9 March 2025 - 1st Sunday of Lent ‘C’
Deut 26:4-10; Rom 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13
Homily
During Christmas Eve 1993, a group of ‘brothers of the mountain’ presented themselves at the monastery of Tibhirine, in Algeria, and their leader Saya Attiya made three requests to the prior, Father Christian de Chergé, who responded negatively to each of them. And when Attiya told him that the monks had no choice, he replied, ‘Yes, we have a choice.’ Attiya withdrew... until the appointed time, one might say. And we know what happened next.
This event, like many events in our own lives - less tragic events as far as we are concerned, thank God! - helps us to understand today's Gospel. These are events in which we are put to the test, and in which a decision involving all our responsibility must be made.
We are easily misled by the use of the word ‘temptation’ and the verb ‘to tempt’ in the translation of this Gospel passage. For us, when we speak of ‘temptation’, we immediately think of something that leads us to do evil. This is not the meaning of the Greek word used by the biblical authors. The Greek noun peirasmós, and the corresponding verb (peirazein) appear very frequently in both the Old and New Testaments. The meaning is more that of ‘testing’ than a call to do evil.
To understand this passage that we have just read, as found at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, we need to consider a short sentence that Luke puts into Jesus‘ mouth at the end of his Gospel, during his last meal with his Apostles. He says to them: ’You are the ones who have stood by me in my trials.’ (Luke 22:28). The Apostles had in fact been with Jesus throughout his public life, at every important turning point in his life, for example when everyone brought their sick to be healed during the early days of his ministry in Capernaum, or again when the crowds had wanted to make him king. Each time he had withdrawn into solitude to make and re-make the choice of the kind of Messiah he had to be, to make the choice of his Father's will. And each time the closest disciples had come to join him.
But in today's Gospel, which is a highly symbolic account set at the beginning of Jesus‘ public life, immediately after his baptism, the overall ordeal of the Messiah is depicted. We are at a radical turning point in Jesus’ life. From his distant Galilee he went up to Judea. With the crowds he went down to the banks of the Jordan to be baptised by John. The Spirit descended upon him and the voice of the Father said to him, ‘You are my beloved son’. From that moment on he entered a desert. The whole meaning of his life, that is to say, the whole direction towards which it tends, is his mission as Messiah: the mission to make known and to make present on earth the reign of God, his Father. Everything else is a distraction, everything else could make him deviate from his path. Everything else is temptation. At each suggestion to do otherwise, he affirms that he has a choice and his choice is to do the will of his Father.