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by George Bersabe Lk 4:1-13 
"T urn away from your sins and believe in the Gospel."
This was what the priest said when he marked you a sign of the cross on your forehead with ashes last Ash Wednesday. This is the beginning of a 40-day journey of prayer, fasting and charitable activities in commemorating the season of Lent.
It is a time to remember, recall that Jesus suffered and died for us. It is a "lengthy" preparation for the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus.
The readings for this Sunday are all invitations to profess our allegiance to Jesus. This confession of faith must show our true Christian identity.
The passages in the first reading(Dt. 26:8-10) are found in a cultic ritual of the Israelites. While the offering was set before the Lord in gratitude for the bounties of the land, the Israelites made this confession.
They acknowledged their debt of gratitude to God, since at the beginning they were a people without land or freedom.
Now, with their land and its produce, they could pay their annual tithes. They recognized in their life-experience that God was on their side against the Egyptians. It was also God who gave them a bountiful land as their new home. Then they had both land and freedom.
In our second reading (Rom. 10:8-13), we learn that with Christ, a new criterion of identity or membership came into play.
In this part of Romans, Paul has been reflecting on the relationship of Jews and Gentiles with God’s plan of salvation. No longer is observance of the rules and regulations of the Old Law required for salvation. Now it is faith in Christ that makes us acceptable to God.
This is not to say that Jews are excluded from saving grace and holiness, but that access to salvation comes to us all through the acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Messiah.
The Gospel narrates the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. The tests and Jesus’s response to the different temptations show what kind of Messiah and Son of God Jesus is.
The story of Jesus’s temptation does not say that this was the only time that Jesus experienced temptation in His entire life. But it showed Jesus experienced the same temptations experienced by His people.
His attitudes during the three tests made it clear that He did not seek to satisfy
His own physical needs, nor make a miraculous display of His status and power; nor did He come to enter into partnership with the devil nor give in to His own wishes and desires. He was totally obedient to the will of the Father.
It is clearly showed that Jesus is convinced that He is truly the Son of God. He was able to overcome the temptations because He believed that the Lord was on His side.
What is the implication of these messages on our life today?
We are not Christian believers neither because we have carried out certain ritual observances nor because we observe certain rules and regulations. We are Christian believers because of our faith in Christ, i.e., our acceptance of the truth of His teaching and our response to His offer to us of participation in His life here and hereafter.
We are Christian believers because we acknowledge that Jesus is Lord. It is this commitment of ourselves to Him in mind and heart that gives our life its basic meaning and direction. Everything else about us is secondary.
But being in Christ is not just a private and secret arrangement between us and Him. It is a relationship that we are called to profess, to manifest in ways that other people can see and hear, that other people can imitate.
We profess our faith in lots of different ways. The most basic is our membership in the new people of God that we call the Church.
We also profess our faith by the way in which we carry out its demands in our social life, in our work, in our recreation. Our willingness to talk about our faith with non-believers and to let them perceive what the lordship of Jesus means to us are also ways in which we profess our faith.
Each of us probably also has his or her own special ways of proclaiming our faith, connected with the specifics of our individual human existence. But external profession must be there if the faith that is in our hearts is to have any meaning.
Lent is a time of reflection and renewal for Catholic Christians. It’s a good time to think about what we believe, how we believe and why we believe.
It’s a good time, too, to review the ways in which we profess what we believe.
Prayer:
Lord, strengthen us so we can practice and demonstrate our faith not just in thought but in deeds. Amen. |
