DEMONS IN THE DESERT

This First Sunday of Lent we find Jesus in the desert, dog-hungry and beset by demons horrible and hairy. The wilderness is a place where God seems absent, distant, even non-existent. This is something the tempter understands very well and hopes Jesus will behave like anybody else who feels there is no God. He urges Jesus to take his one shot at life into his own hands and live it on his own terms rather than on God's.

When people feel there is no God they have a way of making themselves, their ideas and their ambitions the ultimate criterion of goodness and truth. They themselves unwittingly take the place of God. This is the sin of big-time pride and arrogance. And that's exactly where the devil wanted Jesus to go. 'If you are the Son of God command this stone to become bread.' Jesus didn't come here to behave like God, but like a human being. In the technical language of Paul, Christ became 'sin' so we would become 'the righteousness of God.'

When God vanishes from our consciousness the resultant vacuum is replaced by our own plans and ambitions. We become voracious, consuming everything in sight. Our hunger grows to know no bounds. Things, the good things of life, take precedence over people and their needs. Television likes to display the dehumanizing lifestyles of the super rich and the super celebrities.

Fr. Timothy Radcliffe pointed out in a retreat to priests a year ago how bizarre it is that in a society which is obsessed with consumption and dieting the Church has largely forgotten the 'liberating discipline of fasting.' Others have pointed out how voracious greed is driving our civilization over a consumer cliff. There has recently been within the Church a healthy call to return to fasting.

Christianity has an ancient wisdom to offer a world that swings between binge eating and anorexia, obesity and starvation. Fasting is about being liberated to desire more deeply, to hunger for what gives life. 'One does not live by bread alone,' said Jesus to his tempter. Ancient spiritual giants like St. Augustine and St. Bernard speak in their sermons for Lent about how fasting sharpens our hunger for God's word. They, too, lived in times of unbelievable consumption and greed.

In the ninety-first psalm, which will be sung this Sunday, we ask that God bear us up lest we dash our foot against a stone. Jesus refused to turn desert stone into bread, a symbol of his rejection of unbridles consumerism. We need to temper our desire to put things before people and before God. A mature, adult approach to Lent is tempered by awareness of others and how we might sustain them. We practice almsgiving for this reason.

'Temperance sounds boring, but it is about learning to desire healthily - to enjoy wine as wine, and not as a means of oblivion, and to enjoy the Word of God even more' - (Notes from Fr. Radcliffe's retreat).

PASTOR EMERITUS