First Sunday of Lent (B-2006): Crushed

(Mark 1:12-15)

(Msgr. Magee did not preach today, but offers these reflections instead)

It is likely that the desert into which Jesus was driven by the Spirit was the desert of Judea, to the east and south-east of Jerusalem, and to the west and north-west of the Dead Sea.

This area is not a desert like the Sahara, with vast and desolate regions of sand. It is more like a wilderness or steppe in which vegetation is not abundant but adequate for sheep and goats.

Streams and rivers do not flow through it, but there are cisterns of water here and there. Moreover, it is the habitat of “wild beasts” such as lions, wild asses and jackals.

The height of this wilderness of Judea varies greatly, with an altitude of 3,346 feet above sea-level at its highest point near Mount Hebron and down to 1,312 feet below sea-level near the Dead Sea.

The Spirit had just descended in bodily form (a dove) on Jesus in his baptism by John in the Jordan. Jesus had just been deeply reassured by his Father of his divine identity, “You are my Son, the Beloved.”

We might say that Jesus, newly come from Galilee to the Jordan, aware that the mission of his cousin John was about to give way to his own, is filled with zeal, with the eagerness of someone at their peak, almost impatient to set forth and conquer.

This feeling of power in Jesus is conveyed by the evangelist Mark when he speaks of Jesus being “driven” into the desert by the Spirit.

His zest for achieving the will of his Father was almost uncontainable. He was “bursting with the Spirit.”

But Jesus knew that the real enemy of his mission, that is, of the will of God, was not flesh and blood.

Nor was that enemy at work only then, when Jesus began his mission.

No, the ancient and primeval opposition to God reached back to a “moment” that was not a moment, in the sense that it preceded the beginning of human history.

Scripture tells us very little about that moment, but it does reveal enough for us to understand its core meaning.

Before God consummated the work of creation by creating male and female, he had already created the angelic order.

The angels, too, like mankind and before it, had to make a choice: whether to accept freely their nature as created beings, or whether to reject freely that God, not they themselves, was the origin of their being.

To put it differently, would they seek their fulfillment in God or in themselves?

Revelation tells us that some submitted freely to the love of the Creator, while others did not, chief among them Lucifer, the “bearer of light” who, paradoxically, and much to the consternation of God, freely became the Prince of Darkness.

From that “moment”, the mysterious and contentious relationship between Satan and God has been played out in the rest of the order of creation, in all time and in all space.

Satan’s detestation of God becomes his detestation of all that God created and in particular of man and woman, the apex of creation.

Satan wasted no time when man and woman first came to the awareness of God and of themselves in relation to God.

He cleverly inserted himself into it by lyingly suggesting that God’s test of mankind’s willingness to accept its nature as created was actually an act of jealousy by God: by that test, insinuated Satan, God wanted to make sure that man and woman did not “steal” his divinity, but remained at a distance from Him, as if God were afraid of his creature.

Man’s and woman’s obedience to the voice of Satan wrought greater destruction in the universe than any other cataclysm that has ever taken place or will ever take place.

By contaminating the apex of creation with his own poisonous jealousy, Satan turned the universe in on itself, dividing it from God and effectively setting it on the path to utter self-destruction.

Satan is the Destroyer, the Father of Lies, the Divider (“diabolos”), the Father of Death.

But God was not to be thwarted, nor his love for creation frustrated.

So much did he love us that he gave his only Son.

The Devil himself could never have imagined the risk, the daring initiative that God would undertake to reverse the logic of destruction which infested creation.

That reversal would restore obedience where there had been disobedience and it would restore life where there had been death. Even more astonishingly, obedience and life would be restored precisely in the submission of the Eternal Son to death itself.

His death would be the death of death, because in Him there was no disobedience, no sin and therefore no foothold for death.

That death of death is nothing other than the Resurrection, the definitive victory of the battle that had been raging between God and Lucifer from before history began.

And so today’s Gospel has us gaze upon the Son in a place of outward barrenness in which Christ’s final victory over Satan is anticipated.

Satan had picked on the easy target of our humanity once he was “thrown out of heaven.” Now, the Son, clothed in that same humanity unmasks the self-serving deceit of Satan by rebutting his temptations with the Word of God.

Christ’s long struggle with the Devil in the wilderness enables him to gain first-hand experience of both the weakness of the human condition and the calculating subtlety of the Devil’s temptations.

For, although he was the Son of God, Jesus learnt obedience through these trials. He was tempted in every way that we are, but through prayer, through suffering, through tears, he did not sin.

He outwitted the destructive logic of Satan with the recreating logic of the Cross.

The essence of Satan’s tempting of Jesus was the same as the essence of his temptation of Adam and Eve.

It was to use the power and resources of one’s own being to assert oneself over against God.

It was to dominate God rather than to serve him; to command God rather than to obey him; to love self as one’s ultimate goal and to despise the One who is (or “claims to be”) one’s destiny; to affirm self as absolute and thus to proclaim the death of God.

All temptation ultimately has its rotten core in self-exaltation at the expense of God.

