Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve
The First Sunday in Lent - March 9, 2025
Lent is the summons to renewal, repentance, and transformation. And whether we have observed Lent for decades or this is our first time, the invitation is the same - examine ways of being that are incomplete, inadequate, dead, and go deeper. We begin at the beginning: what is the spiritual journey? What is life in God? Is it the pursuit of a state of blissful separation from the slings and arrows of lesser existence? Is it an escape plan from trials, suffering, anxiety? Is the purpose of gathering here to be protected from all that happens outside these walls, enclosed safely and securely in God’s care, even if for an hour? Are we escaping something or changing something? Are we being comforted or empowered? And as we look at the state of the country, do we circle the wagons or storm the gates?
The life of Jesus of Nazareth was neither withdrawal nor attack, which were the dominant strategies of his day as well as ours. He did not flee the realities of life under Roman occupation. He did not align with the zealots who fought it. His life is a new thing, a new template for human life as trust in God which he called the kingdom or reign of God. His temptations in the wilderness have the power to reorient us out of the twin dangers of denial and enmeshment.
The wilderness is the place of exposure, vulnerability, wildness. In the Bible, the outside is often a symbol of what is going on inside. Trust in God is summoned in the raw, untamed place of the land and the heart. This is not a comfortable retreat that is interrupted by the pesky presence of the adversary. Conscious and prayerful solitude in God’s presence brings up temptations. Presence is a free choice and temptation accompanies all free choices. There is no freedom without the presence of temptation. Compulsion is not freedom. Authentic presence to God in myself is chosen, never automatic. Real choice by definition includes the option of saying, “no” to that presence. So the option of resisting God, of avoiding God, of going unconscious rather than being present to God must appear if the “yes” to God is to be authentic. We can discern from the reading that Jesus was authentically present to God because he was tempted.
I do not imagine that a being with horns and a pitchfork appeared to him in the wilderness and began to offer him something appealing. The temptations came from his own conscience. It somehow occurred to him that he could change stones to bread or rule the earth or perform some spectacular sign to impress the masses. These ideas appealed to him. In his wrestling with the nature of his message, the nature of authentic love and humility, of power and transformation, the alternatives appear. Why not change the stones or worship the devil or throw himself off the temple? Good questions. Jesus faced the temptations as temptations. He related to them, not from them. He did not avoid or attack. He discerned and made a choice.
What is new in Jesus is the source and nature of his renunciation of the temptations. The gospel gives us Jesus’ reply to these thoughts. Jesus does NOT say, “I can’t change these stones to bread because that would be wrong. I am not allowed to do that. I am not bad, but good, and I must, must make good choices at all times, no matter what, no matter how hungry I am.” In reply to this and the other two temptations, he recalls something greater than what the devil offers. He rejects the temptations because they are illusory. He can see that they are both appealing and illusory. The temptations are a quick fix, but they are too small, too transitory. Jesus is committed to cosmic, eternal things. In renouncing temptation, he affirms who he is - he chooses to be himself. He is the faithful and obedient Son, and from that identity he discerns and chooses. He does not become himself because he resists the temptation. He resists because he knows who he is.
This manner of understanding the inner meaning of the story makes it applicable to us. For those of us who are good, moral, churchgoing types, our temptations are probably not going to come as theft, robbery, assault, murder, adultery, etc…. Our temptations will usually come in more subtle and venial kinds of sin: inordinate pleasure, greed, materialism, judgment, self-righteousness, apathy, coldness of heart, failure to love as we could. Remember that in prayer is temptation. In temptation is the awakening to the choice of our identity.
We face our temptations as temptations, not denying or running away, not averse to the wounded parts of ourselves, but facing all that we are. You and I have sinned in part because the sin provided something that appealed to us, some means of getting something we wanted. It worked, for some brief moment, anyway. And so we have violated ourselves and one another and rejected God’s love. The will to act contrary to God, which is contrary to ourselves, resides within us. I am not wholehearted all the time. I am good at inventing temptations for myself. I have no problem rationalizing my way into why the temptation is actually a good idea. The temptation sounds just fine. I sometimes want to be someone else, with more power and autonomy, access to the quick fix and the instant gratification, especially if there is a chance I can get away with it.
We can avoid temptation - at least most of them. It is possible, but costly. We can choose to repress our human desires, disengage from the responsibilities of freedom and choice, find false solace in a pseudo-spirituality of legalism and denial. This is the core temptation of good people - to fixate on our own self-image of goodness to such an extent that we lose contact with the potential for sin, and so lose our freedom. It is possible to look and even outwardly act holy, but not be fully human. What this dangerous path denies is the deeper truth under the temptation. Because we become our choices, our individually custom-fitted temptations are clues into who we are and must continue to choose to be. We do not grow in holiness by becoming less human, less free, but by freely choosing to trust God in the face of temptation because that is who we are.
Jesus as the model fully-human One obeyed the Spirit and went into the wilderness. He faces temptation as the obedient Son. Because he knows he is the beloved, he chooses to act as the beloved. Our wilderness temptings will expose our false identities and confront us with the full reality of what it means to be human. Denial and avoidance is a refusal to be fully human. The presence of temptation does not make us less human. Temptation awakens us to the cost of freedom. Ignoring our sinful desires does not make them go away. It is not sinful to think about what I could get by sinning. A good self check-in question is, “what do I want?” For Jesus, the answers were bread, power, and fame. Now ask, “what do I want under what I want?” What is the gold under the temptation? For Jesus, the deeper commitment was fellowship and obedience to his Father through self-giving, sacrificial love. And because he knew and was united to that, he could renounce bread, power, and fame. Fear can be converted into faithful service. Lust into healthy intimacy. Greed into vulnerable simplicity. Vengeance into prayer for enemies and wrongdoers. What do I want under what I want?
The wilderness is the space to undergo the stripping of our illusions and the unmasking of our false self-images. We neither withdraw nor attack. In facing our full humanity, we can choose to be fully ourselves. In this stripping, God gives us back to ourselves in full divine image - made of love and blessing while also capable of hate and cursing, made to reflect glory, yet often choosing to deny that glory - and in it all never separated from the love that sees and knows us. Give us the grace, Lord Christ, to be real and truly who we are and the power to always choose to be who you have made us to be. Amen.
