Driven with Christ into the Lenten Desert, First Sunday of Lent (B), February 18, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
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: 

• Most people, 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 the desert, 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 and experienced there upon his return. Every Lent, the same Holy Spirit whom we read in today’s Gospel drove Jesus into the desert wants to drive us into the desert with him. Lent is meant to help us recapitulate Christ’s 40 days away from everything so that we, 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.
• 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. 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 first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ’s voice from the desert calling us to this silence and prayer, saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31).
• The next lesson we need to grasp is what is supposed to be the fruit of that time in the desert. What does the Holy Spirit who drives us to this Lenten desert experience want to help us to achieve? Jesus shares this lesson with us as soon as he finished that first 40-day retreat. He returned saying, “Repent and believe in the good news.” These are the words he shared with us earlier this week, as we were marked with ashes on Wednesday. To repent — what metanoiameans in Greek — is to revolutionize the way we look at things, the world, ourselves, and others, so that we might put on the way Christ looks at things. It means to turn one’s 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, but for many of 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-verteremeans) and follow him. That’s what he hopes to accomplish in us by our 40-days with him in prayer and silence.
• When we look at the way the devil tried to tempt Jesus in the desert, we see the three fundamental ways we can get out of spiritual alignment. We can also learn from Christ how in Lent he wants to help us press the reset button in our spiritual life to come back into alignment. As St. Matthew and St. Luke indicate to us in their larger descriptions of Jesus’ time in the Judean wildernes, the devil subjected Jesus to “every temptation” (Lk 4:13), and those can be summarized as temptations to disorder his relationship with God, with others and within himself. Since no one else was there, the only way we would know about what Jesus endured was if he had told his first disciples, and the reason he would have told them is so that, through the way he responded to these temptations, we might learn how to resist them, too.
• The first class of temptation Jesus suffered was 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 get us to jump off various cliffs and then blame God for letting us suffer. He tempts us ultimately toward spiritual suicide. Jesus shows that the proper response is never to put the Lord our God to the test, but in fact to love him and throw ourselves into his arms rather than from dangerous precipices into sin.
• The second class of 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 bargain of falling 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 devil tries to tempt us, too, to distort our relationship with others, so that we will seek to exercise over them dominion, control and power. The antidote is to follow Jesus’ advice, to serve 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 laying down our lives for them as Christ himself did.
• The third class of 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! But Jesus replied that we live not on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. We’re supposed to use our talents not selfishly but for God and others, and ultimately for our own true good, that the word of God may be done in us.
• In response to these three fundamental types of temptations, Jesus not only shows us how to resist with the power of the Word of God but also as Divine Physician prescribes for us on Ash Wednesday the medicine we need. He does so through the three traditional Lenten practices of prayer, almsgiving and fasting, when he instructs us, “When you pray, when you give alms,… when you give fast.” These help us to become stronger against the devil’s seductions to disorder our relationship with God, others and ourselves respectively. They constitute a crucial part of our Lenten penitence. They are part of living with Jesus in the desert and, through uniting ourselves with his prayer, fasting and self-giving, entering into his resistance to the principal forms of temptation by the evil one.
• In terms of prayer, when we pray in our inner room in intimacy with God the Father, we make him our priority. Perhaps the biggest sin most people are susceptible to is pushing God to the periphery of our lives. We pray only when we need something, or only a few minutes a day, or only when we’re supposed to in an increasingly routine way. 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. 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. He wants to lead us step-by-step, day-by-day, 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. 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 wants to drive us into the desert with Jesus so that our whole lives will be characterized by prayer.
• In terms of the medicine for the distortion of our relationship with others, Jesus prescribes almsgiving. The truth is, succumbing to the devil’s subtle or plain temptations, we often begin to use others for our purposes and to ignore them if they don’t fit into our own ends. We often see ourselves in a competitive survival of the fittest contest with them rather than in loving cooperation. We may assuage our consciences, reminding ourselves that a few times this week or this month or this year we’ve done some acts of charity, but for a follower of Jesus, charity must become a way of life, our true mission. That’s what real almsgiving does. Jesus gave everything for us and told 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.
• The third distortion that the Divine Physician wants to cure is of our 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 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 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.
• So a crucial part of our repentance and faith in the Gospel, of our Lenten desert experience, is entering into Jesus’ prayer, almsgiving and fasting, which means entering into his total self-giving to the Father and to us. In the first reading, 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 the ark. The Fathers of the Church eventually said that the Ark is a symbol of Peter’s boat the Church: to be saved, you needed 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.” 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.” It’s a new beginning. After our “drowning” in the waters of baptism, we’re led into a similar post-baptismal desert by same Spirit who drove Jesus there. In baptism and the life of Christ to which it leads, we receive God’s help to renounce Satan, all his evil works and all his empty promises. Then we profess our faith in God Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in the Holy Catholic Church God founded. Lent is a time to repent and believe, to renew those 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 crazy, 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 four vows you profess as Missionaries of Charity help to live out those baptismal promises and to fight against the devil’s temptations. Spiritual poverty refuses the diabolical fruit of materialism; chastity, the diabolical fruit of lust and hedonism, using others for our pleasure; obedience the diabolical fruit of false freedom, disobeying God and trying to control rather than serve others; and wholehearted service of the poorest of the poor focuses you on how to apply your true wealth, true love and true freedom to loving and serving God in the poor and quenching his infinite thirst. The more you respond to God’s graces to live these vows, the more you will experience with Jesus the freedom from the dominion of the evil one in your life and the joy of happiness.
• The Eucharist is the great means by which we are able every day to enter more deeply into the practices of the desert. In preparation for the Eucharist, we always 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 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 calling us boldly and eagerly to “come with him apart from the crowds to a deserted place,” so that we can experience the joy that comes from repenting and believing, and 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 today’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.”

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