Lent

We know what drought is like. We know what is like to see gardens gradually turn brown and die. Farmers worry about their crops and livestock, conscious that their health makes all the difference to their livelihood and the future of their families. Many of us may not become thirsty,but we receive constant media advice on ways of conserving water. On the other hand, an excess of water is equally tragic. Floods also destroy life and hope.

In their loneliness, some people’s hearts are shrivelled and barren for lack of the water of love. We all need to love and be loved. With love, people grow and develop in unimaginable color and texture. Life, however hard, never becomes unmanageable. That is exactly the sort of transformation that Jesus promised the Samaritan woman. He didn’t tell her that she would never again come to the village well to draw water. Instead He offered the new life and hope that can be born of making a fresh start. However many difficulties may fill our days, we will never again face them on our own. Our hearts need not shrivel and die. Instead they can joyfully burst out into a new and everlasting life. All we need is Jesus. His love is the water for which our souls thirst.

It is on Mount Sinai that Moses both experiences God and is given the commandments for his people. He first encounters God in the episode of the burning bush, and it is at Sinai again that he goes up the mountain to receive the commandments that will govern the lives of the people of Israel, spending 40 days and nights with God. After the people’s apostasy, Moses has to return a second time to negotiate with God, and Moses asks that he might see God’s glory. When Moses comes down the mountain this time, his face is so illuminated that the people cannot bear to look at him, and he has to cover his head with a veil. Elijah stands for the prophets, those whose task was to bring God’s erring people back to the faithful practice of the covenant. Elijah too experiences God on the mountain, waiting until all the storms and winds have passed. All of this Jesus brings to His disciples as He takes them up the mountain. He is the new covenant with God, but the gift of that covenant is hallowed and experienced by His disciples in an encounter with God’s glory.

We have begun our Lenten journey, following Christ into the wilderness for 40 days. Today we too are taken up with His disciples to the mountain top so that we too may be touched by His glory. We all, through different ways, need to be touched by the experience of the living God, as given to the disciples as they witnessed the Transfiguration of Jesus and in the Pascal mystery of being with God. For some people such moments become the foundation of their conversion to Christianity. Others find sustenance for their belief in their experience of prayer and worship. Others again, in moments of natural awe and wonder in the natural world, in their loving relationships, or in the world of the arts or discovery. God reaches out to touch the heart of each of us in such a way that we can journey onwards, not just through Lent but through the darker moments of our lives when faith, knowledge and our comfort zone may be challenged by life’s mysteries.

In our first reading today, the book of Genesis tells us that “The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts;” the serpent certainly knows how to distort the truth and make temptation irresistibly attractive. The woman and the man fall to the subtlety of the serpent’s promise that by eating the forbidden fruit their eyes will be opened and they will be “like gods.” They eat, their eyes are opened but they see, instead, that their innocence has been lost. Sin has entered the world.

Jesus fasts in the wilderness for forty days; He is hungry and the devil’s time has come. The three temptations wear masks of persuasive reason: by using His miraculous powers Jesus’ hunger can be assuaged through turning stones into bread; belief in His mission can be guaranteed by a spectacular sign; and the temporal power to achieve that mission can be assured.

The story of our salvation take us from the garden in Eden to the wilderness of the Exodus and from the Lord’s temptations to another garden, Gethsemane, where Jesus told His disciples that they should pray not to be put to the test. When the ultimate test of their discipleship came, most of them failed. What about us?