is the temptation is to disorder our relationships with others. The devil promised Jesus that he would give him rule over all the cities, to be in control over everyone else, to have them serve him rather than he serve them, if only Jesus would take the bait to fall down before the devil in homage. Jesus resisted the temptation toward this type of diabolical control by quoting Scripture about worshipping and serving the Lord our God alone. The same devil tries to tempt us, too, to the same Faustian bargain, to distort our relationship with others, so that we may have over them dominion, control and power. The way to tame and resist this beast is to follow Jesus’ advice, and dedicate ourself to serving God and others made in God’s image and likeness, reverencing the Lord in them, striving to serve them with love rather than be served, and ultimately laying down our lives for them as Christ himself did.
• The third beast is the temptation is to disorder our relationship within ourselves, using what God has given us egocentrically for our own purposes rather than for God and others. This is shown in the temptation the devil gave to Jesus to change stones into bread after forty days of hunger. How strong this temptation must have been for someone so famished! The devil is always trying to get us to use the gifts and talents with which God has bestowed us selfishly, to make a name for ourselves, to make our kingdom come, and to do our will. Jesus shows us how to fight against and tame this beast, by replying and showing us we do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. He helps us to use our talents not self-centeredly but for God and others, and ultimately for our own true good, that the word of God may be done in us.
• Mark tells us that there are also angels sent to minister to Jesus in the desert and angels are likewise sent to help us. This first and foremost refers to real angels, who exist and seek to help us in the battle for love and against sin. But Pope Francis also interprets them symbolically as“the good thoughts and sentiments suggested by the Holy Spirit. While temptations tear us apart, the good divine inspirations unify us and let us enter into harmony: they quench the heart and infuse the taste of Christ.” What are these angels, these messengers, these means, good thought and feelings? Jesus indicated them to us as Lent began on Ash Wednesday. They’re the three traditional Lenten practices of prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Jesus told us in the Gospel four days ago, “When you pray, … when you give alms,… when you give fast.” These three “angelic practices” help us to become stronger, respectively, against the devil’s seductions to disorder our relationship with God, others and ourselves. They therefore constitute essential weapons in our fight against the wild beasts of disordered passions and against the work of the devil and the fallen angels. As “angels” these practices announce to us the path to do God’s will and enter into communion with him. Every Lent we go into the desert with Jesus, so that, through uniting ourselves to his prayer, fasting and self-giving, we may be strengthened by him against every way the devil seeks to attack.
• In terms of the “angel” of prayer, when we commit ourselves to pray in our inner room in intimacy with God the Father, we make God our priority. Perhaps the biggest sin most people are susceptible to is pushing God to the periphery of our lives. Many of us pray only when we need something, or only a few minutes a day, or only in a mechanical way when, for example, we come to Church. But this is simply not consistent with really believing in God and loving him above every other love. It’s also dangerous. The devil well knows that for many of us he would never be able to convince us never to pray and to cut ourselves off from conversation with God completely. So what he tries to do is to get us to think that we’re too busy to pray much, and that God doesn’t really care about our praying more than when we can. St. John Paul II talked about this in his great document Novo Millennio Ineunte at the beginning of this millennium. “It would be wrong,” he wrote, “to think that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life. Especially in the face of the many trials to which today’s world subjects faith, they would be not only mediocre Christians but ‘Christians at risk.’ They would run the insidious risk of seeing their faith progressively undermined, and would perhaps end up succumbing to the allure of ‘substitutes,’ accepting alternative religious proposals and even indulging in far-fetched superstitions.” That’s the devil’s draw play: to get us to accept a shallow prayer life so that he can eventually draw us away from the Lord into superstitions and eventually into spiritual oblivion. The devil wants to lead us gradually into that truly risky situation. That’s why increasing the quantity and quality of our prayer time in the Lenten desert is what will have the most dramatic impact in changing us and turning around our minds and hearts. As St. Augustine reminds us, prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us. The more we seek God’s will in prayer, the more time we spend praising him, thanking him, begging for his forgiveness and confiding to him what we and others need, the more we will become like him and love what he loves. As the devil wants to tempt us toward minimizing prayer, the Spirit, as a divine angel, wants to drive us into the desert with Jesus so that our whole lives will be characterized by prayer.
• The second angel that announces God and seeks to bring us into communion with him is almsgiving. The devil regularly tempts us use others for our purposes and to ignore them if they don’t fit into our own ends. We often view life as a competitive survival of the fittest contest rather than one of loving cooperation and mutual help. In the devil can’t get us to become maleficent or to stop doing good deeds altogether, he wants to assuage our consciences by reminding us that a few times this week or this month or this year, we’ve done some acts of charity. For a follower of Jesus, however, charity must become a way of life, our true mission. That’s what real almsgiving does. Jesus gave everything for us and summoned us to love others as he has loved us. He became the Good Samaritan and rescued us and told us to go and do the same. Almgiving is not just about sacrificing things or time, but ultimately sacrificing ourselves. A Christian is supposed to be a person for God and others; that’s what the devil wants to distort and that’s what Jesus, especially in Lent, wants to fortify. So the angel of God therefore calls us to almsgiving.
