Let’s start today with a little imaginative exercise. Let’s picture Jesus’s condition after he spent 40 days in the desert, Or if you think that’s too hard to do, start by picturing just a little about how you might have felt.
First we can imagine that Jesus was physically drained. He had probably been chronically hungry for weeks. Maybe he was more than just a bit uncertain about where this life he was now to begin was going to take him. He went to the desert to prepare for something, to have something revealed to him. And it is possible that the path he saw ahead was a lonely one, and one that in the eyes of the world would be a failure, that it was very hard to see how to begin or what to do first or where to go. It would have been very easy for him to feel very much alone.
And here is an enemy telling him that there is a way to fix that. Something that will take care of his hunger, and loneliness, and uncertainty, and maybe his sense of powerlessness. The trouble is, it will also take him away from the God who is inviting him to a life where he will be truly who he is called to be.
This story that we hear every year on the First Sunday of Lent is also a story about us. This is precisely what the enemy does to all of us, now and then. He, or she, or it tells us when we are vulnerable that there is something that can fill in the hole that we feel, something that will help make up for the fact that we are human and imperfect. The offer can be exactly tailored to us and what we really feel like we need the most.
Just for example, if our weakness, which we may or may not know about, is that way down inside we feel like we’re deeply flawed, that God couldn’t have much special interest in someone like us, the offer that we get from this enemy could be, what if you had something that would help you feel not so flawed, like money, or a feeling that you don’t need any help from anyone, or constant distraction, or maybe a belief system that will help you feel that you’re right about everything.
Or, here’s another scenario, if our weakness is that we are angry, if we feel that life has just never delivered on what we thought we were entitled to, this enemy can tell us, you know, other people are the reason for that. And by taking that offer, our lives become filled with a hostility that over time seems to be so natural we don’t even notice any more.
So is there a real devil or enemy making these offers to us, trying to keep us away from a relationship with the real God who loves us as we are? You can decide based on your own experience, for my part these days I am pretty sure there is an enemy, but if there isn’t, there may as well be. Because these temptations to find alternatives to a close and honest relationship with God are constant in this life. We get offered counterfeit money, we get offered power over something but it’s an illusion, we get offered solutions that seem to make sense but they end up harming us in ways we can’t see, hampering our ability to love others without judging them, and interfering with our ability to just come to God with our pain and our imperfections.
Maybe we hear this gospel every year because during Lent, every year we talk about conversion, and this is what conversion is, turning away from having been deceived in the wrong direction, finding a way to reject giving so much power to our insecurities, our anger, our self-loathing, our self-destructive sins, our attachment to something that we thought was important but turns out now to be empty. We try to see these things for what they are, obstacles and roadblocks that have no real power over us if we don’t want them to. Because God wants to rescue us from all this, God wants to fill up the hole in us with the only thing that actually works, which is God’s undying love for us, mercy and understanding for all of our mistakes, mercy that we can then turn around and lavish on other people.
That’s the system that works, that is where Jesus headed after sending the enemy away, he leaves the desert and heads out into a world where he tells people there is a kingdom where love is the only thing that can be or needs to be trusted, that even the suffering of this life is ultimately overcome by love and nothing else.
As we head off into this season of Lent and our own version of the desert we all wish the process of recognizing and rejecting the enemy was as easy as Jesus makes it look at this gospel. And yet God is stronger than any enemy, and in fact so are we. The great spiritual teacher St. Ignatius Loyola said that our enemy is a coward, he runs when recognized and confronted, when we recognize how empty what he has to offer really is, compared to what we could have if we just were completely honest with God about where we find ourselves and what we need God to do for us and for this world. The enemy really hates when we do that. So that must be an excellent way to start.