Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - First Sunday of Lent - 17 February 2013

Fr Robin Gibbons

What do we make of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness? Anybody who has spent time in a desert environment will realize that these encounters are not simply hallucinations or the workings out of some psycho-drama in the mind, in religious tradition the desert is a place of meeting, where stripped of almost everything we begin to discover the power of the spiritual world in both negative and positive aspects. Faced with hunger Jesus is tempted to do something different - alter the landscape of the desert to create what he needs, stone to bread, but he refuses this offer and gives us an insight into a contemporary dilemma.

Faced with our hungry world politicians and business men and women seek more land to utilize for food production, more livestock for meat, but in doing this they often cause great ecological damage, the human land grabbing, destructive ways of altering habitant and life cannot go on, for in the end hunger will not be assuaged, we need to listen to the word of God encouraging us to be good stewards looking at good ecological alternatives, perhaps even seeking ways of turning our arid deserts, often caused by our actions into an oasis of cultivation.

More obvious is the temptation to power and glory, made more apparent by the media celebrity and fame culture of today. But as we listen to the different chattering classes telling us what to do and see powerful men and women strut the world stage it is important to remember the ancient penitential words of Lent: 'remember man/woman that thou art dust'. This is not to belittle achievement but to keep a sense of reality and humility before our eyes, as Christians we believe that though we are citizens of the world, we are also members of the Kingdom of God and it is God we ultimately worship and serve, nobody else.

The last temptation is interesting because it touches on the role of religion, here the devil is portrayed as testing Jesus, revealing who he is but trying to use religion as a panacea, throw himself down and the angels will lift him up, but that is not Christ's way. The incarnation is the total identification of God in Christ with everything in the world, poverty, sin, sickness, hope,despair, love, life and death, faith does not give us short cuts or ways out, instead through Jesus and those gifts of the Spirit we are asked to faithfully take up the victorious cross each day, to share one anothers burdens, to 'give and not to count the cost', to be a loving disciple of Jesus and one another.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.