Day 5, Sunday, 21 February

 

RETREAT IN LENT 2021

Day 5, Sunday, 21 February

It was desirable

The first Sunday in Lent could be called ‘Temptation Sunday’. It is a moment to look at this experience which we have known from our earliest years. The word means ‘to test’. Like Covid vaccine. It has to go through trials before it can be used. Will it produce good results? Or like training. Time spent in training helps a soldier to be ready when the action starts.

So we get this story of the first woman and man. They were tested. Would they take the tough road of growing into the fullness of their humanity? Or would they get drawn away by something that looked ‘desirable and pleasing to the eye’ but which would ultimately diminish them. We know what they chose. It is a story (Genesis 3:1-7) to tell us how the ancients viewed our dilemma, how we refused to grow. We have a name for it: sin.

The Bible tells us of the consequences; the triumphs and catastrophes of our history then - and now. Paul’s letters (for example, Roman 5:12-19) and the gospels tell us how God saw our plight and came to rescue us. He became one of us, flesh and blood like us. He shared our thirst, our hunger, our tiredness – and our temptations (Matthew 4:1-11). He saw through what was ‘desirable and pleasing to the eye’. He refused to take that road.

He took another road, the road less travelled (Robert Frost);

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

Jesus etched it in our memory with the words; ‘Unless you renounce yourself, you cannot be with me.’ You cannot come to the fullness of life. To renounce here is to give up the easy way out. An athlete gets nohere without hours of training. A musician never develops without hours of practice. It is all testing, testing, testing.

 

We fall, we rise, we fall, we rise. Our life is to keep pushing, pushing against the wind that wants to drive us back to the easy road, the one most travelled by.