Homily 1st Lent Sundat

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Fr. Raymond . . .
: Sunday, 26 February 2012, 14:19
Subject: DRIVEN BY THE SPIRIT

DRIVEN BY THE SPIRIT  (Mark 1:12 -15)

There are two key words in this short passage about Jesus’ temptation in the desert. The first is the word ‘driven’ and the second is the word ‘forty’.  The word driven is a very strong word: Jesus wasn’t just asked to go into the desert; he wasn’t just inspired, even commanded to go to the desert; he was driven, he was forced to go into the desert. There is something about the word ‘driven’ that implies a reluctance or  a fear on the part of Jesus.  There seems to be here a sort of foreshadowing of the Gethsemani experience for Him here.  We can almost hear the human nature of Jesus crying our here in much the same way as he did in Gethsemani:  ‘No Father, No. Please, No!  Let this ordeal pass from me!’  He had indeed to be ‘driven’ to go into that desert, that fearsome desert.  He was well aware of its significance for his mission.

Another episode in salvation history that’s surely related to this temptation of Jesus is the contrast between it and the temptation of the first Adam.  The first Adam’s temptation took place in a beautiful garden, the garden of paradise, and Adam failed and the paradise was turned into a wilderness, a wilderness of thorns and thistles.  But for Jesus, Our New Adam, his temptation took place, not in a garden, but in a wilderness, this wilderness that Adam’s fall had made of it.  But Jesus didn’t fail us. He triumphed, and his triumph over the tempter was destined to restore that wilderness into a New Garden, a Paradise, a Paradise of Grace.

 Now, if we come to consider the significance of the ‘forty days’.  The number 40 is one of the most significant and frequently occuring numbers in the history of God’s people.  From the 40 days and 40 nights of the deluge to the 40 years of wandering in the desert.  From the 40 days and 40 nights that Moses spent on the mountain receiving the commandments to the 40 days and 40 nights his spies spent reconnoitering the promised land.  And there are many other examples of this occurrence of the number forty in the OT. It seems to express the completion of a certain stage in the life of God’s people or the fullness of some aspect of their history.

The number 40 seems to have some primeval significance for our human nature. This may come from the fact that we spend the first forty weeks of our existence being formed in our Mother’s womb.  It is the very first and most fundamental stage of the existence of each and every one of us.

But to get back to Jesus forty days and forty nights in the desert --- We could well understand this as signifying an experience that should be part and parcel of the lives of each and every one of us.  We are all destined to be confronted by Satan in our own particular lives. We are all destined to be put to the test in difficult circumstances.

And, surely we can understand too from this story how God has compassion for us all in our struggle.  There is a beautiful and very meaningfulconclusion to this story too, a detail that we learn from Matthew’s account of it: there we read that after the temptation ‘the devil left him and angels came to minister to him’.

 And so, surely, we are all promised the comfort and support of God’s angels in our trials.   God is always ready, as the psalmist puts it: to give us joy to balance our afflictions.