Today is the first Sunday of Lent, a beautiful liturgical season that invites us to enter the desert with Christ Jesus. The word Lent has Old English and Germanic roots, which mean springtime and lengthening of days. Light is coming into our part of the hemisphere following the darkness of winter. Yes, light is coming to us. The light of Jesus Christ is at the heart of Lent, and Jesus gives us an opportunity to shine a light on any darkness in our lives by overcoming our temptations. In that sense, temptation is anything that is pulling us away from God. The first question we should reflect upon today is: Are we lost in something that pulls us away from God?
It seems to me that the past few weeks, the church in her wisdom has been preparing us for Lent with readings from Genesis describing our creation and some gospel passages which encourage us to be salt and light for the world. There was a call for greater commitment: “May your yes be a yes and your No be no” (Mt 5,37) and “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5, 48). To summarize it, we can say that God’s great love has created us, and God has expectations about how to live life well. But it will not be perfect; there will be some temptations, some downsides that we will have to face daily. Just as Jesus was tempted in today’s gospel but chose to turn away from the darkness, we too are influenced by the darkness of our temptations. At the end of the day, it will be up to us to make the right choice—to turn back to God.
“Return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning.” This must be the dynamic of our Lenten journey. There are two ways to look at obedience in this context. First, from the Greek meaning, obedience is to listen carefully. Second, from the Latin meaning, obedience is to listen attentively. This Lent, we need to surrender our lives to God to listen both carefully and attentively to what He is asking us to do. There is a constant need to prioritize this spiritual listening over the noise of our daily struggles.
Lent invites us to listen to God while practicing the traditional Lenten observances. That is the reason we should consider this season as a perfect time to identify our temptations and offer them to God in prayer. Lent is a time to pray for a clean heart—a time to seek grace that will lead us to face our challenges and make a change. It is not about lingering in our imperfection, but rather doing something so that our relationship with God will help us to shape our life with all its beauty and lean it up from all that pulls us away from Him.
