A Call to Arms

Godfried Guffins & Jan Swerts, The Temptation of Christ (c. 1870), Sint-Joriskerk, Antwerp

There has been a little tension in our church office over the last few weeks. Adam, one of our campus ministers, and Fr. Jason, our associate pastor, are both signed up to race in the Hogeye Marathon on April 14th. A bit of a friendly rivalry has developed in their preparations. Adam is training in a traditional way: running different mileages and slowly building up over time. Fr. Jason is taking a different approach: he’s working on sheer muscle strength and training with different martial arts techniques. It is almost as if he is training more for a fight than a race! I have even seen a pair of brass knuckles on his desk – he tells me it is just a paperweight, but now I am a little afraid to make him angry!

In the Gospel today, Jesus begins his public ministry with a fight. Following his baptism in the Jordan, he is driven by the Spirit out into the desert to encounter the devil. At its heart, it is a spiritual struggle. We know from the other Gospels that the devil is trying to tempt Jesus to betray his mission, to interiorly falter in his willingness to dedicate himself completely to the will of the Father who has sent him. There also, however, material aspects to this contest. It takes place in the wilderness of Judea, where Jesus is alone, fasting, submitting himself to the elements, surrounded by wild beasts. Mark’s account draws our attention to how there is truly a battle being fought: between Jesus, the Son of God, filled with the Holy Spirit and all of the forces of darkness, earthly and otherwise, everything that represents chaos and disorder and violence. These spiritual powers converge upon Christ, and he bests them all.

Each year, as we begin Lent, we hear about this testing of Jesus – this period of struggle that he undergoes in the desert and from which he emerges victorious. But only in the Gospel of Mark do we hear what happens next: that having defeated the devil and resisted his temptations, Jesus goes to Galilee and begins proclaiming the Good News. It is as if Mark is suggesting that Jesus’s proclamation of the Gospel is a continuation of what he began in the desert – an extension of the battle against the forces of sin and darkness.

The Church Fathers saw this very clearly. All of Jesus’s public ministry – his preaching, his miracles, the encounters with particular people – all of it is a battle to win back creation, especially humanity, from the darkness that has enslaved us through sin and dysfunction. At each turn, Jesus encounters the devil and at each turn he beats him back, healing this person, forgiving that one, casting out a demon from that one, and strengthening the faith of another. Jesus is on a mission of liberation, one ultimately that is headed for Jerusalem, where the last great battle must be fought and won on the hill of Calvary.

If we look at all of Jesus’s ministry in that way, then his words today “Repent and believe in the Gospel” also take on a new meaning. They are not mere moralizing; Jesus is not just admonishing us to be a little better, a little holier. Rather, he is issuing a call to arms – he is inviting us to come and join him in the battle and share with him in the victory over darkness. Unfortunately, our world still affords us many reminders, too many, that evil is real; we know from our newscasts, and Facebook feeds, and our gossip around the water cooler and dinner table that sin and dysfunction did not disappear with Jesus. Evil still must be confronted and defeated, and the first place to engage with it is in our own hearts. Repentance therefore is part of the rhythm of our Christian life – while we have a claim on the final victory to come, the battle still continues.

With what then do we fight? Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These weapons may not sound as fearsome as sword or steel, but the Christian tradition has long seen these penitential practices as the most effective ways of combating the forces of evil. They help sharpen our spiritual attention and heighten our moral awareness, and each of them contribute to making us more free. Prayer reminds us that it is our relationship with God that most truly defines who we are, not the circumstances or even the relationships of our day to day. Fasting reminds us that we are not slaves to our physical impulses and corporeal desires; we have a free will. Almsgiving and works of charity free us from being possessed by the things we own.

Often we tend to see Lent as something serious, and maybe a little gloomy, but really it should be a time that invigorates us and reawakens us our faith. Some five hundred years ago, Ignatius of Loyola encouraged the young men who wanted to join his new group, the Jesuits, to imagine themselves in the middle of a great plain. Assembled there are two great armies. Under the banner of Satan, are the proud, the self-serving, the self-reliant. Under the banner of Christ are the humble, the modest, those reliant upon God, the penitential.

