Lent

Lent is a period of 40 days which precedes Holy Week. Holy Week then culminates in the great feast of Easter. Lent is widely known as a time when people give something up, when they sacrifice something that they will miss a little during these 40 days. Others, however, take something up - like attending mass more frequently or volunteering in community activities and so on.

Of course Lent finds its basis in the New Testament. Jesus is driven, directly after his baptism by John in the Jordan, into the wilderness for 40 days and is there tempted by the devil to deny the mission which was entrusted to him, the mission which would define his very existence. The story of Jesus' time in the desert can be found in the Gospel of Matthew (Mt. 4: 1-11). This is a clever literary technique used by Matthew and is indeed the summation of the whole Christian life. From the very moment of our baptism into Christ, we too are constantly being tempted away. We are shown the attractions of secularism, the freedom of immoral lives without consequences and the temptations of intemperance constantly encircle us. Jesus' resistence to temptation finds beautiful expression at the closure of this story: "Then the devil left him, and the angels appeared and looked after him." This too, is the promise that awaits us when we experience those little triumphs over temptation. This is what Matthew is trying to tell his largely Jewish-Christian community who were being persecuted by traditional Jews and who were being expelled from their local synagogues. They were being tempted away from their Christian mission. Matthew aligns both their sufferings and their providence with those of Jesus in the desert.

Imagine that desert place - it is not hard to do because most of us find ourselves there from time to time. Imagine the howling of the wind around the tall and rough stones. Imagine at night how terrifying the shadows would have been. The light of the world struggled against those shadows to be a certain kind of Messiah. He ignored the Jewish expectation of the Messiah. The Jews were expecting a powerful, political leader who would vindicate them and elevate them as a people. This is not who Jesus was. He left these expectations with John the Baptist in the Jordan. The defeat of satan by Jesus in the desert in the Gospel of Matthew prefigures the defeat of sin and death by Jesus at the crucifixion. Instead of falling down to worship satan in the desert, instead of testing God and throwing himself off a cliff, Jesus is seen, towards the end of the Gospel to be lifted, raised, elevated under the veil of the crucifixion.

And yet that crucifixion, that suffering, that death was very real. We have ideas and images of Jesus, of God and of ourselves. Most of the time, none of them are accurate. Jesus had no illusions. He didn't try to be someone, he tried not to be someone, he tried not to be that expected Messiah.

The desert experience is about deprivation. This deprivation is remembered at Lent and symbolised through the different sacrifices we make. God promises no trial beyond our ability to endure. But we are a mortal, flawed and sinful people who make misery and suffering for ourselves. But beyond all that we live in the hope of immortality because we have been baptised into Christ and because in every desert experience we have, where there are demons and isolation, there is always the hope of God's angels.