God's glory not ours or mine

Lent should be a time for us to be more open to God’s love for us, but sadly some have turned it into a time for introspection about how we might do better, and sadly for some an increased feeling of guilt and rejection. You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_lqoX2bccM

St Paul makes it very clear in our 2nd Reading (Romans 5:12-19) that the only hope for us is not to feel guilty about our many failings (falls as he calls them) but instead think about God’s mercy and grace. He writes “The results of the gift …. outweigh the results of one man’s sin:… now after many falls comes grace.” Clearly therefore the principal thing we should be doing this Lent is working out how to be more open to this grace and this means that all of us need to think about God in different ways.

Let me give you an example. If you had parents who kept telling you to do things without offering you any help or advice, you might well think of God as being like them. But God is not like that. God is like the parent, who seeing the young child’s extremely untidy room suggests that they work together to make it more tidy. For the child, it becomes a good time with their parent, where they learn that it can be as much fun to tidy up as to make a mess; and how much easier it is to find the toys you want to play with if you know the place where you have decided to keep them. This image of the parent actually working with their children, and teaching them by love and example, is the image of God that Jesus gives us. He teaches us to call God Daddy, Papa, Abba, which is a million miles from from the image of a God making demands on us from afar. If we read that 2nd Reading from St Paul again, we might note that the word he uses over and over again is the word “Gift”. And the gift is not just God’s love, but God’s very presence with us, as Jesus Christ our Friend and our Brother, who is also our Lord and our God.

We see this very different approach to things in today’s Gospel. (Matt 4:1-11) Look at how Jesus handles each of the Temptations as they occur to him. The first temptation is to make bread to satisfy his hunger. Like many temptations this is not a bad idea, but it is hopeless if we think that just feeding ourselves and others with physical nourishment will make us all good or happy. We humans need spiritual nourishment for this. To be well fed but unhappy or unfulfilled is pointless and leads nowhere. Jesus may well heal the sick and feed the hungry, but he knows that more important than this is teaching people how much God loves them.

The second temptation is to do something dramatic, to make a name for himself so that people will be over-awed by his presence and power. Jesus realises how shallow this promise is. Political leaders have sometimes been tempted in this direction drawing large crowds to their rallies who shout unthinkingly of the glory of the person they can see in front of them. But such things are like the plants that grow up on rocky ground, they look magnificent for a short while, but they have no root and so quickly wither and die. Jesus knows he could be like this, indeed occasionally he heals people in seemingly miraculous ways; but when this happens he constantly tells people not to talk to others about such things, for if people rely on signs and wonders then they have missed the point. To rely on God as a magician who can miraculously put things right, is to misunderstand how the real world that God has made works, where the only long-term solution is quiet love and service.

The third temptation seems strange us. How could Jesus ever have been tempted to become a political leader? But of course that was just how the Messiah, the Christ was expected to behave when he came, and Jesus clearly had to challenge in his mind this assumption of what the Messiah was like, and to recognise that if he took that path he would end up serving the power of evil, the desire to dominate others and tell them how to behave, rather than the path of God. This is surely why he is really rough with the Tempter at this point, with his almost aggressive “Be off”, followed by that great declaration “You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone.”

In the end this sentence should sum up our approach to Lent. I am always intrigued by the way many people who do not practise the faith will still talk about what they are giving up for Lent, like cake or chocolate, or alcohol, or even Facebook or Twitter. For them, it is simply a way of trying to prove to themselves that they are in control of their lives. It is all about our modern obsession with ourselves. We, who are believers, may well give up some food or some activity: but we have to be very careful to remind ourselves that we are doing this for God and not for some kind of self-improvement. Many suggest that a better way is to take on some extra prayers, trying perhaps to go to a Weekday Mass, or to some other time of prayer laid on by our Church, but these kinds of resolutions too can end up encouraging us to think about ourselves and how well we are doing or how badly we are failing, rather than being an opening of ourselves to God.

In the Opening Prayer for today’s Mass the priest prays “That we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ.” What we need to remember is that the riches of Christ, the riches of God, are infinite; they are everlasting. Saint Augustine says the same when he describes God as a fountain, a spring of water, that never runs dry. This means that however much we drink, there is always more available; and however far we enter into God’s mystery, however much we do to respond to his love, there is always more to explore, something new to do for him. If we think we can sort ourselves out for God, and present him with some kind of perfection, then we have misunderstood God, for our relationship with God is ever changing, ever growing, and we can never know what we will need to do next in response to his infinite love. We need not feel guilty or sad that we will never reach fully into the depths of that love in what we try to do, rather we need to rejoice that his call to us takes us on and on and on into his glory.