• The third angel we have wants to help fix our distorted relationship with the material order. So often we can prioritize our material needs, living for the satisfaction of our bodily pleasure. We can become hedonists, those whose happiness is defined in terms of the meals we eat, the beverages we consume, the human experiences we can accumulate. God doesn’t call us to give up all the things of this world he created good, but he does call us to a deeper, more long-lasting and truer form of happiness, prioritizing our soul. That’s why fasting is so important. The only way we can learn to live by every word that comes from God’s mouth is by not living on bread and material things alone. Fasting helps us to cut the cords of our addictions and hyper-dependence, because either we control our appetites or they control us. When we eventually gain self-mastery, we can begin to hunger for what God hungers. Fasting opens us up in gratitude to God’s providence, his giving us each day our daily bread, so that we may better empathize and care for others who are in material need. That’s why fasting is the third angel — and the most countercultural — calling us to God, so that our bodies may align fully with our souls in praising God.
• The renewal God wants to give us in Lent, the goal toward which the angelic practices he announces are meant to lead, is the full living out of our baptismal identity as Christians. We see this in the other readings today. In the Book of Genesis, we encounter Noah and the new beginning, the second chance, God gave the human race after the flood. In order to be saved, people — and the other animals of creation — needed to be on Noah’s Ark. The Fathers of the Church eventually said that the Ark is a symbol of Peter’s boat the Church: to be saved, we need to be in that Barque. But we know that the Church is ultimately Jesus’ Mystical Body. To be saved we need to be a member of his Body, to enter into him, and that means entering into his prayer, his fasting, his almsgiving, his life, death and resurrection. Every Lent, we examine whether we’re fully in Him who is the Ark, we look at how much we are living the new and eternal Covenant in Christ’s blood, seeking God’s ways, walking his paths, and ultimately living out the promises of our baptism. St. Peter tells us in today’s second reading the connection between what God did with Noah and what he seeks to do with us. “God,” St. Peter says, “waited patiently in the days of Noah during the building of the ark in which a few persons, eight in all, were saved through water.” Then he applies that historical occurrence to our situation: “This prefigured baptism, which saves you now.” Notice the “now.” Baptism is not just supposed to be a thing of our “past,” for many of us in our first days of life, when we became Christians. It’s supposed to be something very much in the present. Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert after his baptism in the Jordan in order precisely to lead us on an exodus through the desert into the promised land of his kingdom. Lent is a type of exodus that seeks to bring about a new order, a new creation, a new kingdom, something that God brought about with Noah, the flood and the ark. Baptism, St. Peter says, is “an appeal to God for a clear conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” and that appeal is meant to be made always in the “now.” Lent not only prepares catechumens and elect for the Sacrament of Baptism but is meant to lead every believer to a new beginning. After our “drowning” in the waters of baptism, we’re led into a similar post-baptismal desert each year by same Spirit who drove Jesus there, where we receive God’s help to renounce Satan, all his evil works and all his empty promises, and live by faith in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Lent is a time to repent and believe, to renew our baptismal promises and live them as not just truths we consent to, but as the fundamental realities of our life, of who we are and what we do. Just as Noah built an ark far from water at God’s command, even though so many thought building such a ship there was ludicrous, so we enter the ark not in a seaport but with Jesus in the middle of the desert, seeking, like Noah, to live by faith with a clean conscience in our triune God.
• The Eucharist is the great means by which we are able every day to enter more deeply into the practices of the desert with Jesus. It’s where the angels of God lead us and where we’re strengthened in the fight against the wild beasts of everyday life. In preparation for the Eucharist, we heed the angel calling us to fast, at least an hour, so that we may hunger more and more for every word that comes from the Father’s mouth, and especially for the Word-made-flesh, Jesus, who comes from the Father’s bosom. In the Mass, we enter into the supreme form of prayer, Jesus’ own prayer from the Last Supper and Calvary. And we not only receive Jesus’ greatest alms — his body, blood, soul and divinity — but are helped by him from the inside, to “do this” in memory of him, living truly Eucharistic lives by giving our body and blood, sweat, tears and heart in loving service to others. At the time of Noah, God said that, after the flood, the rainbow would be the sign to “recall the covenant I have made between you and all living beings,” so now, as we’ll pray later in the Eucharistic Prayer, the Cross has “become the lasting sign of your Covenant” (Reconciliation I), and each Mass we receive Jesus’ Body and Blood given on Calvary as the “new and eternal Covenant,” as the efficacious sign that unites us to Christ, helps us to receive the fruit of his prayer, fasting and almsgiving, and equips us to pray, fast and give of ourselves together with him. As we prepare to receive Jesus today, we ask him for the graces to live this 40-day retreat by heeding his call boldly and eagerly to “come with him apart from the crowds to a deserted place,” so that we can receive his strength to heed the angels and fight and tame the beasts,  so that we can experience the joy that comes from repenting and believing, and so that we can become signs with him to the whole world that this is the time of fulfillment and the kingdom of God is at hand.

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: 

After John had been arrested,
Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God:
“This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download