1st Sunday of Lent     

Gospel – Luke 4:1-13

A Blank Sheet

Judean Desert Near the Dead Sea

As most of my former students can attest, my exams and tests were never what you would call normal!  I was always looking for a slightly skewed approach that would challenge them to think creatively and re-present the class material in a unique way.  So when we gathered for a test on Buddhism, I tried not to disappoint!  I handed out a simple blank sheet of paper and gave them this one ‘simple’ direction.  Create a poster with the following theme:  Everything You Need to Know about Buddhism. 

What followed was 45 minutes filled with a furious scribbling of pens, pencils and markers.  Most used the entire time period and completely filled their paper with a variety of words and drawings, of terms and symbols related to Buddhism.  And all of them completely missed the point!  Buddhism has absolutely nothing to do with “knowing”. You can’t actually teach Buddhism; you have to experience it!  It’s about living it.  It’s about knowing nothing!  So what would have been the A+ answer?  If they turned in a completely blank sheet of paper!   And NO, nobody got it!  Oh well!  Sometimes a blank slate is a good thing!  Sometimes brevity beats long-windedness!  And that is what we see in today’s Gospel.

We read the story of Jesus in the desert.  Jesus is led by the Spirit out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, where He was tempted by Satan.  And while we tend to focus on the 3 temptations themselves, let’s instead look at 2 details that actually set the scene: the number 40 and the desert.

If you think about it, 40 comes up a lot in the Bible: 40 days and nights of rain with Noah, 40 years of wandering in the desert for the Israelites after leaving Egypt, Moses spending 40 days on Mt. Sinai before receiving the Ten Commandments, Jonah warning the people of Nineveh that they have 40 days to repent before God destroys the city, 40 days between Easter Sunday and Ascension Thursday, and, today, Jesus spending 40 days in the desert.

For the Jews, 40 always symbolized a time of transition, a point of passing from one experience to another.  Passing from a life of slavery in Egypt to a life of freedom in the Promised Land, passing from a world of sin to a new world with Noah, and Jesus moving from a private life to His public life of preaching and healing.  And for us in this season of Lent, moving from 40 days of reflection and repentance to the joy of Easter!  A time of transition and a time of change!

And the 2nd detail – the desert

The desert, for the Jews, was a place of trial and testing, a place where the unnecessary elements of one’s life was burned away.  It was a place that tested one’s courage and faith.  For the faithless, it was a place where one felt forsaken by God, in doubt about what God intended for them, a period of darkness of the soul and abandonment by God.

But for the faithful, it was a place of spiritual cleansing, a place to strip away dependency on material things and focus on one’s relationship with the Creator.  A place of prayer, a place to draw closer to God!

That is why so many mystics retreated to the desert in the early Church and why John the Baptist lived such an ascetic life of prayer and fasting in the hills around Qumran in the Judean Desert to before his mission of baptism and repentance of sins.  So it’s not that surprising that Jesus goes off into the desert to fast, to pray to His Father and to prepare for His public ministry.

As we continue on this 40 day journey, will it truly be a journey of transition.  Will we be any different at the end of 40 days than we were at the beginning?  Will we experience any change in our spiritual life at all?

Will we give ourselves the chance to have that desert experience?  We all need that time to step aside from all the comforts and luxuries of life, to get back to basics in a sense, and give ourselves the time to revisit and reconnect with our Creator.  Will we experience a sort of spiritual cleansing?  A chance to get down to basics, to realize what is necessary in our lives and what needs to be discarded.

I pray that these 40 days of Lent provide us all with the opportunity for some positive changes in our life and that we all have a desert experience, to step aside from a life of comfort and everyday life, to cleanse ourselves of unnecessary distractions and to be more focused on our Creator and on our relationship with Him.  To start with that blank sheet of paper!

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