Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, 3/6

Today’s Gospel leads us into the desert with Jesus, a place of dryness, trial, and temptation. In the desert, Jesus enters into one-on-one combat with his Enemy; he is alone, hungry, and armed with nothing but the Word of God. The season of Lent invites us into a similar desert experience. It is a chance to shed our attachments and our excess, to forego the things that numb us and keep us comfortable, and to come face to face with our enemies of sin and death.

One of the reasons that the Church emphasizes fasting is because it awakens a deeper hunger in us, a hunger for the true source of goodness and satisfaction. It also reveals our frailty and brokenness and invites us to rely on God more deeply. And the amazing thing about our God is that he is intimately acquainted with our frailty: he has entered into it, has allowed himself to experience hunger and loneliness and temptation. And when Jesus invites us into the desert with him, or calls us to pick up our cross and walk toward Calvary, he isn’t doing it to punish us or make us miserable for a few weeks so that we can enjoy chocolate on Easter. He invites us on his narrow desert way, vulnerable to death and temptation, because he wants to conquer the death and brokenness in each of us once and for all. I remember several years ago hearing a retreat speaker say, “Jesus never asks us to die without planning a resurrection.” So even in these dry and sacrificial weeks of Lent, walking the way of the cross and witnessing Jesus’ humble humanity and our own, we can trust in the ending he has planned. We can trust that in sharing in the darkness of the desert and the bitterness of the cross, we will also share in the sweetness of the sunrise and the profound glory of the resurrection.