The First Sunday of Lent
February 21, 2007
8:00 am Liturgy
J.A. Loftus, S.J.
Everyone has a wilderness, a desert. Jesus was no exception. The
question I want to ask us this morning is this: where is our wilderness? I am
talking of a place, or a time, or a state of mind, or state of heart, that can best
be described as my own personal desert–a place I usually don’t want to go.
For some of us that desert may be where we feel most alone, perhaps
even empty. For some that desert is a place of great fear and loneliness. For
others it’s a place they go deliberately in order to shed some of the
accumulated baggage of busy lives; it is place where one can go to “take a
time-out.” Scary sometimes, but finally freeing.
But just about everyone has a personal wilderness. Sometimes, these
days especially, it’s just a daily struggle to find work, food, shelter, or to find
just a moment when we don’t feel terribly vulnerable. The wilderness can be
a bleak and lonely experience in which we feel small and powerless and alone.
Sometimes the wilderness just seems like a cruel fun-house mirror in which all
I can see is me–and that me always seems distorted!
Where is your wilderness? I said on Ash Wednesday that Lent was
God’s invitation to listen and repent, a word that means to literally turn
yourself around, and look again. If you think you have no wilderness, keep
turning around. You’re not listening yet. Only a fool has never been
tempted. Can you–even for a minute–let yourself be at risk enough to know
your own temptations? The real ones. The temptations that put your life on
the line, your dreams, your fondest hopes, your lack of belief. Everybody has
secret fears and black holes. And sometimes it doesn’t even get any better
with age!
Jesus was no exception. That is the message of the gospel stories of his
temptations. Jesus is led by God’s invitation to his own forty days in his very
own wilderness. Notice in Luke’s version, it is not Satan who leads Jesus
there; Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit, Luke tells us, and is led by the Spirit
into the wilderness to know himself and to know again his God.
It is God’s invitation to Jesus, just as it is God’s invitation to each of us.
And there in that wilderness we, too, will be led to confront and embrace our
own worst fears, our own worst loneliness, our own temptations to pretend to
be more than we are, or to settle for less than we are. Those two choices are
exactly what Jesus faces in the gospel. In fact, most of us face the same
temptation ourselves: to have to choose between either pretending to be more
than I know I am, or settling to be less than I really am an can become.
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How does Jesus resist the dark, the uncertainty, the apparent futility of
what he is about to do with his life? How? Jesus draws on an absolutely
unshakable confidence that he is not alone. In the dialogue with Satan he
keeps repeating “It is written...” He knows, even in and through his worst
fears, God has written his life and God cannot lie or abandon him–no matter
what it feels like at times.
I know that Fr. Bob spoke here last week about reconciliation in the
process of Lent. I want to share a reconciliation story of my own today.
Many years ago, when I was a very young, fresh priest (yes, I really was once
upon a time). My niece invited me to help with the First Confessions of herself
and her classmates.
It was, as it always is, a complete hoot. Seven year olds trying so hard to
come up with their “real sins.” I was a very popular confessor that day too.
There were seven other priests, but I had the longest line. I thought it might
be the Jesuit thing. I only discovered later that not only had my niece told all
her classmates that I was the “coolest uncle in the world,” but that I had been
forgetting to hand out any penances to the kids. So much for the brilliance of
my Jesuit confessor style!
But one little boy, whom I will never forget, taught me a lesson about
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the wilderness, the desert, in today’s gospel. As he confessed the usual list of
slights any seven year old might, I noticed tears forming in his eyes. Then one
tear broke down his cheek as he quietly said: “And I pulled Spot’s ears and
really hurt him.” He then said so quietly: “And I love my Spot so much.”
And then the tear-ducts really opened–both his and mine. This seven
year old was discovering that we often hurt the ones we love the most. And
often we don’t even know why or how. It’s that strange, dark spot in all of us
(no pun intended). We only see it in the wilderness, the desert.
He taught me something about myself, and about sin, and about my own
deserts and wilderness. And all I could share with him was the deepest
conviction of that sacrament: you are not alone!
That was Jesus’ deepest conviction in his own wilderness. He was not
alone either. And neither are we.
So, where is your wilderness? Do not be afraid. Embrace it. And
know: no one is alone there. Welcome to Lent.
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