1^st Sunday of Lent      

Gospel – Matthew 4:1-11

A Desert Experience

Masada, Judean Desert Near the Dead Sea

A King was growing old and knew it was time to choose his successor. Instead of choosing one of his children, he invited all the young people from his kingdom and told them,   "I am going to give each one of you a seed today – one very special seed. I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from this seed. I will then judge the plants that you bring, and, based on your efforts, I will choose the next ruler

 One of the boys went home and excitedly told his mother the story. She helped him get a pot filled with soil, and he planted the seed and watered it carefully. Every day, he would water it and watch to see if it had grown. After about three weeks, some of the other youths began to talk about their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow. He kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew. Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks went by, still nothing. By now, others were talking about their plants, but he didn't have a plant and he felt like a failure. Six months went by   -- still nothing in his pot and he knew his seed had died. Everyone else had trees or flowers, but he had nothing.  A year finally went by and all the youths of the kingdom brought their plants to the king for inspection.  The boy reluctantly took his empty pot to the palace. He was amazed at the variety of plants grown by the other youths. They were beautiful -- in all shapes and sizes. 

 When the king arrived, he surveyed the room and greeted the young people. And the boy tried to hide in the back.   Suddenly the king spotted him at the back of the room with his empty pot. He ordered his guards to bring him to the front. He was terrified.  The king asked him what happened.  I don’t know, he said.  I planted the seed, watered it every day, pulled weeds and cared for it as best I could.  But nothing grew.  I’m sorry!

Then the King spoke to the crowd "One year ago today, I gave everyone here a seed. I told you to take the seed, plant it, water it, and bring it back to me today. But I gave you all boiled seeds that couldn’t grow. All of you, except this boy, have brought me trees and plants and flowers. When you found that the seed would not grow, you substituted another seed for the one I gave you. This boy was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me a pot with my seed in it. Therefore, he is the one who will be the new king!"

That young boy had a choice; actually all the youth had a choice.  But he was the only one to make the honest decision, the tough decision, to take the right road even though it was difficult and uncomfortable.  All the others chose to take the easy road – no worries, no responsibilities, a dishonest path.  They all faced a sort of temptation – right or wrong, easy or demanding.  They all faced a turning point in their lives!  All of time, except for that one boy, gave in to temptation.

We read the Gospel story of Jesus being led by the Spirit out into the desert, and He remained in the desert for forty days, at the end of which He was tempted by Satan.  Forty days in the desert heat, forty days of fasting and prayer!  And then when He was tired and hungry, in that human moment, the devil tempted Him 3 times with the lure of selfishness, of focusing only on His physical and spiritual needs, and not that of others!  40 days! 

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, 40 days of Lent 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, moving into a new direction in life!  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 then, there’s 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? 

Those 40 days in the desert marked a turning point for Jesus.  It marked His rejection of taking the easy path that the devil offered.  It marked the beginning of His public life – a life of preaching and teaching and healing.  A life that ends on the hill of Calvary on the cross!

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.