Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement
Lent 1 C - March 6, 2022
To the God who was, who is, and who will be forever. Amen.
Even if your glass is always half full and you wake up each morning with a big smile on your face ready to conquer the coming day, there will no doubt be times in life when you’ll find yourself where the light has dimmed and where the oppressive threat of doom closes in upon you.
The ebb and flow of life has its own logic. As a person of faith, though, I refuse to believe that this logic is in any way outside the influence of God. On the contrary, no matter how impersonal, sporadic, chaotic, or even cruel it may sometimes seem, my faith assures me that God is imminently present and at work in every ebb and flow of life’s journey working all things together for good.
In today’s Gospel reading we find Jesus brought by the devil to the mountaintop of Jerusalem, indeed, even to the pinnacle of the temple. The pinnacle of the temple, scholars suggest, is likely a reference to the southwest corner of the temple mount. It’s the location overlooking the Kidron Valley where the priest would blow the trumpet to call the Jews to worship. It was the place where the divine called out to the human and where both would commune together. So, when the devil tries to get Jesus to force God’s hand by saving him after throwing himself off the pinnacle of the temple, he is testing Jesus’ faith–seeking to sow doubt into Jesus’ heart and mind about who he is as God’s Beloved and thereby thwarting his mission in destroying evil and ushering in God’s kingdom of peace where heaven and earth are one.
As we should recall, the three tests of Jesus follow immediately after his baptism where God declares that Jesus is “my beloved in whom I am well pleased,” followed by the genealogy where Jesus’ identity is reinforced: he is not only the son of Joseph, son of Eli, he is also son of Adam, son of God. Everything Jesus will do from here on out will flow from this intimate knowledge, or you can say “faith,” that he is infinitely loved by the one he calls “Abba.”
The devil knows this and so seeks to rupture the relationship by sowing seeds of doubt, “If you are the Son of God….” If he can only cause Jesus to doubt that he is God’s Beloved, then maybe Jesus would, when things got tough, lose faith and take matters into his own hands. The text leaves us wondering, “Will Jesus prove to be another Abraham who doubted God’s fidelity and power to save, or will his inner conviction reveal a different kind of faith and a new kind of union between human and divine?” The text won’t answer this question until the story has reached its end and not before Jesus’ faith is tested over and over again.
Lent, like the spiritual life in general, is all about this journey of faith and how it allows the good in us to overcome the evil. And today’s lessons show us that the only way that progress is made, that we become more and more grounded in our identity as God’s beloved and so fulfill our mission of conquering evil is by undergoing the testing of our faith. As it was for Jesus, so it is for us. Faith not tried is faith not realized.
At our baptism, we are all made daughters and sons of God. Eternity now dwells within us or as St. Paul’s says, “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” The reason we come to a monastery is to allow this truth to become more apparent…to silence the chaos of the visible which is transitory and passing away and to allow the hidden, eternal truth of God’s word to be heard and believed once again…or maybe for the first time.
But, even then, it’s often not until we have some sort of crisis of faith that we begin to finally ask the deeper questions that can awaken within us who, in fact, we are in God and reveal to us that God is not aloof or distant to the chaos of our lives, no matter how much it may seem, but is right in the middle of it seeking to remind us of what we have perhaps forgotten, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
As a human family we find ourselves at this particular historical moment in a dark valley where the oppressive weight of doom presses down upon us in unprecedented ways. For many…we find ourselves in a crisis of faith. Two years in a global pandemic which has claimed nearly 6 million lives. Ecological disaster that now seems to be irreparable, according to the latest UN report released last week. And now the devastating war in Ukraine that has the world on edge.
If there is any one temptation today that we must guard against, it would have to be the temptation to despair. But let us remember that this dark valley is part of life’s ebb and flow and that this temptation is better understood as a test…a trial of faith…God using it to waken us ever more to the divine presence and power at work right in the midst of all the mess and seeking to create something beautiful out of the rubble.
Luke concludes his account of the testing of Jesus by saying, “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until the opportune time.” That “opportune time” points to the days leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion when the devil will appear again now in Judas to betray his Master with a kiss and when the devil will test Peter and the other disciples as he seeks to sift them like wheat. But it also points to a time when Jesus will mount another mountain and confront the devil face to face and receive one final test, this time through the voice of a criminal hanging beside him, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us as well.”
Jesus refuses one last time to force God’s hand and instead, this time, from the pinnacle of the cross takes the leap throwing himself in total faith and abandonment into God’s embrace…“Into your hands I commit my spirit.” And yet, precisely there, when all hope seemed lost and the earth was engulfed in deep darkness, the light of the resurrected Christ made of death not an end to dread but a means for an ultimate transformation.
Let us, then, be resolute and fearless in our Lenten pilgrimage to Calvary. The Holy Spirit goes before us leading us through the dark valley. There will be trials. Maybe we’ll even be sifted like wheat. But there are also precious lessons to be learned, perhaps the most important being learning to hear the constant whisper, “You are my Beloved, with you I am well pleased.” May we daily awaken with our inner eyes and ears wide open and ready ourselves with constant vigilance, always guarding against despair, always choosing the path of faith.
Terrence Malick’s 2001 film The Tree of Life begins, “The nuns taught us that there were two ways through life…the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself; get others to please it too. It likes to lord it over them; to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy, while all the world is shining around it…and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you whatever comes.”
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