1st Sunday of Lent 2020
Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matt 4: 1-11
Where are you? Are you in the wilderness? It is not a pleasant place to be. I suspect that everybody spends some time in the wilderness at least once in their lives. That is the time when you lose your sense of direction, when things go wrong, when fixed points no longer seem stable, when perhaps the black dog of depression is prowling, barking, biting.
That is a wilderness which we do not enter voluntarily. We are driven there, and we long for rescue. Yet sometimes it is the case that, rather than being driven there by the forces of darkness, we are actually, like Jesus, led by the Holy Spirit. If we cling on, however feebly, in faith and hope, perhaps we will realise that we are not alone; that the Spirit of Jesus is in the wilderness with us; that the times of loss and emptiness will prove to be times of growth and renewal; that, as Isaiah prophesied, the wilderness will bloom.
Lent is a slightly different aspect of the same experience. In Lent we do enter the wilderness voluntarily, as we ask the Holy Spirit to lead us in the footsteps of Jesus. We undertake penance to loosen our dependence, at least for a time, on some of the elements of everyday; to sharpen our awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and of the call of the Son of God. We pray, we practise self-denial, we give of what we have, to remind ourselves that we do not live on bread alone, but that the true giver of life is very close to us in our apparent emptiness.
Sometimes the voluntary and the involuntary wilderness times coincide. My most difficult Lent came 25 years ago, when a heavy bout of clinical depression compelled me, under medical direction, to leave my parish on the Wednesday of the second week of Lent and to spend time in a nursing home. To add to my sense of wilderness disorientation, the principal celebrant at Mass the following Sunday focused his homily on one sentence from the Gospel: “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Yippee! Just what I needed to help me feel better—or perhaps not.
That wilderness time passed, and I recall another Lent, ten years earlier, when the wilderness did indeed blossom for me. I was based at St. Mary’s Morecambe at the time, as well as being chaplain at Our Lady’s. That Lent, everything came together at once to provide a deep experience of joy in the Lord.
There was an excellent Castlerigg course with the Lower Sixth, a Caring Church Week which brought four hundred pupils voluntarily to Mass every day, and a fund raising effort for charity which raised huge sums, not least through a sponsored run along the riverside to Halton. I remember, a few days after the latter, acting as marker for the school cross country, and as I stood near Greyhound Bridge, I recall thinking how good it was to be alive.
Good times and bad come and go throughout our lives, but through them all the Lord is with us. When we make our Lenten journey with the Lord, He may share with us His suffering, or His joys, or both, but we can guarantee that, if we are faithful, He will make us better for the experience.
As we share His journey, will we also share His temptations? I shall be surprised if we don’t. The tempter who was in the garden for the first Adam, was also in the wilderness for the Second Adam, Jesus the second founder of the human race. We can be almost certain that the tempter will lie in wait in our wilderness. We too may be tempted to turn stones into bread, by giving up the journey with Christ in order to satisfy our own wishes, our own way, even our own compulsions. We may be tempted to leap from the Temple pinnacle, not so much to put God to the test, but in despair, unable to accept and to realise that God is with us and that He will bring us out of the wilderness. We may be tempted to rule the kingdoms of the world, or at least to lord it over people in our own petty kingdom, the circles in which we move.
Temptations there will be, difficulties there may be, but if we are faithful we will emerge from the wilderness ready to enter with the Lord into Holy Week and to find deep joy in the Resurrection.
