1 Lent B February
26, 2012
Gen. 9:8-17
Ps 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-13
The Gospel of Mark, the earliest written
Gospel, does not give us the Christmas story with the narratives of the birth
of Jesus. It begins with the baptism of
Jesus, an event when His Father declared in a loud voice that Jesus is His Son. The voice of God the Father spoke to Jesus
about his very identity. God the Father said,
“You my beloved Son!” And God the Father
said to Jesus, “I am well pleased with you.”
And what does the third member of the Trinity
do? “The Spirit immediately drove Jesus
into the wilderness.” He was there for
forty days, he was tempted by Satan, he was with the wild beasts, and the
angels waited on him. The Gospels of Luke
and Matthew give us more details of the temptation, but not the Gospel of Mark.
In the Eucharistic preface for the Lenten season, we
profess a belief about Jesus that is expressed in the letter to the Hebrews:
“He was tempted in every way as we are, yet did not sin.” Jesus was tempted as a sign of God being with
us in our temptations in life.
Our belief that Jesus did not sin does not
mean that we believe that he could not sin.
We might question as to why he submitted to the baptism of John the
Baptist which was a baptism of repentance from sin. If Jesus had no sin to repent of, why did he
need to be baptized? It was not so much
a need to be baptized as his choice of solidarity within that particular
community of John the Baptist. We have
learned to read the Gospels from the view point of a risen, cosmic, global
Christ, and we need to set that view aside as we return to the details of the
narrative of the particular events in the life of the historical figure, Jesus
of Nazareth.
While we have standards or rules that govern
sin, such as the Ten Commandments, often the laws and rules have more to do
with the practice of each community adjudicating in the ways in which they
believe justice and community order can best be implemented. But the law of perfection as presented by
Christ has less to do with avoiding public penalty and more to do with the
individual path of excellence that each of us is placed upon in finding out
what God’s will is for our lives.
The sin for Jesus was to be tempted into
taking alternate routes in his life.
Jesus could have chosen lots of good and great things in his life, but
if they were not the will of God the Father, they would have been sin.
The temptation of Jesus in wilderness, perhaps,
was to get Jesus to do other good things in his life that were not the will of
God the Father. It is harder temptation
to be faced with good things in our lives that are not the best thing for our
lives. I suspect that the decisions that
haunt us the most are the decisions where we chose good things in place of
better things. In our vocations we can
make good decisions based upon good reasons of financial security but our souls
can end up being burned out in jobs that do not gives us the excitement of
creativity.
The will of God the Father for Jesus was his
ministry and how his genius was to be expressed in his life work. The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness was
to be a time of preparation for his life ministry. During his time of preparation he was to face
within himself a simulation of lots of alternative routes for his life. Where one possesses genius, one can be
tempted towards megalomania or inflations of the ego. One can easily be tempted to do things from
the wrong motives.
We assume that Jesus did not have human
companionship when he was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. But we are told that he was not alone. He was with the beasts. Jesus was tempted to fear the dynamic of predator-prey
relationship that is found in the natural orders. He was faced with the reality that this world
is not always a natural friendly place to be.
Jesus was also tempted by Satan. Satan is a personified figure who appears in
the interior life to accuse. Satan is
the one who tried to convince Jesus to go down other paths of success. “Jesus, you are so brilliant; with
Machiavellian brilliance you can persuade and outwit others and become a
political leader. Use your genius as an
expression of political power.” In other
places Satan is called the devil, or diabolos
(hence the Spanish Diablo). A diabollo is the opposite of a
symbol. Diabollo means to throw into or generate confusion. The reality of Satan
is the experience of maladjusted relationship between our interior life and
exterior life. It is literally “ a voice
within myself turned against myself” in what is best for me and for my world.
Symbollon means to throw
together. We get the word “Symbol” from
this Greek word. A symbol is a type of sign; it puts together an action with an
icon. When the confusion of chaos can be
funneled into a symbol or sign, then one has meaning, a direction and a
message. The ministers of the symbol for
Jesus in the wilderness were the angels. The literal meaning of angel is a
messenger. The angels waited upon Jesus in the wilderness. In the midst of the confusion of many paths
offered to Jesus the sign was offered to him about the direction for his
life. He was able to sort out from the
confusion of many interior confusing interior voices, the will of God his
Father.
Today, we need to take a lesson from the
temptation of Jesus. How can you and I
become the hero of our own interior lives?
How can we live with ourselves in such a way that we find God’s messages
leading us to relate our interior lives with our exterior lives in peaceful and
creative ways? How can we learn to
choose what is better for our lives over what appears to be merely good for our
lives?
We may feel good in our lives for not
killing, not stealing and not lying, in the juridical sense of those
activities. But where is the excess of
my lifestyle diminishing the lives of others?
Where is my excess a robbing of the bare minimum for others? Where is my failure to learn more allowing
me to simply live in “partial truths?”
Living in partial truths because of our refusal to learn is a different
sort of lie that we easily absolve our selves of.
What we can learn from the temptation of
Jesus is the continual internal dynamics from which can arise new paths of
excellence for us in our lives and surely those new paths of excellence include
the betterment for the people in this world.
We have begun the forty days of Lent. Let us see where the Spirit of God drives us
in these days. Let us confront all of
our good options in our lives that may be hindrances to what is better for our
life and our world. And let us find
God’s angels, God’s messengers, to help us choose what is better for us as we
are in the process of always remaking our lives through the transformation
known as repentance. Let us look to the
once tempted but now risen Christ who stands as symbol of each of us surpassing
our self in excellence in a future state.
Amen.
