What is Lent?
Lent is a 40 day season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday. It’s a period of preparation to celebrate the Lord’s Resurrection at Easter. During Lent, we seek the Lord in prayer by reading Sacred Scripture; we serve by giving alms; and we practice self-control through fasting. We are called not only to abstain from luxuries during Lent, but to a true inner conversion of heart as we seek to follow Christ’s will more faithfully. We recall the waters of baptism in which we were also baptized into Christ’s death, died to sin and evil, and began new life in Christ.
But, please do not think that Lent is about doing so much for God, something extra for Him (which is very important!). Lent is about letting God do something extra for us and to remember what God has already done for us.
First Sunday of Lent
Jesus is tempted in the desert
One commentator on the Scripture suggests that this experience of Jesus being tempted would not have been included in the accounts of His life and ministry unless Jesus revealed this to some of his close followers. He is portrayed as vulnerable to the deceits of Satan. Why would Jesus go into the desert for a forty-day retreat after His baptism? It is the same reason why people go on retreat: to refocus on who they are, where they are going and how to get there. One’s perspective about life gets blurred by all the noise and hyperactivity of life. Jesus needed time to understand the revelation of his identity given by the voices of His Father at His baptism: “You are my beloved Son, my favor rests on you.”
- Jesus was tempted as we are. Temptations are not bad in themselves, but it is what we do with them that can help us turn to God or away from God. Do we see temptations as ways to turn to God rather than rely on our own resources?
- Do the temptations of Jesus seem different from the ways we are tempted or is there a similarity? Underneath the different temptations of Jesus, there is the invitation of Satan that He deny His identity as the Son of God. Are not our temptations an invitation to deny the kind of person we want to be and, instead, turn to unhealthy ways to satisfy ourselves?
- By resisting the temptations, Jesus chose to depend on His Father to satisfy his deepest hunger, to relate with others in an ordinary way and by not relying on reputation, power, and possessions. How do we satisfy our deepest hungers? Do we depend on prestige, possessions, and power to make ourselves acceptable to others?
- Are we going to use the forty days of lent as a retreat – taking time to be more reflective and prayerful?
So submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil,
and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners,
and purify your hearts, you of two minds.
Begin to lament, to mourn, to weep.
Let your laughter be turned into mourning
and your joy into dejection.
Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you.
James 4: 7-10
Fr. Tom