It is a powerful meditation because it is so counter-intuitive. The side of Satan seems much stronger, and for that reason more inviting; the side of Christ seems weak and maybe even a bit pathetic. And yet we know that it is those under the banner of Christ that ultimately are victorious. What Ignatius wants to show us is that often what attracts us, what seems to us most appealing, is precisely what can lead to our ultimate ruin. Eternal life comes rather through self-denial, through penance – through a recognition that we must constantly be purifying ourselves from the desire for the things of this world so that we can be more attuned to the deeper longing for what is eternal.

Friends, as we begin Lent again, our Lord reminds us that we have a fight on our hands, one for which brass knuckles will not be effective. God still desires to cleans our world of its sin and dysfunction, but rather than act on a grand scale through a purifying flood as in the days of Noah, he now acts at the individual level through the transformative power of his Holy Spirit. Lent affords us a chance not just to tweak one or two things in our moral life, but above all to remind ourselves on which side we are fighting. Jesus offers nothing less than emancipation from all that holds us back, so heed his call! Invite the Holy Spirit to do battle in your heart. Arm him with the weapons of penance and spiritual discipline. Take up your stand anew under the banner of your Savior, and begin to share again in the victory only he can give.

Lent: A Love Story

What one word best sums up today? If you were to ask that question on campus today, you’d probably get a straightforward answer: love. It’s February 14, after all, Valentine’s Day. We know that behind all of the flowers and chocolate and jewelry and other commercializations, there is the simple idea of telling someone you care about that you love them. 

Believe it or not, that same single word – love – is also at the heart of our celebration of Ash Wednesday. Yes, it is the start of Lent, that season of penance and purification. We will mark our foreheads with ashes and ask for God’s forgiveness. We think about what penitential practice we might want to take on – giving something up that we enjoy, doing something charitable or sacrificial for another, or both. But beneath it all is the theme of love: God’s love for us and our love for God. 

It is precisely because God loves us that he calls us to repentance. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Those words are from the Book of Genesis, spoken by God to Adam, reminding him that this life is finite, and that we must use this time well to prepare for our judgment. God wants nothing less than for us as his creatures to flourish, to thrive in every way, especially at the level of soul. Our sinful habits and attitudes hold us back from being the temples of the Holy Spirit he has created us to be, and so he calls us to repentance so that we might leave behind our old ways apart from him and embrace the new life that comes from Christ. 

Of course, as the old saying goes, the best intentions oft go astray. How often do we begin Lent with a firm intention to improve our relationship with God only to find that halfway through we have lost that determination altogether? Or worse, we simply never had it in the first place? In the Gospel today, Jesus knows that it can be hard to truly change, hard even at times to truly want to change. What we need is motivation – a reason to carry on with these things that are difficult. When the going gets tough, what will keep us going? 

David O'Connell, Stations of the Cross: Fifth Station: Simon Helps Jesus (c. 1960), St. Richard Church, Chichester, UK

The only answer is love. Only out of love for God do we endure that which is hard, that which needs perseverance. We may be tempted – when the going gets tough – to put on a good show for others, to appear pious and penitential on the outside without truly giving it our all on the inside. But as Jesus says, God sees through such a false pretense. The Lord judges the heart, not the exterior appearance. Ashes on our foreheads are not enough to claim repentance; they must be accompanied by a true recognition of how far we have fallen astray. Our deepest motivation must always be the love of God – remembering constantly his love for us and renewing at each moment our love for him. If we seek his mercy, if we desire to do penance not to impress others or to better ourselves in a self-serving way but merely out of love for him, then Jesus assures us our heavenly Father sees our contrition and forgives us.

Thus, it is out of love that we take up again the penitential practices of Lent, not because they are fun but because they help us to love well. Prayer helps orient us toward God, remembering our love for him. Fasting helps us to love ourselves properly, training us to look away from worldly delights and to yearn for what nourishes our souls. Giving alms, or works of charity in general, help us to love those around us, helping us to remember the duty we have to care for those in need.

Friends, the season of Lent reminds us again that the greatest love story ever told is not a story of romance, told with valentines, but rather the story of God’s love for us – told most fully in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of God’s Son for us. It is the celebration of that wondrous event, the Easter story, that Lent prepares us for. As we receive ashes on our heads, remembering the mortality of this body, may we also yearn to be enlivened by the power of Jesus’s love to hope one day for eternal life. May the Lord who loves us so deeply inspire in us a love to turn back to him, to be renewed by his grace in these forty days, to echo his love in all that we do.