If you had not realized that you were in Lent, you most certainly will realize it on Sunday morning. The haunting images that surround our lessons are a surreal reminder of those words spoken yesterday, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”, are true to the core. Ash Wednesday is the day when we name our mortality, when we acknowledge that we are creatures who are susceptible to the ways and wiles of the world and who succumb to their clarion call each and every day that we live. Ash Wednesday begins our sacred journey to the empty tomb.
Lent is a time for us to remember that like Adam and Eve, we are naked before God. It is a time for us to be aware of the voices that swirl around us—the voices of doubt, shame, anger, hate, blaming, disapproval, or condemnation and then to name them for what they are… temptations that draw us away from the words of our baptism, “You are marked as Christ’s own, the Beloved of God forever”. We remove the masks of Mardi Gras to make way for the ashes of Lent. Without our masks—made of our desire for position, wealth, and power, we stand in our birthday clothes of vulnerability, humility, and gratitude—walking the Way with Christ.
So we begin this season of Lent with Jesus being led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. In the typical fashion of Matthew there are more parallels in this story than we can count. It parallels the forty years of the Israelites sojourn in the desert. The language of purpose, “to be tempted”, parallels the purposeful language just before—“to be baptized”. The use of the temptations as a symbolic sort of overview of Jesus’ life—an overview meant to prove that he is the Son of God—is paralleled by the stories that mark Jesus’ ministry throughout the gospel. “Turn this stone into bread”, “ask God to protect you”, “worship the world”, says the tempter. All of the taunts are meant to challenge or to trap him to give some sort of a sign that he is God’s son. Questions designed to trap him into blasphemy.
Like Jesus, we live with temptation each and every day of our lives. When we feel the world condemning us, telling us what we should or should not do or say or worship, we are tempted to take the easy way out—building ourselves up at the expense of another—tearing down my friend or relative’s worth so that I might feel more powerful myself. Just as Jesus was tempted, we are tempted too.
So on this first full day, I invite you into a Holy Lent. One where the temptations we know all too well do not determine the person we are, but are named and considered and put aside to make way for God’s love and mercy and acceptance. Blessed Lent to all…
Buen Camino,
Mother Jane
Image attribution: Tissot, James, 1836-1902. Jesus Carried up to a Pinnacle of the Temple, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.
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