Ps 51:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 17
Rm 5:12-19 or 5:12, 17-19
Mt 4:1-11
How do you deal with temptation? That's the personal challenge given to us by the Word of God on the first Sunday of Lent. And so we begin our journey with Jesus, traveling to the holiest place we can reach at this point in our lives.
This Lent is like no other Lent. Last year, you had different needs, different areas of growth, different levels of insight and understanding. Much has happened since then, and all of it is a preparation for what the Lord is going to do in your life now.
What victory do you need this year? What needs to be resurrected? To get there, your path will lead through the cross, into the tomb, and out into God's light where his love provides healing and new life.
During Lent – and every time we make sacrifices and connect our sufferings to the Passion of Christ – we follow Jesus to the cross and to resurrection. This requires accepting and embracing our own crosses, for the Calvary Road is the only way to reach the victorious new life that we yearn to experience.
If we want Easter to be more than just a holiday of pretty eggs, chocolate bunnies and big dinners, we have to make Lent more than just 40 days of enduring an annoying, obligatory sacrifice, eating meatless pizza on Fridays, and going to an occasional extra event at church. If we want to experience the power of resurrection, we have to experience the power of mourning and repenting from our sinfulness. In other words, we have to experience the powerlessness of death – the death of our selfishness, the death of our worldliness, the death of our behaviors that are not Christ-like.
Reflect & Discuss:
1. In the story from Genesis, what did Adam and Eve need to die to (let go of, put aside, reject) in order to resist the Original Sin? Why didn't they?
2. In the reading from Romans, we hear about the abundant grace and the gift of justification that Jesus provided to each of us when he died on the cross. How does this grace and justification give us life? In other words, how does God help us to resist sin?
3. Looking at the Gospel passage, what did Jesus have to die to in the desert so that he could say no to temptation?
Question for the Journey:
Name one thing you can do this week to die to self. How does that make it easier to resist sin? For example, think of good deed you can do that's the opposite of what your selfishness wants you to do.
Do you recall comedian Flip Wilson's famous phrase: "The devil made me do it!"? That line hits home because human beings often make excuses when we give in to temptation. But in reality, no one "makes" us sin we choose it, just as we freely choose to do good.
Today's Scriptures present Adam and Eve, faced with a choice for good or evil: They choose to reject God and give in to the temptation to "be like God"—in the words of the serpent-tempter.
Another temptation scene comes in the Gospel. This time, Jesus, facing the choice to accomplish his ministry in selfish, power-hungry ways, rejects the temptation and affirms his true identity as God's Son.
Our Christian identity is a choice we affirmed (or which was affirmed for us) at our Baptism. But we must re-affirm that choice again and again in the face of temptation.
It's fitting that the temptation scene in the Gospel is set in the desert. In the Bible, the desert is often a place of testing, of choices. The season of Lent is like a "spiritual desert" where we hope to rediscover our identification with Christ, leading to a renewal of Baptism at Easter. Let our choices this Lent be directed by the example of Jesus in the face of temptation.
Scripture:
•For if by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one person Jesus Christ overflow for the many. (Romans 5:15)
•Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry. The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God…” (Matthew 4:1-3a)
•The seven deadly sins are pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice (greed), gluttony and lust. Is anyone injured by these “deadly sins?”
•How are these sins different from the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes?
•Do these sins deaden the spirit to receive the gifts of God’s love?
For each person the movement away from the threat of enslavement to the capital sins will involve growth in some basic virtues: humility that recognizes God as the basic healer; patience with one’s own gradual but steady journey towards holiness; and compassion for the weakness of others. Although the complex reality that is sin cannot easily be fit into seven specific categories, the survival of capital sins as a spiritual theme points to the presence of patterns of evil that threaten to dissipate life in any age.
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