WHO ARE YOU?

WHO ARE YOU?

In A Man for all Seasons, a play about Thomas More who defied the king over a matter of conscience, Norfolk pleads with Thomas to join him in obeying the king “for fellowship’s sake.” Thomas replies, “And when you go to heaven for following your conscience and I go to hell for not following mine, will you come with me ‘for fellowship’s sake’”?

What a tonic it is to meet someone who thinks out their position and sticks to it whatever the surrounding weight of opinion! Where I live we are approaching an election and if you ask people it is rare to hear a reasoned statement of how they will vote. The pressure to do as others do or how our tribe does or for some other social reason is hard to resist.

As we begin Lent we find the readings demanding we make choices. The Israelites were mired in political, social and religious trouble at the time of the exile. Their leaders reminded them of Moses’ words about their fragile origins: “My father was a wandering Aramaean.” He went down to Egypt and endured many trials but God rescued him and gave him the land “where milk and honey flow” (Deut. 26). Yet the Israelites abandoned God and followed “the people round about” and ended in disaster.

Each first Sunday of Lent we have an account of the temptations of Jesus in the desert where Satan tries to deflect him from his mission. “Do something popular!” Follow the crowd! But Jesus turns away and “sets his face like flint” (Is. 50:7) to follow what is deepest within him, the Father’s will. He will walk the road alone, “despised and rejected” by the men and women of his time.

If we were to make one Lent resolution we could do no better than to get in touch with what is deepest within us; to strive to discover my greatest yearning – something that can easily be hidden under the layers of cultural and social pressure that surround me. No one is immune to these subtle forces. All the time we compare ourselves – maybe almost unconsciously – to others and we make our decisions accordingly. We trample on what is deepest within us just as the Israelites trampled on their covenant with God in the desert.

This Lent we are invited to “return to the desert” with Jesus and learn again the meaning of the new covenant he has made with us – a covenant that cost him his life’s blood. I had an uncle who went to his death in the Great War in Europe and on his memorial card the family wrote the words of John, “Greater love than this no one can have than to lay down their life for their friends.” (John 15:13). In the end, coming in touch with my conscience and following it is the greatest act of love a person can show.  

14 February 2016                               Sunday 1 C in Lent

Deut 26:4-10                                       Rom 10:8-13                                       Luke 4:1-13