As we prepare to enter the season of Lent, a season in the Church’s liturgical year, we seek through the spiritual discipline of our heightened prayer, fasting and almsgiving to strengthen our relationship with the Lord.
Down through the ages, the season of Lent has always captured our hearts, and during Lent many people engage in additional faith practices and spiritual disciplines. This inherent tendency in us to want to engage in constructive spiritual practices during Lent is a wonderful way to respond to all of the opportunities that the season of Lent presents to us.
When we undertake these spiritual disciplines during Lent, we are called to a renewed and heightened awareness of the following: our need for God, our responsibilities to God, and the many ways that God renews his love for us with the passing of each day.
Our spiritual discipline during the season of Lent hopefully engenders within all of us a desire to follow more closely after the Lord as we prepare to recall his life-giving death and glorious resurrection, and then to live our lives in accordance with what this self-sacrificing love for us on the part of Jesus Christ calls us to embrace.
Our readings for the approaching First Sunday of Lent call us each year to reflect upon the whole dynamic of temptation and sin in our lives. The encounter between Jesus and Satan in the desert, just after Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan, sets the tone for us with regard to what is to be found at the very heart of the season of Lent: returning to living the call of our Christian baptism.
Immediately after his baptism, Jesus enters the desert to be tempted to sin by Satan. It is a classic Scripture passage that is heard each year on the first Sunday of Lent. Each one of us knows and struggles with the power and reality of temptation and sin in our lives. The reason that we know the strength of sin and temptation is because we also know the dignity and joy of our baptism. Sin and temptation call us away from that which we know we are and that which we know to be right and true. Temptation and sin attempt to eclipse and remove from us our dignity as sons and daughters of God born in baptism.
The three temptations of Jesus strike at the very heart of his knowledge and acceptance of who he is. The formula of the temptations nips at his self-knowledge and establishes itself on a weakened and conditional understanding of who Jesus is as Son of God.
The condition presented by Satan is a blatant and direct one: “If you are the Son of God … then … .”
Within the context of this condition, the temptations presented to Jesus base themselves on the human vices to be selfish (the first temptation), to test God (the second temptation), and to fall into idolatry and false worship (the third temptation).
As was the effort regarding Jesus, temptation and sin also attempt to destroy our own self-knowledge, the knowledge we have of how we are called to live as baptized sons and daughters of God. Unlike Jesus, we repeatedly fall into the traps of selfishness, testing God, and idolatry.
In his victory over the temptations of Satan, Jesus has set before us the model of what we desire to achieve during this Lent, which is freedom from the power of sin in our lives. But even as we stumble into temptation and sin over and over again, we are not without hope. The actions of Jesus Christ and his own victory over temptation, sin, suffering, and death bring about the reconciliation of humankind with God and reverse the power of sin and temptation to hold us in their power.
Having been restored to right relationship with God in Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity now to become the very holiness of God. Through the obedience of Jesus Christ and in his victory over temptation, we have been saved from the power of sin.
I hope and pray that the season of Lent will be a renewed opportunity for us all to be reinvigorated by the dignity of our baptism and to seek by what we say and do to return to the promises of our God.
Let us pray for one another during this season of Lent, and always!
Comfort My People — Season of Lent
As we prepare to enter the season of Lent, a season in the Church’s liturgical year, we seek through the spiritual discipline of our heightened prayer, fasting and almsgiving to strengthen our relationship with the Lord.
Down through the ages, the season of Lent has always captured our hearts, and during Lent many people engage in additional faith practices and spiritual disciplines. This inherent tendency in us to want to engage in constructive spiritual practices during Lent is a wonderful way to respond to all of the opportunities that the season of Lent presents to us.
When we undertake these spiritual disciplines during Lent, we are called to a renewed and heightened awareness of the following: our need for God, our responsibilities to God, and the many ways that God renews his love for us with the passing of each day.
Our spiritual discipline during the season of Lent hopefully engenders within all of us a desire to follow more closely after the Lord as we prepare to recall his life-giving death and glorious resurrection, and then to live our lives in accordance with what this self-sacrificing love for us on the part of Jesus Christ calls us to embrace.
Our readings for the approaching First Sunday of Lent call us each year to reflect upon the whole dynamic of temptation and sin in our lives. The encounter between Jesus and Satan in the desert, just after Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan, sets the tone for us with regard to what is to be found at the very heart of the season of Lent: returning to living the call of our Christian baptism.
Immediately after his baptism, Jesus enters the desert to be tempted to sin by Satan. It is a classic Scripture passage that is heard each year on the first Sunday of Lent. Each one of us knows and struggles with the power and reality of temptation and sin in our lives. The reason that we know the strength of sin and temptation is because we also know the dignity and joy of our baptism. Sin and temptation call us away from that which we know we are and that which we know to be right and true. Temptation and sin attempt to eclipse and remove from us our dignity as sons and daughters of God born in baptism.
The three temptations of Jesus strike at the very heart of his knowledge and acceptance of who he is. The formula of the temptations nips at his self-knowledge and establishes itself on a weakened and conditional understanding of who Jesus is as Son of God.
The condition presented by Satan is a blatant and direct one: “If you are the Son of God … then … .”
Within the context of this condition, the temptations presented to Jesus base themselves on the human vices to be selfish (the first temptation), to test God (the second temptation), and to fall into idolatry and false worship (the third temptation).
As was the effort regarding Jesus, temptation and sin also attempt to destroy our own self-knowledge, the knowledge we have of how we are called to live as baptized sons and daughters of God. Unlike Jesus, we repeatedly fall into the traps of selfishness, testing God, and idolatry.
In his victory over the temptations of Satan, Jesus has set before us the model of what we desire to achieve during this Lent, which is freedom from the power of sin in our lives. But even as we stumble into temptation and sin over and over again, we are not without hope. The actions of Jesus Christ and his own victory over temptation, sin, suffering, and death bring about the reconciliation of humankind with God and reverse the power of sin and temptation to hold us in their power.
Having been restored to right relationship with God in Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity now to become the very holiness of God. Through the obedience of Jesus Christ and in his victory over temptation, we have been saved from the power of sin.
I hope and pray that the season of Lent will be a renewed opportunity for us all to be reinvigorated by the dignity of our baptism and to seek by what we say and do to return to the promises of our God.
Let us pray for one another during this season of Lent, and always!
A Time to Speak — Why be a Catechist?