First Sunday of Lent

On this first Sunday of Lent, the liturgy calls our attention to Jesus’ time of testing in the wilderness.  In these forty days of fasting and prayer in solitude, the Son of God recapitulates the 40-year journey of the people of God through the desert to the Promised Land.  The stories mirror one another: as the people pass through the Red Sea, so Jesus is baptized in the Jordan; as the people’s euphoria gives way to hunger, thirst, quarrelling and testing, so Jesus’ moment of felt communion with his Father gives way to obscurity, weakness and temptation.  This is our journey too, not only through Lent, but through life.
 
It seems to me that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament known in Hebrew as the Torah, is an extended account of the human condition.  Our story begins with the original goodness of creation and the intimacy of the human person with the Creator.  It continues with the fall and its repercussions for every generation, when trust was lost and so also intimacy, presence, and freedom.  We see God’s repeated attempts to refashion humanity after his own heart and design, to draw us back to himself first through the lives of particular men and women, and then through a chosen people.  Every year we get to revisit this story and reclaim it as our own.  Every year we find ourselves once again in the captivity of Egypt, where in spite of the bondage and oppression under which we labor, something in us knows that we are made for more than this.  We may be tempted to wallow in inertia, to think that change is too hard, too demanding, that it might even kill us.  But if we listen to the incessant call of God to freedom and more abundant life, we can find the courage to respond and there comes a moment when we can risk everything.  It is a moment of passage, in fear and trembling, with the waters of chaos as a wall to our left and our right.
 
We made it!  Our enemies lie dead on the seashore and here we are in this place of freedom, released from bondage by the power of our Deliverer, at peace now, leaning on our Beloved.  The call to the desert was a call to intimacy that proved irresistible:
“Therefore, I will now allure her,
    and bring her into the wilderness,
    and speak tenderly to her….
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
    as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.” (Hos 2:14-15)
But this is not the end of the story; it is just another beginning.  As we set our foot on the desert road, the wilderness begins to reveal its other face, its austere and all-demanding face.  We begin to realize what we did not allow ourselves to see at first: that we are in a place of nerve-wracking insecurity and breathtaking vulnerability.  We have fallen into the hands of the living God.  Everything’s fine, so long as we feel the hands, so long as we are suitably fed, watered and gainfully employed, so long as we seem to be in control.  The trial of the desert consists in the felt absence of God.  In the anguish of silence one is driven to find out if God really cares by pushing him to reveal himself, by trying to force his hand.  We grab, we backtrack, we waver, and we doubt, we quarrel, we test God.  This is what the Israelites did at Massah and Meribah.  It is the opposite of filial trust.
 
Tellingly, Jesus’ responses to the devil’s temptations are direct quotations from the book of Deuteronomy, which details the people’s rebellion:
“One does not live on bread alone.” (Lk 4:4, Dt 8:3)
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” (Lk 4:8, Dt 6:13)
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Lk 4:12, Dt 6:16)
God’s Son chose not grab something to fill his stomach, not to flatter his way to a false sense of security, not to cast himself down in perverse mockery of God’s apparent failure to care.  In this he chose to be the Son of God, and not anyone else’s son.  He accepted the vulnerability of the human condition, embracing it with total trust in his Father’s love.  In taking on himself our temptation, he lets us know that we are loved enough to pray with full conviction the words of Psalm 90: “My refuge, my stronghold, my God in whom I trust.”
 
Deuteronomy says of this God, that: “He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” (Dt 8:3)
How are we fed in the desert?  Where is our manna?  It is the Word of God.  As St Paul says, once again echoing Deuteronomy:
“The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.” (Rom 10:8, Dt 30:14)
The life-giving Word of God is there for us daily in liturgy and in lectio divina.  It is also offered to us in the particularly Benedictine Lenten practice of spiritual reading in common.  Today we each receive a book from the library to read during the days of Lent as our spiritual nourishment, our manna for the journey.  As we read together in the Scriptorium each morning, let us notice that we are being nourished, whether this manna is familiar and appetizing, or strange and a little tough.  Let us notice also that we gather this manna together and hold it in common.