LENT, A TIME TO FIGHT IDOLATRY.
March 01 2020: First Sunday of Lent - A
A Spanish proverb says, “He who avoids the temptation avoids
the sin.” Another proverb adds, “A man of character is resistant to temptation.”
The forbidden is delicious! That is what they say. And at times, prohibited things can seem pretty good. So, we tend to do things that should not be, to disobey or to violate the taboo. The temptations of man are in general, to make him selfish, to lose his relationship with God. Because the real temptation is to break man's dependence on his God. It is about the idolatry of the self. People today, love to do everything without God. Everything by ourselves and for ourselves, caring less about other and even about God.
Many are we who understand idolatry as worshiping the sun, the moon, the rivers or any other created things surrounding us. In that sense, we categorize some people as idolaters. Many have looked and even still looking at some African and Asiatic cultures as idolatric. The indigenous people are taxed of idolaters, and many other not yet Christianized tribes are seen as idol worshipers. What we forget is that even in our today’s so-called modern societies, many more are the fulltime idol worshipers. Idols have no longer the face of sun or moon or forest or rivers, but of money, power, pleasure, material possession, sex, electronic gadgets…
Many are we who understand idolatry as worshiping the sun, the moon, the rivers or any other created things surrounding us. In that sense, we categorize some people as idolaters. Many have looked and even still looking at some African and Asiatic cultures as idolatric. The indigenous people are taxed of idolaters, and many other not yet Christianized tribes are seen as idol worshipers. What we forget is that even in our today’s so-called modern societies, many more are the fulltime idol worshipers. Idols have no longer the face of sun or moon or forest or rivers, but of money, power, pleasure, material possession, sex, electronic gadgets…
Today’s liturgy, while we enter the Lenten pilgrimage is a
call to be at war against idolatry. We are told that God abhors all kind of idolization.
He wants us to be his unshared and exclusive possession, his beloved children.
Before entering the deep of our meditation, a word on Lent. We
have opened, with last Wednesday’s celebration, the Ash Wednesday, an annual
season of climbing the Holy Mountain of Easter. Through this season
observances, we are invited to set a particular focus on our individual
relationship with God. the accent of the Lenten season is that it is a
favorable time of repentance, renewal of oneself through the renewal of our
baptismal commitment, rediscovery of a sacramental life through the sacrament
of reconciliation, and the commitment to be good and to do good. Lent is, par excellence,
a time to experience God’s mercy and in return, to be merciful toward others.
While we enter in this season, today being the first Sunday,
the first reading takes us to the first greatest sin of idolatry, the sin of
our ancestors, Adam and Eve. It is all about the idolatry of one’s will instead
of the will of God. We read from this extract of the Genesis that sin comes
from the fact of giving free ride to temptation, and temptation leads to disobedience.
In fact, after creating man, God planted a garden and gave to Adam its care, with
an order. God gave man the possibility of using or eating all he wants from the
garden, except one, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” But then came
the time of temptation; the serpent corrupting God words and leading man and
woman to disobedience.
Through that episode of Adam and Eve, we are brought to
learn that when we let ourselves be seduced by the devil and go against God’s
will, we destroy and condemn ourselves to unhappiness and all kind of evilness.
Here is the real consequence of idolatry. He who lives in it becomes an unhappy
creature submitted to the dictate of what he believes is good for him, though
far away from his Creator.
Jesus, instead, in the Gospel teaches us how to resist
idolatry and how to overcome all kind of temptations. We read that it all begins
with prayer. Brought in the desert by the Spirit, the Lord, we read, is exposed
to temptations: to do his own will or the will of God his Father? Through the
experience of the Lord, we learn that the best way to resist the devil and any
temptations is to set the primacy on God’s will and on God alone. He who puts
God at the first position in his life does not hunger for material possession
neither for pleasure, not even the basic needs, that is food. He thirsts for
nothing.
The Lord’s three temptations in the desert are the pattern of
our ordinary temptations: idolatry of pleasure at all cost, idolatry of
possession at all cost and idolatry of power at all cost. We can resist those
temptations, only if we set the love of God and the intimacy with him before
our love for food, for money, for pleasure (sex included), for power and any
other material things. May these Lenten observances help us to fight the three ‘P’,
that are the lust of flesh (pleasure), the lust of eyes (possession) and the
pride of life (power), our true idols.
Like Jesus, may we, in this Lent, make of obedience to God’s
will our armor. In so doing, no matter the assaults or seductions of the world
and of its prince, we will stand firm and unshaken. For, if sin is a mystery,
the love and compassion of God is a greater mystery, and only obedience helps
us to unveil that mystery of love.
Comments
Post a Comment