Even as we deal with the deadly and horrific school killings in Florida, we believe our God is bigger that any of our sins or the violence we live with. Let us firmly stand on the common ground of love.

We enter into another Lenten season.  We were marked with ashes this past Wednesday as Lent formally began. These ashes acknowledge that we all belong to the order of penitents.  We all confess that we are sinners, and we stand in need of the Lord’s healing forgiveness.  The light of Christ that is within us has been dimmed by the darkness of our sin.   We acknowledge this reality with these ashes.  We were given the mantra to:  Repent and believe in the Gospel.

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.  He was among the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.  

 Today’s Gospel tells us about the experience of Jesus in the desert.  The Gospel also indicates our road ahead, our path of discipleship.  To travel that road we have forty days of spiritual renewal – in honor of Jesus’ days in the desert. 

In the midst of a Rochester winter, it may be difficult to imagine Jesus’ experience of the desert.  There is no desert here.  In the biblical context, the desert is anywhere we experience solitude.  And in this solitude, two things can happen:  an encounter with God and an encounter with the Tempter.  This is what happened to Jesus in today’s Gospel.

In the desert, Jesus prayed to His Father and fasted for forty days and forty nights. Secondly, Jesus experienced what each one of us undergoes in temptations and sufferings.

It is the uncomfortable silence of the desert which opens a space for God to confront the divided state of our hearts.

Our divided hearts are symbolized by the ashes on our foreheads that have dimmed the light of Christ this is within us.  Yes, there are many ugly things about ourselves:

-         Our meanness and envy.

-         The hurts we have not forgiven.

-         The desire to take revenge.

-         The gossip, the pornography, the greed, the self-centeredness.

-          Our addiction to a culture of materialism and what I want.

Yes, there are demons; there is sinfulness in our lives that we seek to turn away from.  Yes, we encounter Satan in the desert of our inner wilderness.  But that is not the end of our Lenten journey.  The real purpose of our Lenten spiritual disciplines is that we are to encounter God in the desert of Lent.  May we focus our hearts on the self-giving love of Jesus.  May we allow ourselves to believe in His love.

Lent pours the grace of forgiveness into our world.  Even as we deal with the deadly and horrific school killings in Florida, as our safety is threatened by too much senseless violence, when even our precious young students are at risk during the school day, we need to know that God is bigger than any of our sins, wars, violence and hatred.  God wants His Kingdom to come now.  Lent is our time of saying ‘yes’ to a partnership with God in saving the world from the effects of evil and sin. Together let us firmly stand on the common ground of love and work together to remedy the social ills that plague our society.

Our aim in Lent should not be our aim to justify ourselves before God by our acts of penance, but rather through those acts develop a genuinely penitential heart.  Such a heart knows itself to depend entirely on the mercy of the Lord.

I call your attention to the simple sentence in today’s Gospel.  “He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.”

The wild beasts tell us that life is fragile.  The wild beasts symbolize the violence we see in the Florida school killings.  There is no escaping the fragileness of the wild beasts in society.  There are also demons within ourselves.  We have an animal side that focuses only on our own pleasure instead of service of others.

Thanks be to God we also have angels that minister to us, that are looking after us – renewing us.  The angels are the graces of our lives – human and divine.  We thank you Lord for all the people of our lives who are God’s messengers, God’s angels to us.  We give thanks for all the people who love us and reveal the face of God to us.

Most of us would not describe ourselves as being ascetical.  We enjoy our share of the joys of life.  Yet, the Lenten calls us to embrace an aspect of asceticism as part of our Lenten journey.  We need to find out what we believe and how strongly we believe.  We give up some good in this world as a way of saying and showing that we believe in a better world (even this side of the grave.)

In the last part of today’s Gospel, Jesus begins his public ministry and proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  In terms of my own self, before I began my ministry as a priest, I had twelve years of seminary formation consisting of considerable time in the chapel and in the class room.  As I think of Jesus’ seminary formation, so to speak, before beginning his public ministry, Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness where he was tempted and struggled and where he encountered God with a joyful sense of obedience to his Father’s will.  May the seminary formation of each of us, so to speak, focus on our spiritual renewal that we are called to in embracing spiritual disciplines.     In so doing, may we encounter God more deeply in our lives.

May you have a blessed, joy-filled, and ascetical Lenten season.