Jesus Leads the Way
First Sunday of Lent. Fr Richard Ounsworth preaches on the challenges of the moral life.
Before Lent began, we started reading St Matthew’s Gospel and very quickly found ourselves in the Sermon on the Mount, the first and probably the best-known of five large blocks of Christ’s teaching that we find in this Gospel. In it, Jesus proposes a new kind of morality, one that goes far beyond what is demanded in the Law of Moses, and one that presents a profound challenge to every human being, as last week’s preacher noted.
But one of the most important features of this Gospel is that Jesus Christ does not simply lay upon his followers this challenge: he also shows us what it looks like to complete it. And today’s Gospel reminds us that the Jesus who – unlike the Scribes and the Pharisees – lived up to the moral standards he proclaimed is a man like us in all things but sin, tempted in every way as we are, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us (Heb 4:15). So before Christ ever makes a single demand of his followers, he enters into profound solidarity with them. Thereafter, throughout Matthew’s Gospel and in many and various ways, Jesus shows himself to be the one who perfectly fulfils the Law and all the demands of the New Law which is the way of life he proposes in his Sermon on the Mount and the rest of his teaching.
Therefore we can see in Christ’s responses to the three temptations highlighted in the Gospel ways in which we can begin to face the difficulties of our own life as we seek to imitate Christ. By far the greatest and most usual of these difficulties is the challenge of the mundane: how to keep our lives centred and focused on God when the ordinary so often intrudes – what to eat, what to wear, how to pay the bills, and so on. These problems are real, and we are not required to pretend that they are not or to ignore them, but only to contextualise them. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God – but we do still need bread. However, by our Lenten observances, especially by fasting and abstinence we begin to learn to put the everyday into the context of the eternal.
Christ invites us to shift our focus, until God is in the centre, and his fundamental message is that we are loved by God. Loved into existence, held in being every moment by a Creator who loves us more profoundly than we can possibly imagine. This truth, once grasped, is utterly liberating; but it brings with it its own danger, namely the risk of presumption. God loves me, therefore nothing bad can happen to me, we might think. But of course bad things do happen to good people all the time, and if hitherto we had supposed that we were the exception, being rightly aware of how loved we are, then when the evil day comes it will be all too easy to lose heart. An awareness of God’s love needs to be matched by an attitude of trust and obedience, so that we can endure difficulties with the certainty that God knows what he is doing, even if we do not.
For our faith tells us that we are destined for glory – as indeed are those upon whom in this life we may be tempted to despise as fools or sinners or even monsters. To share in the glory of God’s Kingdom is the purpose for which humanity was created and for which every human being was brought into the world. But to reach out and grasp this for ourselves, not in a spirit of obedience and love such as Christ showed on the Cross, but in a spirit of pride which puffs us up and seeks our glory at the expense of others is to make ourselves servants of Satan. By prayer and almsgiving, we co-operate with God in his gracious gift of lives focused on love of God and neighbour, on humility and service.
In all of this, Christ shows us the way, and it is the way of the Cross. ‘Take up your Cross and follow me’ is his invitation. And if we follow it, we will find ourselves with him on another high mountain: not the one where he is led by Satan, but the one he reaches after his Resurrection, when he shows us the world, tells us of his definitive victory over sin and death, and invites us to be heralds of the victory by proclaiming the Gospel. He has led the way, and that way has brought us to new life and to the wonderful gift of Apostleship. Let us follow him, tempted often though we may be, with joyful hearts.
Readings: Genesis 2:7-9,3:1-7 | Romans 5:12-19 | Matthew 4:1-11
Image: detail from a photograph of Christ the Redeemer, Rio di Janeiro, via Wikimedia Commons
