FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
February 21, 2010Reflections on Deuteronomy 26:4-10
Psalm 91:1-2, 10-11, 12-13, 14-15
by Sister Patricia Coughlin, O.S.B, D.Min.
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Something in me wants to say, “Welcome to the desert, a place of testing, a place of encountering God as well.” But that would imply that I have some degree of ownership or mastery over the desert and doing these reflections has confronted me with my lack of mastery and so I offer them in that spirit.
Luke places his story of the temptation or, more accurately, the testing in the desert after his account of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan with its assurance that he is God’s beloved son and then, surprisingly, a detailed genealogy of Jesus starting with Joseph and ending with Adam. The event marks the beginning of his public ministry and the scriptures describe it with a kind of review of the Hebrew scriptures beginning with Adam and the testing and failure of Adam and Eve in Eden. The desert setting evokes the Israelites wandering in the desert. Hosea’s description of Israel’s reunion with God in the desert, Elijah’s fleeing his enemies in the desert and Job’s testing by the devil with God’s permission are also alluded to.
This story also prefigures the hostility and opposition Jesus will face during his public life ending with his final temptation in Gethsemane and the taunts of “if you are the Son of God” on Calvary. It shows that Jesus was not going to fulfill the current expectations about who the messiah was and what the messiah was going to do. Frederick Buechner says that, in this temptation story, Jesus is wrestling with what it means to be Jesus, the Son of God. Was he going to be a miracle worker, rescuer of the poor and hungry, a political liberator. How was he going to be the authentic messiah? We see the results of his decision in Holy Week. We see its fruition at Easter.
A lot has been discussed, written and preached about this story, especially the three offers the devil makes to Jesus. It’s pretty obvious that he is being offered three ways of being God’s beloved child that are not authentic and that he rejects them. It’s telling that Jesus rejects each temptation by quoting Deuteronomy. Each quote recalls a test of Israel’s fidelity to God and Israel’s failure in faith. They are Jesus’ only words to the devil (who quotes scripture, Psalm 91) as well and Luke uses them to underscore Jesus’ faithfulness to God’s will.
One of the most compelling writings about the three temptations is the tale of “The Grand Inquisitor” found in Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the story, Christ has reappeared on earth in the city of Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. The people follow him with burning hearts. The Grand Inquisitor sees this and has Him arrested and thrown into prison. That night the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell and tells him that he will be burned at the stake the next morning because, by his rejection of the three temptations in the desert he has declared that he wants our free, unforced love rather than slavery to the law. But, according to the Grand Inquisitor about 100, 000 humans can handle freedom while thousands of millions are incapable of it. Freedom only makes them miserable, so the church, out of compassion, gives them bread, authority and miracles to relieve them of the suffering that freedom brings.
If Christ truly loved humankind he would have chosen to turn stones into bread because, in the words of the inquisitor, “If you had chosen bread you would have fulfilled the greatest desire of humans-to find someone to worship, to hand over the gift of freedom.” He would have chosen to cast himself down from the temple because humans seek, not God but the miraculous. He would have chosen the kingdoms of the world as the church has done, reclaiming the sword of Caesar in order to establish a plan for the happiness of humanity and finally correcting Christ’s mistake. The only unhappy ones will be the elite, the strong, who take the suffering of freedom upon themselves for the sake of the weak. The grand Inquisitor says to Christ, “You rejected the only way humanity might be happy, but fortunately, departing the earth, you handed over the work to us. You have given us the right to bind and unbind, and, now, of course, you cannot think of taking it away. At the end of the story, Christ, who has been silent, gives the Grand Inquisitor a gentle kiss, is let go and disappears into the night. The inquisitor is left alone and, in Dostoevsky’s words, “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man holds to his idea.”
I bring this up not because it is a satire on the church. (Dostoevsky was a Russian patriot and not a fan of the Roman Catholic Church) but because it gives us a lens through which we might look at Lent, the lens of freedom. Lent might be a time to examine our freedom, to live in greater freedom. Freedom is hard, demanding, austere - a bit like Lent. Sometimes, like a trek in the desert, it leaves us without familiar landmarks. St. Paul reminds us that, after Christ’s death and resurrection, God’s word is in our hearts and obeying the word on the page is no longer sufficient. Freedom demands that, like Jesus, we need to wrestle with who we are, who we were created to be and do in the world and what gets in the way of being our authentic selves. What illusions do we hang unto that prevent us from being authentic? How do we wrestle with being the daughter or son we were created to be?
I’d like to offer one more set of three for your reflection. Thomas Keating, the teacher of Centering Prayer says that most of us in our early lives develop what he calls false emotional programs for happiness. We put our faith in security/survival or esteem/affection or power/control to to protect and save us. Fantasies about how to get these things and who threatens to take these things away cycle and recycle in our heads and keep us from seeing the world, others, ourselves and the abundance that we share right before us.
The author of Matthew probably wasn’t saying this, but I think we can say that Jesus rejected the fantasies offered by the devil and, unlike the Grand Inquisitor, he gave of himself to free us from the prison of fantasies rather than incarcerating us in them.
Another novelist, Nora Gallagher, writes that in order to love (and I think we can also say to be free or freer) we must enlarge our capacity to suffer; to become more real we must face the hard truths about ourselves that will enlarge our humanity. That is real penance and the fasting, abstaining and other Lenten practices we do can help us to do just that. On Wednesday we accepted ashes as a symbol of accepting suffering, suffering that, in the end, will enlarge our capacity for joy and freedom. Have a good Lent.