First Sunday of Lent (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 5, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, C, Vigil
March 5, 2022

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 privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, as we journey with Jesus into the desert at the beginning of the Lenten Season.
• Most people 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 there and ponder the fruits of what he did. Every Lent, the same Holy Spirit whom St. Luke tells us led Jesus into the desert wants to guide 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 distractions, can focus on who we are, on our relationship with God and others 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, however, 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 Arabah, he is calling us to the state of the desert, removing ourselves as much as we can from distractions, from the television, computer, radio, newspaper, 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 each 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. 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, and that leads us to this Sunday’s Gospel. It’s a particularly special scene, because the only way St. Luke and St. Matthew would have known about it would have been if Christ had told it to his disciples himself. No one else was there. The Lord must have opened up his heart to them about this seminal moment in his hidden life, which occurred immediately after he was baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist (Mk 1:12). The Holy Spirit led him into the huge fifteen-by-thirty-five mile desert between the mountain of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea so that he could pray to the Father about the public ministry that he was about to commence. He prayed and fasted for an incredible forty days, which obviously would have left him physically weak and famished. It was at this moment of physical weakness that the Devil came to him to tempt him. Much like God the Father had once allowed Job to be tested, the same Father allowed Jesus his Son to be tempted. In the temptations Jesus suffered and later described to his disciples, the devil brought out in a pristine form the types of temptation that Christ would undergo in his public ministry and that each of us undergoes in our lives. By focusing on how Christ responded, we, too, can learn how to receive his mercy so that we might be able to react as Jesus did.
• The first temptation was aimed right at Jesus’ tremendous hunger after 40 days of eating nothing: “If you are the Son of God,” the devil chortled, “command this stone to become a loaf of Bread.” When the Israelites were in the desert, Satan successfully tempted them to grumble to God to feed them (Ex 16:3ff). Satan was tempting Jesus to recapitulate the Israelites’ lack of trust in God and Jesus would have nothing of it. Jesus had come to save people, to feed their most important hunger — the hunger of their souls — and Satan was trying to induce him, as Archbishop Sheen used to say, to become a baker rather than a Savior. To feed people’s physical hunger would be a great way to win a crowd and become popular. Hunger is the most basic human need and the devil was tempting Christ to bribe others to follow him. But Jesus himself was already living off a greater source of food and was preparing to train disciples to seek this same celestial nutrition: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This same insight he passed on to the crowds when they were following him to have their stomachs satiated: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (Jn 6:27).
• In the second temptation, the devil presented Jesus with a vision of all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority … if you … will worship me.” Jesus was about to announce that his kingdom was at hand, but that kingdom was going to come about not through pride and Satanic worship but through humility and the Cross. The “father of lies” (Jn 8:44) was proposing a short cut, another way, an easier way. “I’ll give it all to you if you fall down and worship me.” The devil had gotten the Israelites in the desert to succumb to this temptation to worship him in a golden calf, rather than to trust in the God with whom Moses was speaking on the mountain. But he failed with Jesus, who said to him, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone. The devil likewise tempts us with the pursuit of power, privilege, prestige or profit, to seek to achieve something worldly by compromising our relationship with God and his moral law, to serve the “ruler of this world” rather than the one, true God. Jesus told his disciples about this second struggle he faced so that we could learn from him that and how we are called to worship the Lord our God and serve him alone.
• In the third temptation, the devil tried to seduce Jesus to test God the Father. Misapplying Psalm 91, he said, “Throw yourself down from [this pinnacle], for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone’ (cf. Ps 91).” The devil had succeeded in getting the Israelites to test God while they were in the desert, to complain that Moses had brought them out into the desert to kill them and their children of thirst. Jesus didn’t succumb to the same temptation. He replied, “It is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” This is the temptation to be presumptuous with God, to do things that will try to force God’s hand into protecting us no matter what. The devil tries to get us to re-create our relationship with God on our terms rather than His terms; to do something reckless and then, when God doesn’t seem to respond to that situation because such behavior harms us, the devil uses it to divide us even further from God. Jesus passed onto his disciples his response to the devil’s temptation, so that we could make it our own: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Rather than presumptuously throwing ourselves down from precipices, Lent is a time in which we trustingly throw ourselves up into God’s outstretched merciful arms.
• The last line of Sunday’s Gospel says that the Devil subjected Jesus to “every test” (v. 13), but Jesus never succumbed. In the letter to the Hebrews, we learn that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet never sinned” (Heb 4:15). But Jesus is more than sympathetic. He went into the desert for 40 days to be tempted to show us the way to overcome temptations, by imitating him and his responses.
• Every Lent the Church, based on Jesus’ words, proposes for us three ways to grow in strength against temptation: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. It calls us to enter into Jesus’ prayer, Jesus’ fasting, and Jesus’ self-giving. As the war in Ukraine continues, conscious that diabolical evils like the Russian aggression are only expunged, as Jesus taught us, by prayer and fasting, we are called to pray as if life depends on it, because many lives do. We need to fast like the people of Nineveh for mercy, like Moses on the mountain in reparation for the sins of Israel, like Queen Esther in petition to save her people. We need to sacrifice for those under attack and those who are now refugees, through reliable international Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus and Aid to the Church in Needwho have extensive networks to deliver that aid through the Churches.
• On Sunday, Jesus will remind us, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He refused to change a stone into bread for the devil; but for us, his beloved flock, he will change bread into his own flesh and blood. He is the word that comes from the mouth of God and this Sunday that God wants to put that Word-made-flesh in our mouths. As we prepare to receive him, let us 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, and respond to his help to “worship Him, the Lord our God, and serve Him alone.”

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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