Homily
1st Sunday of Lent I
13 March 2011
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
AMDG JMJ +m
You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. The Lord your God shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.
On the First Sunday of Lent, the Church invites us to ponder the fundamental temptation that gives rise to every other sin in our lives. Before working on our sins in detail this Lent, the Church focuses us on the temptation that reaches the depths of who we are. It is the temptation faced by our Lord in the desert. It is the temptation to doubt God. It is the temptation to wonder whether we would be better off if we never had to do anything anyone told us to do, to wonder whether we are better off defining good and evil for ourselves. At the end of this homily, I hope we can receive the Eucharist together agreeing that it is better to serve in love in heaven forever, responding to the love that Christ first shows us, than to reign in hell.
Most of us are working on trusting God. The Pope's new book Jesus of Nazareth Part II leaped to the top of the best seller list this week. People want to know God and to learn how to trust Him. Yet there are also books by the new atheists on the same best seller lists. As much as we want to trust God, the temptation to doubt Him is equally there. There are no shortage of atheists who make fun of those who believe a good God could allow something like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami this last week. There are plenty who will try to convince us that the universe is the cause of its own existence, and that there is no God beyond the laws of nature. It is remarkable to me how far some people will go in doubting God. There are plenty who are willing to explain away the reality and meaning of what makes us human, the experience that that we are not determined but are radically free, as an illusion operating within the laws of nature. There are many who would more readily be a slave to the laws of nature than to admit that God can exist and that He might be good, and that He is the reason there is freedom and something rather than nothing. There are many who doubt that love is the base of all reality, and who are willing to stop asking the question of why there is something rather than nothing. We all have a sense that the temptation to doubt God is as strong today as it was on the fateful day in the garden of Eden.
This is not to say that it is always a sin to question God, or to desire to go deeper in our understanding of God and to find better reasons to believe in Him. This is a natural progression of the intellect, and insofar as modern atheists can help us to answer better questions about God, their project can in a way be helpful. But what we are talking about tonight is pride, the temptation not to just question God, but to doubt Him, and this is the temptation that runs deep within each one of us. It is the temptation to exalt the beautiful, radical, transcendent freedom we have above and against the good for which freedom was made.
Our country is great among nations precisely because we believe so strongly in the potential of human freedom, in the American dream of self-determination. We know as Americans that man can and should become great through making great and risky choices, and this is a great Christian vision of man as well. Yet we know sadly that the freedom we exalt as Americans sometimes is used for evil, and is used over and against the good for which freedom is made. We are tempted, as much in this country as anywhere, to understand freedom minimally, as a license to do whatever I want without having to listen to anybody, instead of understanding it maximally, as freedom to pursue the highest things for myself and for my neighbor. The temptation is to forget that freedom is only good when it is ordered to the highest good and is used to choose the highest good. We forget that freedom without goodness is meaningless, and we get this wrong to our own peril and destruction. We forget that being placed in God's garden, as a gift of a Father to his children, is better than reigning in hell, where we only have the opportunity to choose what is evil. This exaltation of the will over and against what is truly good is the fundamental temptation of our lives, and so radical is our freedom that makes us in the image and likeness of God, that we are free to choose death and to destroy ourselves rather than to serve the good for which we are made.
This is how we become rivals and enemies of each other. When I exalt freedom over goodness, when I place my own freedom above everything else, then reality changes and other people become threats to my freedom, and I become suspicious of others just as Adam and Eve began to be at emnity with each other. When my freedom is divorced from the good, then I even begin determining who should live and die, and I use others for my own pleasure. It is no wonder that since man became capable of choosing death instead of life, that God in his justice decreed that a creature that does not always choose what is good should not live forever. And so through the choice of man, death entered the world.
Tonight's scriptures remind us that although we can question God, since we are contingent beings, and not the cause of our own existence, we do not possess the ability to ultimately determine what is good and evil, nor could we possibly make infallible judgments about the goodness of God. Yet our intelligence and will are what relate us directly to God. They are what make a meaningful relationship with God possible, so we should not throw them away as an illusion operating merely within the laws of nature. The transcendent freedom we experience relates us directly to God, and has great potential to be conformed to the ultimate and eternal good, if only we do not use our freedom to become enemies of God or enemies of each other.
Our Lord in his forty days resisted every temptation to doubt God. In the end, our Lord by the purification of his mind, heart and body, who was tempted in every way we are, but who never sinned, used his human life to reveal who God is, a God who is deeply in love with his creation, and who was willing by the sacrifice of Himself to reverse the curse begun by Adam. Strengthened by our Lord's example, let us not be cowards in the face of temptation this Lent, but engage in the spiritual battle that leads to the revelation of the best that is within us, the capacity to love and to reveal to the world that God is real and He is love.
You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. The Lord your God shall you worship. Him alone shall you serve
AMDG JMJ +m
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