1st Sunday of Lent A - Homily 3

Homily 3 – 2011 

Well, we’re racing! We’re into Lent – a time, not so much of penance as of conversion.  Conversion – change, opening to changing, hoping for change.  To change not so much behaviour (that will follow), but my ever-growing sense of God.  Lent is an invitation to keep searching, searching to know God, to break open my constricting ideas about God and to be drawn more deeply into Mystery.  But there is a problem – bigger than me.  There is an inertia - not of my choosing, a confusion – that has always been there – something getting in the way.

Today’s First Reading spoke colourfully of the serpent.  The Second Reading spoke of sin (capital “S” Sin).  The Gospel used the graphic image of Satan.  The serpent planted desire, and muddied the waters: You will be like gods.  Sin brought death – the negation of truly living.  Satan offered himself for worship! - sowing confusion.  It’s a confusion we inevitably fall for.  So easily we confuse God with Satan! (or, is it more that we confuse God with ourselves?)

Perhaps, we can’t avoid it.  How else can we get a sense of God other than by reflecting on our experience, or accepting the fruit of others’ conclusions?  The meanings I attach to words like father, like love, like justice, and particularly the feelings the words trigger, very much depend on my past and present experience – my history.  I can’t see anyone other than through my own filters.  I see God through my filters.

The Hebrew word Satan means Accuser in English.  It is so easy, so usual for us, to get things so terribly wrong that we see God, essentially, as the accuser – focussed, on the one hand, on our guilts, our shame, our sin, or, on the other hand, counting our merits or measuring our goodness.

Certainly, sin is bad for us – it destroys us; it eats into our relationships; and undermines our communities.  God wants to free us from that – just as God wants to free us from wanting to count on our own merits and goodness.  God is not into assessing but setting free.  Sin doesn’t get in God’s way.  It gets in our way.  Our turning from sin doesn’t change God’s attitude towards us.  It changes our attitude to God.  Merits don’t persuade God to love us.  God can’t love us any more.  God loves us relentlessly, always, unconditionally.  Those of you who are happily married – those of you whose love has matured – know that that is the way even human love works.  Am I right? Right enough, I hope.

But life is an ongoing exploration into mystery, a moving beyond, a letting go – and I haven’t yet reached the end (and perhaps never will, even in eternity).  I’ll keep searching.  And that, to me, is what Lent is about – one more reminder to convert, to turn, to change and to go deeper. 

Today’s Gospel passage situates us in the days immediately preceding Jesus’ public life. He had just experienced that mysterious moment down by the Jordan river where John the Baptist had been at work. As if in answer to the plea made centuries beforehand by Isaiah: “Oh that you would split open the heavens and come down..”, as Jesus had come up out of the water, the “heavens suddenly opened” and Jesus saw “the Spirit of God descending … and coming down on him”. More than that, through the opened heavens a voice declared: “This is my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on him”.

What might it have been like for Jesus to hear that supernatural voice say of him: “You are my Son. I love you dearly. You delight my heart”?

He needed time — time and space and stillness — to allow the message to sink deeply into his heart and mind. He went out alone into the nearby Judean wilderness to be with “the Spirit of God” that he had seen “coming down on him” back at the river.