A Homily for the First Sunday of Lent

+ It is exciting, is it not, when someone offers us a gift? It is affirming. Very often gifts open up new possibilities for us, small or large. They expand our horizons and introduce something new into how we proceed in the future.
 
So too, it is pleasing when we are entrusted with greater responsibility in our vocation or career. It is right and fitting that when we work hard and diligently over a long time that this be recognised and rewarded and that, if we are capable, when we are ready to exercise authority, we are given the opportunity so to do. Advancement in life and responsibility and a successful career are all good things. St Paul exhorts us to be ambitious for the higher gifts (cf. 1 Cor. 12:31)—insisting, of course that they are exercised in love.
 
There is nothing intrinsically wrong, then, in accepting gifts or responsibilities. They are often gifts of Almighty God Himself that call us further in His service and the service of others. And yet, as the Gospel of this Holy Mass teaches very clearly, some gifts that are offered are in fact pernicious temptations:
 
“The devil took Him to a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to Him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Begone, Satan! for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve.’”
 
“All the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them,” is quite an offer! What child does not dream of ruling the world and making all things right? Thankfully children grow up and as adults, usually, rightly recoil from any such ambitions—because the offer is made by the devil on one condition: “if you will fall down and worship me.”
 
On this first Sunday of Lent the Sacred Liturgy of Our Holy Mother, the Church, confronts us with the fundamental realities of good and evil and of their personification in God and the devil. She starkly puts before us the choice to fall down and worship the devil by grasping for whatever we can in this life, or of saying: ““Begone, Satan!” and of worshipping the Lord our God and of serving Him alone.
 
This choice—and our radical human freedom enables us to choose either of them—is as fundamental to our existence as it is frequent in the fabric of our daily activities. The monk who daily takes back more and more of what his self-will prefers is on the road to perdition: his habit and his profession call him to serve God, not his own desires. The married man or woman for whom their spouse and their family do not come first has placed something else in front of their God-given vocation—and that something needs to move to second place so that it is the Lord God, and He alone, who is worshipped. The young man or woman who considers what “I want…” rather than the radical self-sacrifice to which Almighty God calls them may never realise their true vocation.

So too, for those who exercise responsibility and power in the Church or in the world, this temptation is an insidious reality: to politic and grasp for power as an end in itself, or for one’s self-aggrandisement and the advancement of one’s ideologies, is a grave danger. We are, perhaps, too used to this in the cutthroat realm of secular politics: one party replaces another and, in a solemn act of homage to the demon of relativism, declares black to be white and white to be black and the contradiction of this political dogma to be illegal. The next party changes everything yet again, and we hope that one day black may be black and white may be white once again.
 
The Church, it seems, is by no means immune to such positivistic political relativism. The demonic seduction of power and prestige has been a debilitating factor throughout the Church’s history, and its resurgence in our own times is deeply distressing. For the use of ecclesiastical power to advance a political programme to reverse the policies of a previous administration, to declare white to be black, and to rejoice in the doing thereof, is a very long way indeed from the humble exercise of authority under God as a service to the Church.
 
For whether we be a president, prime minister, a prince of the Church or a pope, be we a parent or a priest, a postulant or a prior, it is the Lord our God and Him alone whom we serve, not ourselves or our own febrile ends, and the exercise of any authority or power that may be given to us must reflect this reality: for according to that reality, according to whom we bow down and worship, we shall be judged.
 
That “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” are offered to us by the devil in one way or another is a reality—a seductive reality that will lead to our perdition. Through our prayer, fasting and almsgiving this Lent, and with the help of the grace of the sacrament of confession, we must rid ourselves of this temptation and return ever more to the worship of the Lord our God alone even—most especially!—when we hold authority, power or responsibility in the Church, in the family and in society. For that humility, and for the grace to persevere in its daily exercise, let us beg Almighty God at His altar in this Holy Mass. +