We began Lent with the imposition of ashes on our forehead. A profound ritual reminding us of the mystery that we are living: our birth, death, and the entrance into life eternal. Being reminded of this mystery puts into bas relief the pilgrimage we are on. In this jubilee year of ‘hope’ Pope Francis titles his Lenten message: “Let us journey together in hope.” The Pope’s message circles around these three images: “to journey”, “to journey together”, “to journey together in hope”. I suggest that we take this as our Lenten theme: “to journey together in hope”.
The gospel reading always for the first Sunday of Lent is the temptations in the desert. After Jesus’ baptismal encounter with his Abba, he is ‘driven’ or ‘led’ into the desert by the Spirit. God is leading him, and perhaps he ‘knows’ he needs prayer, that he needs a lonely place apart from everyone and everything to understand interiorly, and to integrate what has just happened. His baptism has opened before him his mission…and he has heard these words “You are my beloved Son”. For any life changing event and ‘calling’, one needs time and space to digest and process it! Keep in mind Jesus is fully human so this encounter at the baptism is not something he easily integrated or perhaps even understood fully.
So, the Spirit drives Jesus into the desert…God knows what is needed next. There is no deepening of faith, no hope to blossom forth, without going into that solitary, seemingly empty place of silence. What will this bring Jesus? Why was he ‘driven’ into the desert after his baptism? He faces in the silence the ‘tempter’. This encounter, how Jesus meets it, what he experiences and learns from it will solidify his call, his mission. It also solidifies his relationship with his Father.
Fr. Simeon in his Ash Wednesday homily gave us three words to reflect on. I bring back two: “Now” and “Hidden.” The antiphon we chanted on Ash Wednesday, and we also heard in the second reading was “Behold, now is the day of salvation”. This ‘now’ is today. We make the choice to go to the desert, but it is God who is leading us there. It is God who is saying to us ‘Now is the time of your salvation’. A new opening in our lives, a conversion, a change, no matter how small is before us NOW.
Let us then go into the desert of our hearts, to that silent, hidden place where we ‘listen’, not to our incessant voices, not to the tempting voices, but to the small still voice of the Spirit. This ‘now’ partners well with ‘hidden’…Go to your secret room and there in that secret room pray to your Father…and the Holy One who meets you in that hidden place will ‘reward’, will bless you (Mt 6:5-6).
Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar writes in his commentary on Luke’s gospel: “The three verses with which Jesus counters the devil are not neatly memorized aphorisms but painfully acquired responses. In a higher sense one can call them an existential confession of faith” (Light of the Word, p.283). This prayer encounter in the desert seals Jesus’ covenant with God. He is led and tested to deepen this bond, this covenant of love which will from now on never leave him. This image of an ‘existential confession of faith’ is one that we need to hold close to our consciousness. On our ‘journey together in hope’, let us pray like Jesus ‘only God alone do I serve’…only God alone. Let our love bond with God in Jesus, become our daily confession of faith where we re-affirm whom and what we serve. St. Benedict in his Rule says that monastic life should always have a Lenten character about it” (ch 49). Perhaps this is the foundation of Benedict’s comment: that the Lenten character of our monastic lives is to deepen this confession of faith so that the many ways we are tested will find us placing God at the center of all that we are and do. How could we do otherwise? If we remember experientially the One who has loved us first…and this Divine love for us has become an irrevocable bond, a covenant that will never be broken.
Sr. Kathy DeVico, Abbess
Chapter Talk – First Sunday of Lent – March 9, 2025, cycle-C
