The Homily

Lent 1

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Audio version of homily

It’s our desert time, this Lent.
Forty days to spend looking deeply and honestly into ourselves.
Or forty days of slight inconvenience caused by the loss of trivial little things we probably don’t need anyway or use in excess most of the time.
The story Luke puts before is not something from a journal kept by Jesus.
No piece of history, this is the story of anyone
who might choose to spend some time wondering who they are
and what they might become
with the gifts they have discovered in themselves.

This is a story that raises the question we must all eventually ask ourselves.
Why am I doing this or that? Why have I made these choices?
The temptations of this story are not about bread from stones,
kingdoms observed from a high place,
or the need to see if God is really there for us.
The issue here faced by Jesus in that desert is identity
but when we tell it here, it is not just the identity of Jesus,
but the identity of any of us.

In that desert, Jesus had to decide
whether to exercise his power as Son of God for himself or for others.
He had to decide whether his power
would bring him riches and prestige
or simply the knowledge that he was doing God’s will.
Our desert time for the next six weeks can do the same.
The gifts with which we find ourselves
are not much different from the gifts Jesus recognized in himself.
The challenge and the question proposed by this Gospel is the same.
What are we doing to do with the life we have?
What are we going to do with the gifts we find in such abundance?
Use them for ourselves? For our ambition, prestige, or power?
Behind these three temptations is a much bigger issue.

The real temptation Jesus faces here has nothing to do
with bread, kingdoms, or assurances of God’s care and presence.
The real temptation for Jesus is one we face all the time.
We’re not temped to turn stone into bread,
to imagine ourselves as the leader and ruler of nations.
We are not tempted to try something silly to see if God will rescue us.
But our identity is called into question all the time.
The temptation Jesus faced in that desert
was about what he was to become:
what he understood himself to be from his Baptism?
Or what someone else (the devil) would like him to become?
Is his life and are his decisions shaped by what happened at his Baptism,
or is his life and decisions shaped
by what someone else thought of him or wanted him to be?
That’s the real temptation he faced, and he faced it all the time.
Easy to become a miracle worker
having people flock around, call him by name, run out to meet him.
Miracles are cool. They’re fascinating.
Why not feed all those hungry people with a miracle?
That would be a lot easier than doing it yourself!
That’s the problem with this thinking.
It leaves God to the heavy lifting, so to speak.
The other problem with miracles is that it leave people passive
expecting God to do everything.

These forty days might well give us time once again
to examine why we do the things we have chosen to do;
and give us pause to consider again
who we really are by Baptism and what God wants of us,
or because of what others think of us.
This is the real temptation of life.
It is first focused on what we become, then on what we do because of it.

— Fr. Boyer