The Devil very cleverly tries to dress it up. He skillfully manipulates the goodness of creation to attract our wills in a disordered way, and once we taste the beauty that comes from God, we taste with it, in disguised form, the poison of sin and death.

Satan wants to recreate the sinner in the image and likeness of himself: he wants to make him jealous of God, angry at and rejecting of God, destructive of God’s work, distorting of God’s Word and Will, absorbed in self-concern, expert in lying, divider of hearts and relationships and ecstatic in the madness of self-adoration.

The Devil seeks to make the sinner a caricature of self, a cynical mimic of what God truly wants him to be.

The Devil wants God to look at man and hear him say, not “I adore you!”, but “I laugh at you!”

And the Devil wanted this to happen above all to Jesus Christ.

For this reason, not only was Jesus tempted as we are, but much more so than we will ever be. For him, the Devil spared no trick, no treachery, no tactic.

So, we must not consider ourselves as more subject to temptation than Christ.

And because Christ crushed the serpent, we can have every confidence that we too will conquer any and every temptation that comes our way.

Christ’s victory in the wilderness anticipates his victory on the Cross.

His return from the wilderness, once John had been arrested, to proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven anticipates his glorious Resurrection and the power given to the Church to proclaim the Gospel, free from the fear of Satan and death.

Our problem as individuals and as communities is that we allow Satan still to wield power over us as if Christ had not conquered.

When we sin, we are inclined to let the Devil say to us, “You see? I am stronger. You will never make it. You might as well give up. Go on, feel bad, feel the heavy guilt. Or, if you want free of it, just give in to it and deny that you have sinned. Why play the game of looking for forgiveness? Forgiveness is a joke! Sin is a joke! There is no sin! Do what you want and be damned! Shake off the shackles of priests, Church, confession, morality! It’s all a way of controlling you. Free yourself! Be who you really want  to be ....”

This same sweet-talker will turn up on the Day of Judgment and say to God, “I accuse, I accuse, I accuse! This person has sinned in all these ways.” Then he will list your sins, and you will say to the Devil, “But you told me that you did not believe in sin, that it was all a joke ....”

And he will reply, “You took the advice of a liar?”

Instead, my friends, let us listen only to the voice of God which he makes resonate in the teaching of his Church.

When you sin, confess it and thus be rid of it and all the entanglements that go with it.

Do not wallow in self-pity, for it will only drag you under further still.

Do not let the awareness of your sin oppress you to the point of either moral suicide or religious apostasy.

If you sin, turn immediately to the Lord and say, “Lord, the one you love is ill. Bring me to the healing of absolution. And until I come to it, let the anticipation of it already relieve me of my sorrow and my shame.”

Let the act of contrition be at hand in your mind and heart, that it may give you encouragement.

Inform yourself of where you can receive absolution in case you commit mortal sin. In the case of venial sin, seek out the Holy Eucharist which has the power to forgive those sins.

Do not dally in sin.

Do not give it one precious millimeter of your heart for it will quickly metastasize and eat it out.

Cultivate a deep, warm and personal relationship with the Lord; seek friendship and support among fellow Catholics; build strong and holy relationships with those around you and with the saints above you and the holy souls beneath you.

Keep the Holy Name of Jesus on your lips, mutter and mumble it under your breath.

Live your conscious life knowing that He lives it with you, in you. Say with Paul, “I live this mortal life, but my real life is the faith I have on the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me: I do not live, Christ lives in me.”

Do not confuse temptation with sin.

Do not let the Devil convince you that, because you have been tempted, you have sinned.

True, temptation can leave you with the “smell” of sin around you, but dispel it with the odor of praise and thanksgiving to God who has given you the grace to resist it.

Do not fear temptation; do not fear the Devil. Stand up to them, strong in faith and they will run far away from you.

As Pope Benedict recently said, the moment of temptation is not the moment to enter into an academic reflection on why one is being tempted; no, it is the moment to cry out, “Lord Jesus! Save me or I perish!”

As the author of the “Cloud of Unknowing” puts it, “beat back the Devil with the Name of Jesus.”

Let temptation cast you into the arms of Christ, confessing your fragility but also your unlimited trust in his power.

In the desert, the angels attended to Jesus. In temptation, you can also call on their ministry, for they know what Satan is made of – he too is an angel.

Finally, let the Immaculate Mother draw close to you. She too must have been sorely tempted in her life, just like her Immaculate Son.

The Devil is terrified of her, because he knows her power of persuasion with Jesus to make our hearts immaculate too.

Let us, then, be “terrorizers” of the Devil by invoking her help. With her, we will crush his head and send him back to where he belongs: in hell and not in the hearts of the children of God.

We would have reason to fear temptation if we had to rely only on ourselves.

But in fact, we have no such reason.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the winds and heavy seas of temptation are but shadows through which we must come to inexorable victory in the Lion of Judah, the Alpha and the Omega, the Valiant Warrior, the Bright Morning Star.

Temptation? Bring it on, and let the Devil be prepared yet again for crushing defeat!

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, March 5^th, 2006