1st Sunday of Lent
Feb. 14, 2016
Collect
Deut 26: 4-10
Rom 10: 8-13
Ursulines, Willow Dr., New Rochelle
There’s something
discordant about pairing the story of Jesus’ temptations with Valentine’s Day. But, as you know, Sunday’s never a day of
penance; so if some sweetheart—a nephew, a former student, your superior—has
given you a box of Cadbury, enjoy! And
in the spirit of yesterday’s reading from Isaiah (58:9-14), share.
I suppose you’ve
heard many homilies about Jesus’ temptations; probably not so many on the 1st
and 2d readings or the collect.
In the collect
we prayed that “by worthy conduct” we might “pursue” the “effects of the riches
hidden in Christ” after “growing” in our “understanding” of those riches. That’s an allusion to Eph 3:8-9, and why the
collect for this Sunday is so framed I can’t tell you because that Scripture
passage comes up in the lectionary only on the feast of the Sacred Heart and
during Week 29 of Ordinary Time. I
thought maybe it was used in Year A, but no.
Our understanding
of the mystery of Christ can never be full or complete, of course. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that
“the riches hidden in Christ” include access to God’s mercy, an invitation to a
new relationship with God—by which we may rightly address him as Abba—and Christ’s effectively
establishing such a relationship between us and his Abba.
So we’re praying
for a fuller understanding of such riches and for their effectiveness in our
lives—an effectiveness that we actively “pursue by worthy conduct.” Daniel Merz and Abbot Marcel Rooney point out
in their study book on the presidential prayers: “Our ‘worthy conduct’ (conversatio [the Latin
text]—which means a conversion of morals) is not of our doing, but the result
of what Christ has done in us.”[1]
St. Paul
addresses the 1st steps of our “conversion,” our response to the grace that
Christ offers us. Those 1st steps are
“confessing with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in your heart that
God raised him from the dead” (Rom 10:9).
Paul says that if we do those 2 things, we “will be saved”; or in terms
of the collect, the riches of Christ will have their effect in us.
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| Matthias Grunewald, Isenheimer Altar |
Publicly
professing our faith in Christ—in Baptism, in the Creed, by our presence at the
community’s worship—is the beginning of our being saved. I use the passive voice there—“our being
saved”—because salvation comes from God thru Jesus Christ and isn’t our own
doing, as Merz and Rooney note. We can
only acknowledge and be grateful for Jesus’ work.
Then Paul says
we must believe in our hearts. You’d
think we’d believe in our heads, no?
Paul doesn’t make that kind of a distinction. In any case, what we profess to believe with
our lips has to go deeper—no mere lip service!
It has to penetrate to our minds, as we’d say, and to our hearts, as
Paul says explicitly. Think of what it
means when we begin the proclamation of the gospel by signing our foreheads,
lips, and hearts. We have to love what
we profess, love the one we confess as our Lord and Savior, risen from the
dead, fully alive and offering life to all who are united to him by grace.
Which brings us
further along toward what we prayed for:
conversatio,
conduct worthy of the Lord whom we confess with our mouths and believe in our
hearts.
In the 1st
reading, Moses sets before the Israelites a profession of faith, the people’s
history of salvation that starts with “My father was a wandering Aramean” (Deut
26:5)—that’s the pastoral nomad Jacob—and concludes with the people’s being led
(passive voice again) into their place of salvation, the “land flowing with
milk and honey” (26:9).
But the
profession of faith leads to action. The
people are to respond to God’s acts of salvation with worship, bringing to God
the 1st fruits of their harvests in that rich land that he’s giving them, and
then “bowing down in his presence” (26:10).
Those acts of worship, like our own celebration of the Eucharist, are a
reaffirmation of the covenant that God has made with his people—a covenant that
includes the whole range of the Law, of worthy conduct toward the Lord God,
toward their fellow Israelites, and toward the aliens dwelling in the land.
By resisting the
temptations of the devil in the Gospel, Jesus is reaffirming his allegiance to
the covenant. In fact, each time Jesus
parries the devil’s offerings, he quotes from Deuteronomy, the book of the Law. In his syndicated column last week, Russell
Shaw wrote about the temptations.[2] He began by remarking that telling the story
of the gospels without the presence of the devil in them would be like telling
the story of WWII without Hitler. The
devil’s the opponent of all the good that Jesus comes to do, the one who
obstructs, or tries to, Jesus’ actions that re-establish our relationship with
God as his daughters and sons. The
temptations are blatant invitations to selfishness, which disrupts the covenant
relationship between us and God; temptations to think of what Jesus wants
rather than what Abba wants. Our worthy conduct, our conversatio, rejects
selfishness by turning us Godward, focusing us on God, who hears our cries,
sees our afflictions, saves us with his outstretched arm (Deut 26:7-8), and
calls for our grateful response; and, further, worthy conduct directs our
selflessness toward others in the same kind of selflessness that Jesus shows.
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The Devil Tempting Christ
(Taken from The Pilot)
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During this
Lenten season, may the words on our lips match what’s in our hearts. May what’s in our hearts lead us to genuine
acts of worship, of giving God our allegiance, gratitude, and selfless conduct
worthy of the riches hidden in Christ.
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