Lent 1

Lent l (Mark 1:9-15) “He was tempted….”

Temptation comes to all. Temptation is the invitation to make choices from the place of separation from God.

There are three sources of temptation: the world, the flesh and the devil. The world is the surrounding culture. Culture is a set of inherited customs and values. The culture of First Century Israel was religious, legalistic, xenophobic and tribal. That was the default set of values and customs people at that time and place lived by.

The culture of 21^st America is secular, self-indulgent, prideful, materialistic and individualistic. That culture forms the default values and customs for those of us who were born and raised in the United States.

A default set of values and customs has the power of being self-evident. We grow to believe “this is just the way the world is” and “this is just who I am in this world.” If we live by the defaults of our culture we no longer respond to God, the world and other people as they are. We react from the demand that they should be a certain way.

The long history of the Bible is how God invites people to question these assumptions about life. Moses issued a set of values and standards everyone agreed to follow and then ignored. The prophets called people to remember the standards and to repent of how they ignored the standards or rebelled against the standards.

Jesus grew up in the context of what the prophets described as a stiff necked and rebellious society. The people did not make choices in union with God. They made choices from the values of their customs and traditions. The two are not necessarily the same. Jesus came to observe very early in his life on earth that what we say, what we believe and what we do are frequently inconsistent. Not only are we inconsistent in our thoughts, words and deeds we also ignore or resist God’s principles for life.

During Lent it is important to hear the word of God with new ears. It is important move into a fresh understanding of what God revealed through Moses and the prophets. It is important to see Jesus for who he is and not for who we want him to be in our secular, materialistic, self- indulgent culture.

The flesh refers to our desires. More specially, when the Bible speaks of the flesh as a source of temptation it refers to the distortion of our desires. Human desire is good. Human desire is also distorted by the pain of original sin we all inherit as human beings.

And so the desire for food is good. The distortion of that appetite to obsess with the quantity of food or unhealthy food like substances creates short term and long term problems. The same pattern holds true for all of our desires from the desire for love to the desire for self-preservation. The flesh tempts us to follow the distortions into short term immediate self-gratification at the expense of long term pain and suffering.

The third source of temptation is the devil, Satan. Most of us will never encounter the personal presence of Satan. He is a fallen Seraph class angel who through pride sees himself as equal and opposite to God. We as a species are beneath contempt for Satan. Nevertheless, Satan knows that God loves us and Satan hates what God loves.

Satan works in the world through deceit. The more carefully crafted the deceit the more effective it is to keep human beings lost in separation from God. If Satan cannot keep us from accepting our Heavenly Father’s Plan of salvation in Jesus Christ, his default strategy is to keep us frustrated, confused and in a state of conflict.

Satan tempted Jesus by offering him a set of problems and a set of solutions. The solutions all involved making a choice from the place of separation, which is to say original sin. Jesus did not commit actual sin and indeed could not commit actual sin because he did not inherit Original Sin. Jesus is the original pattern of human nature before Adam and Eve chose separation.

Within his own being Jesus is the unification of human nature and divine nature. In that union Jesus made all choices from the place of the divine nature. That place is universal and unconditional love. Jesus never had to ask himself: what’s in it for me? Jesus always prayed: Heavenly Father, not my will but Thy will be done. The source of that prayer is the sacred heart of Jesus - human love set free in the vast ocean of divine love.

This is the model for us to meet the temptations of the world culture, the appetites of the flesh and the subtle deceits of Satan. It is not just enough to have the Law of God written in a book. We must also ask the Holy Spirit to write the laws in our hearts.

Our goal during lent is to identify how the world, the flesh and the devil use the distortions in our mind, heart and will to choose sin. Once we do that, our next step is to ask for the divine grace to repent. When we repent we simply affirm that we agree with God in the matters of sin and virtue. We accept God’s definitions of reality. And then, we ask the Holy Spirt to help us make better choices.

Be assured, that sometimes this will mean contradicting what our culture expects. Sometimes this may seem like giving up a desire for a perceived benefit in order to enjoy a greater good. And, at all times this process requires a courageous commitment to truth to counteract Satan’s clever and subtle deceits.

Jesus was tempted yet never sinned. He live in union with Divine love.

We can overcome the temptation to sin and the pattern of sin we inherit as we make a real choice to enter daily into the Real Presence of God the Father, through a personal relationship with God the Son, by the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit.