Peace be with you.
Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent,
our preparation for Easter.
Lent, I’ve often said, is a time to get
back to basics.
It’s like when you’re starting the football season
and you get back to fundamentals.
It’s when you’re trying to get back to playing golf
after a long winter away,
and you have to remember the fundamentals of the swing.
So in the spiritual order, there’s certain fundamental truth.
And so the readings of Lent get us in touch with these.
And for the First Sunday of Lent,
this cycle of readings,
it’s especially clear and good.
Our first reading is from the book of Genesis.
Can I recommend, everybody, you just keep revisiting
those opening chapters of Genesis
to get your bearings in the spiritual life?
That’s just indispensably important.
So listen now.
This is from chapter 2 of Genesis:
“The LORD God planted a garden in Eden . . .
and placed there the man whom he had formed.
Out of the ground the LORD God made various trees grow
that were delightful to look at and good for food.”
What does God want for us?
He wants life for us.
Please, everyone listening to me,
resist the temptation, or fight the suggestion
whenever you hear it, that somehow the God of the
Bible is sort of cramped and crabby and difficult
and legalistic and overbearing.
I’ve quoted before from Christopher Hitchens,
the famous atheist, who said God is
like Kim Jong-un.
He’s like this North Korean dictator that’s imposing
a grim lifestyle on everybody.
Come on, come on.
That’s completely unbiblical.
What does God want for us?
Life.
He wants life and life to the full.
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,”
as Irenaeus said.
Well you see it right here.
Now notice something.
The serpent is invoked,
the most cunning of all the animals.
“The serpent asked the woman, ‘Did God really tell you
not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’”
And the woman answers.
Now pay very close attention here to the answer.
“No, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden.”
Now we tend, I think, to skip right over that line,
and we go right to the prohibition,
which I’ll get to, but don’t forget that line.
It’s the devil who suggests,
“Oh, God doesn’t want you to eat of any of these
beautiful and tasty trees.”
No, no, no.
See, that’s the father of lies suggesting that.
And the woman correctly answers,
“No, no. We’ve been given permission
to eat of all of these trees.”
The Church Fathers said this symbolizes
the great permission.
God wants us alive.
He wants us to enjoy fully the good things of this world.
How wonderful that they’re delightful
to look at and to eat.
He’s talking about sensual pleasure,
but the Church Fathers saw it as symbolic of
all the different forms of human flourishing.
So this is science and art and literature and politics
and friendship and conversation.
Everything that makes life wonderful,
God says, “Yes, yes.”
See, before we get to the prohibition,
there’s the great permission.
It was G.K. Chesterton who said people can focus
so much on the Ten Commandments
and that God is telling us these things we can’t do.
I don’t know if you’ve seen there’s a routine
of George Carlin.
And I did appreciate George Carlin;
he was one of the funniest people when
I was growing up,
but of course he hated religion.
A Catholic, I guess, by formation,
but boy was he poorly formed in his Catholicism.
Because he has a routine where he says,
“Religion’s made us believe in this invisible man in the sky.”
First of all, that’s the last thing God is,
is an invisible man in the sky.
But then Carlin says,
“Who’s told us there are ten things you can’t do,
and if you do them, I’ll send you to . . .”
Well see, that’s rushing to these
—let’s face it—
ten little things that God asks us not to do.
What he forgets is —this is Chesterton’s point—
the millions of things that God tells us we can do,
the billions of things that we can do;
all the ways that we’re allowed to flourish.
So notice how Genesis puts the emphasis properly
on the permission, not the prohibition.
The true God wants us alive.
It’s a sign, by the way, that you’re dealing
with a false god when you have a cramped,
crabby, legalistic, oppressive form of deity.
That’s a sign you’re dealing with the wrong god.
The true one wants us alive.
Okay, now she corrects the serpent:
“No, we may eat of all the trees except for one,
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Now here, everyone knows this.
Everyone runs to that line.
There is indeed this prohibition.
Now, why?
Oh, because God doesn’t want us alive,
and he’s legalistic and he’s overbearing.
No, that’s not it.
We are prohibited from becoming ourselves
the criterion of good and evil.
God alone, as the supreme good,
as goodness in itself,
is the criterion of good and evil.
What is in accord with God’s nature, that’s good.
What is repugnant to God’s nature, that’s evil.
God is the criterion.
The problem is when we make ourselves
the criterion of good and evil.
We say, no, no, my will, my mind.
I determine what’s right and wrong.
When that happens, everything falls apart.
When that happens, the enjoyment we are supposed
to take out of life is compromised.
See, God’s no, if you want, is a no to a no.
It’s a no to a negative.
God’s word is always yes,
because a no to a no is a yes.
Does that make sense?
That’s the right way to read the prohibition,
not that God’s trying to limit us.
On the contrary, he wants us alive,
and that means we live our lives in accordance
with the criterion that he himself is.
