First Sunday of Lent - Traditional Latin Mass
/Dominica I in Quadragesima (Mass of the 1962 Missal)
26 February 2023
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST. AMEN.
The Gospel of the first Sunday of the Season of Lent places before us Our Blessed Lord’s journey into the desert from the account of St. Matthew. Soon after his baptism, whereby his identity as the Beloved Son is revealed, our Lord goes out into the wilderness of the desert to prepare for his saving mission. The trip to the desert is not an insignificant detail and it is not a random journey. Rather, it is the Spirit that leads our Lord into the desert to take on the Devil.
Perhaps it strikes us as curious that the very Spirit of God, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, would lead the Son into the terrain of the prince of this world. But it is for a holy purpose. That purpose can give us focus for what Lent should be for us.
Our Lord’s appearance in the desert can serve to call to mind the desert wanderings of the Exodus. God was doing something important and salvific in the life and history of Israel and he was doing so in the unforgiving wilderness. Is this not the challenge for every life of faith? We become focused on the desert, where there is dryness and difficulty and suffering in our life and we become so nearsighted in our misery that we can no longer see the overarching narrative, that God is acting and doing something to bring about His purposes. As was the case in the Exodus and so many other instances of the number forty in the Scriptures, so here with our Lord’s forty days and nights in the desert, we have a time of testing of faith and a time of purification to lead to greater strength in battle. Likewise for us, our symbolic forty days of Lent is a time of testing and a time of purification. The goal is that our faith become stronger as we become more and more purified from sin.
Our Lord has a full human nature united to his full divine nature. After forty days and forty nights of fasting, he would have been very hungry and very weak. Think of how unprepared we can be when it comes to fasting for just one day on Ash Wednesday! The battle our Lord faced was inconceivable to our paltry penances. In that immense weakness the Devil, the opportunist that he is, came to tempt the Lord. And the three temptations presented by the Devil mark the classic temptations that theologians have noted as part of man’s fallen nature. That classic formulation of temptation is that man’s downfall is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. St. John the Apostle and Evangelist shows just how ancient this formulation is when he warns not to love the things of the world and writes in his First Letter, chapter 2, verse 16: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.”
The Devil’s first temptation refers to the lust of the flesh, that is, to the desires of the flesh, of the body, to pleasures of whatever kind. Our Lord is hungry and the temptation is to fill his belly and to give himself the pleasure and satisfaction of eating, to respond to the desire of the flesh for food by turning stones into bread. Keeping with St. John and the ordering sequence of the classic formulation of the threefold temptation, we’ll jump to the third temptation from the Devil in the Gospel selection today. The lust of the eyes is the desire to possess and to take by whatever means necessary. In the third temptation the Devil shows our Lord all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. The Devil has a certain dominion over this world. But the Lord has come to save the world, to pull it from the Devil’s grasp and to claim its proper ownership by God. By offering the Lord all the kingdoms of the world, the Devil is tempting the Lord to gain possession of the souls he has come to save, but to do so – and here is the critical difference – to do so without suffering and without the Cross, but by worshipping the Devil himself. And finally, the pride of life takes us back to the second temptation listed by St. Matthew in the Gospel selection. Here the Devil tempts the Lord to show Himself for who He is as God and to do so in a very public way from the height of the Temple. The Devil suggests that the Lord throw himself down to demonstrate his identity by means of the angels who would come to prevent his fall.
The Church places this episode before us at the start of Lent to show us that the Lord is recapitulating – and doing so successfully – the temptations of Adam and Eve and the temptations of Israel in the desert of the Exodus. Where Adam’s sin turned paradise into exile and left him outside paradise in the desert, our Lord willingly goes into the desert to be faithful in resisting the classic threefold temptation. Our Lord is faithful Israel. Our Lord is the new Adam. In all this he shows us that God Himself in His immense love for us comes to experience our weakness and to be victorious, and to do so in our very flesh.
In this holy season we are to battle that classic threefold concupiscence inherited from Adam: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. But our battle cannot be half-hearted and weak. We need some manly courage to be serious about discipline. This is precisely what we are not good about as modern Americans. So many of us, I fear, do not move beyond a childish Lent where we give up chocolate or some luxury. It’s fine to give up those things. But I highly doubt anyone’s salvation will rest on giving up chocolate, or pizza, or soda. Yes, give up things like that, but also do something serious, something really challenging. Take up one practice of prayer and one practice of mortification. For prayer: If you don’t already pray a daily Rosary, then do it. Pray with the Scriptures. After all, “man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” Or perhaps committing to come more often to adoration and even to committing to take an hour in our chapel each week would be a good new step in uniting yourself to our victorious Lord. And for mortification: why not do more than the bare minimum? I sometimes wonder about our modern regulations for Lent. Do we really fast? I mean, our modern rules for fasting are basically so easy that frankly it is not much of a challenge for most people. So, how about willingly taking on more than the bare minimum? It’s not required, I know, but perhaps fast on all Fridays of Lent, at least for most of the day up until the fish fry and then even there take only a modest amount. I am sure these practices will increase the likelihood of a fruitful Lent where we can participate in the Lord’s victory and find renewal in the invitation to grow in daily prayer and the life of grace with the Lord. As we heard in the epistle from St. Paul, “we exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain…. Behold now is the acceptable time, behold is the day of salvation.”
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST. AMEN.