First Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 17, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
February 17, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the first Sunday of Lent, as we will journey with Jesus into the desert.
• Most people have little desire to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a tourist visit. Even in the midst of a rather frigid and snowy February in the northeast, few of us are dreaming about the Sahara, Arabian or Gobi deserts. But at a spiritual level, 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 this Sunday’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, can 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. We’re so connected that if we are out of cell phone range we can easily feel totally lost. While the Lord is not calling us all physically to go to the sands of the Mojave, 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 booze and 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 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 metanoia means in Greek — is to revolutionize the way we look at things, at the world, at ourselves, at 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.” Jesus is not calling us to a minor course correction, but 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). 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 he seeks to get human beings out of spiritual alignment. Yet we also learn from Christ how to come back into alignment, which is what Jesus seeks to help us do each Lent.
• As we see in the lengthier accounts in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke of Jesus’ temptations in the desert, which must have been related by Jesus himself since no one else was there, we see that one diabolical temptation was to try to get Jesus to disorder his relationship with God the Father. This happened when the devil tempted Jesus to throw himself off the parapet of the temple, presuming that God would save him by sending his angels to prevent his even dashing his foot against a stone. The devil 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 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 temptation was to disorder our relationships with others. The devil promised that he would give Jesus rule over all the cities of the world, to be in control over everyone else, to have them serve him rather than he serve them, if only he 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, to lay down our lives for them as Christ himself did.
• The third fiendish temptation was 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 true good, that the word of God may be done in us.
• In response to these three fundamental 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 when he speaks about the three traditional Lenten practices of prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Prayer helps us to order our relationship with God against the temptation of presumption. Almsgiving helps us to reorder our relationship properly with our others against the temptation of control and power. Fasting helps us to reorder ourselves within, making sure our body obeys a properly formed conscience, against the temptation to order everything to satisfying our pleasures. That’s why the three practices constitute a crucial part of our Lenten program, of living with Jesus in the desert and entering into his resistance to every temptation. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are not part of a spiritual multiple-choice test but are a three-drug cocktail we need to treat the illness of sin. Prayer strengthens our faith in God, fasting our hope toward the fulfillment of our physical and spiritual hungers, and almsgiving our love for others as Christ has loved us. They are at the root of our spiritual renewal.
• This Lent, as the Spirit drives us into the desert with Jesus, Jesus, out of mercy, is not going to have us fast the entirety of our time. This Sunday he will feed us with the nourishment that satisfies hungry hearts, as he gives himself as the Word that fills our silence. The Mass is where our fasting, prayer and charity reach their zenith. In preparation for the Eucharist, we 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. In the Mass, we enter into the supreme form of prayer, Jesus’ own 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. As we prepare to receive Jesus on this first Sunday of Lent, we ask him for the graces to live this 40-day calling us to “come with him apart from the crowds to a deserted place” in the most bold and holy way possible, so that we can experience the joy that comes from repentance and faith, 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 Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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