Homily for 1st Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
1st Sunday of Lent

Feb. 21, 2021
Ps 25: 4-9
Mark 1: 12-15                                                     
Holy Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.

“Your ways, O Lord, make known to me” (Ps 25: 4).

Blogger-hiker on a fallen tree

bearing a Ramapo-Dunderberg Trail blaze

When I go hiking in Harriman State Park or elsewhere, it’s crucial to keep a sharp lookout for the trail markers (called “blazes”) on trees or rocks.  The trails are usually well marked, but sometimes the blazes have faded or are more widely scattered or are on a tree that has since fallen down in a storm.  More than once I’ve lost the path and had to double back to re-find my way.  Once in a while I’ve gone so far off that I’ve had to resort to map and compass and bushwhack my way back to a trail or familiar spot.

As you know, we’ve just begun Lent.  Many of  you probably came here on Wednesday to be signed with ashes, signed in repentance, signed in a desire for conversion.

What is conversion?  Turning toward the Lord, turning away from sin.  In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed for the Lord to make his ways known to us, to teach us his paths.  We aren’t always walking on the right road—sometimes because it isn’t clearly blazed for us, sometimes because we’ve wandered off it by missing the marks.  The most common NT word for “sin,” harmartia, means “missing the mark” or “going astray.”  When we’re off the Lord’s road, that’s when we need conversion—turning ourselves around or getting reoriented.

Maybe Jesus was doing something like that when he went out into the desert for 40 days, driven by the Spirit (Mark 1:12).  I don’t mean that he needed to recover his way from sin.  He’d just been baptized by John and heard the Father’s voice, “You’re my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (1:11).  Perhaps Jesus needed to ponder that.  What did it mean?  What did God want of him?  Which of the possible paths open before him was he supposed to take?  St. Mark tells us he battled Satan, without providing us any of the vivid pictures that we get from St. Matthew and St. Luke.  We may be sure that the Prince of Darkness was trying to lead him astray (1:13).  Satan might have been happy had Jesus decided to go back to Nazareth and resume the carpenter’s trade and life with his mother and extended family.  In the 1st song of Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas suggests:

Nazareth, your famous son should have stayed a great unknown
Like his father carving wood He’d have made good.
Tables, chairs, and oaken chests would have suited Jesus best.
He’d have caused nobody harm; no one alarm.

Christ in the Wilderness (Ivan Kramskoy)

Out there in the desert, we may suppose Jesus was looking for the right path, the ways of the God his Father for himself.  And when he left the desert after those 40 days, he knew that his road was back to Galilee—but not to “tables, chairs, and oaken chests” and not to family life.  He also knew that John had been arrested and imprisoned.  He knew that his path was to begin preaching the kingdom of God, preaching repentance; to pick up where John had left off, and quite possibly to run the same risk that John had run and to end up as John did.

In the psalm, we pray that God will put us on the right path, that he will guide us in his truth and keep us away from the Devil’s lies.  When we renew our baptismal promises at Easter, we’ll reject all of Satan’s empty promises—his lies, his false roads that direct us away from the fulfillment of our lives and the happiness that God intends for us.

All of us have listened at times to the Devil’s lies.  We’ve been selfish, told our own lies, watched TV and movies that use violence to degrade human life or use sex to tear down the dignity of human beings.  We’ve treated family members and others badly, nursed grudges, cheated our employers.  Maybe we’ve done worse.

So we plead in the psalm, “Remember your compassion, O Lord” (25:6).  The Lord’s love for us is “from of old” (25:6).  He created us out of love and for love and never stops loving us.  May his love enlighten us to see our sins and errors.  May it show us sinners the way, put us back on the right track, on the trail that leads us securely toward our Father’s house, our eternal home, where with our Lord Jesus we hope to live forever and ever.