Okay.
Now keep that fundamental in mind.
This is like how to grip the golf club.
This is like how to do a three-point stance.
This is a fundamental in the spiritual order.
So with that in mind, let’s turn to the Gospel,
which is from the fourth chapter of Matthew,
the story of the temptation of Jesus.
What are we meant to see here?
We’re meant to see three typical ways
that we get off kilter.
Three ways that when we make ourselves the
criterion of good and evil, we tend to get off the beam.
So Jesus, like us in all things except sin
—that means he was tempted the way we are.
He’s tempted in his humanity by these three typical distortions.
And notice how
—very clever of course—
the devil reappears in the Gospel,
appealing to his —Jesus’—ego to make himself
the criterion of good and evil.
So look at the first one.
The tempter approached him after the forty days of fasting.
He said, “If you are the Son of God,
command that these stones become loaves of bread.”
What’s the temptation here?
Alright, I make myself the criterion of good and evil,
and therefore I make
the satisfaction of my sensual desire the center of my life.
Food and drink and sex and bodily pleasure,
that becomes the central value of my life because
I am the criterion of good and evil.
Who are you to tell me what to do?
So I’m going to say,
“No, satisfying my sensual desire is what my life is all about.”
Think that’s an abstraction?
Come on, look around and look at yourself.
Honestly, we’re always, always confronted
with this temptation.
Notice, please.
We’re not saying here that sensual pleasure’s a bad thing.
Of course not.
God gave us these bodies.
God gave us these capacities, and he wants us to eat
of all the trees in the garden.
That means, yes, food and drink and
sex and sensual pleasure.
Nothing wrong with that.
What’s wrong with it is making it into god,
making it the central value of my life.
It does not belong there.
Now, why?
Listen to Jesus.
Jesus said in reply, “It is written:
‘One does not live on bread alone,
but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”
That’s it.
Nothing wrong with bread and wine and sensual pleasure,
but we don’t live by those alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,
from the criterion of good and evil that God is.
Okay.
Second temptation.
And again, we’re back to the basics here,
because all of us sinners face this.
“The devil took him to the holy city,
and made him stand on the parapet of the temple.
He said, “If you are the Son of God,
throw yourself down.
For it is written:
‘He will command his angels concerning you
and with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”
What’s the temptation here?
Temptation to honor, pride.
The parapet of the temple, that meant the tip-top of
the most important building in the Jewish world.
And in fact, I’m so important that I’ll
throw myself down and God himself will come and send
his angels to support me.
Here’s the temptation everybody, fellow sinners
listening to me, toward ego inflation,
toward the honoring of the self.
Again, is honor bad in itself?
No, not bad in itself, but it’s not God.
And the inflation of the ego leads to this very deep
compromise and very profound distortion of the self.
Jesus answered him,
“Again it is written: ‘You shall not
put the Lord, your God, to the test.’”
Notice what’s going on there again.
You’re not the criterion of good and evil.
God is.
Don’t put the criterion of good and evil
to the test on your terms.
No, no.
When you submit to God, then you can rest
in the legitimate honors that come to you.
Then you can feel a legitimate sense
of your own importance,
but only under the aegis of God.
Okay, last temptation, and fellow sinners,
we all face it.
“Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain,
and showed him all the kingdoms of the world
in their magnificence.
He said, ‘All these I shall give to you,
if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.’”
What’s that?
The temptation to power.
It’s interesting to me how it comes last,
because it’s the most important.
It’s the most fundamental.
In a way, the temptation toward sensual pleasure
is more superficial,
then honor, but finally, power.
Power is a deeply tempting thing.
Wrong in itself?
No, no.
God’s called powerful, it can’t be wrong in itself.
But when you make worldly power
the center of your life, the supreme value,
what’s going to happen —and we’ve seen it
again and again in the lives of famous sinners—
is your power now becomes the means by which
you put everybody in his or her place.
Everyone now is a bit player in your great drama.
You will manipulate and dominate anyone
if they get in the way of your exercise of power.
When you make yourself the criterion of good
and evil and you say,
“my power is what really matters,”
watch out.
Everybody, the havoc that has been wreaked
in the world from this move.
So what does Jesus say?
“Get away, Satan!
It is written: ‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship
and him alone shall you serve.’”
There it is again.
Nothing wrong with power in itself as long as it’s
under the aegis of God.
As long as you are worshiping not power but God,
then eat of that tree,
then use your power for good.
Lots of the saints have.
Okay, everybody, back to basics.
Genesis chapter 2, the great permission,
and then that one prohibition.
Do not make yourself the criterion of good and evil.
And then watch, perhaps, all during
these forty days of Lent:
What’s my relationship to pleasure,
to honor, to power?
Always submit yourself to God,
and then put the rest in relation to God.
And God bless you.