Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
February 17, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.17.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the first Sunday of Lent, as we will journey with Jesus into the desert.
* Most people have little desire to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a tourist visit. Even in the midst of a rather frigid and snowy February in the northeast, few of us are dreaming about the Sahara, Arabian or Gobi deserts. But at a spiritual level, we should always have a great love for the desert, because the desert is what helps us to understand the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent, in which we join and imitate Jesus in the desert and ponder the fruits of what he learned and experienced there upon his return. Every Lent, the same Holy Spirit whom we read in this Sunday’s Gospel drove Jesus into the desert wants to drive us into the desert with him. Lent is meant to help us recapitulate Christ’s 40 days away from everything so that we, apart from every distraction, can focus on our relationship with God and others and on who we are — and, with Christ’s help, can confront and overcome the way that the devil seeks to distort those relations and that image.
* To go into the desert is increasingly difficult for people today. We’re so connected that if we are out of cell phone range we can easily feel totally lost. While the Lord is not calling us all physically to go to the sands of the Mojave, he is calling us to the state of the desert, removing ourselves from distractions, from our screens and devices, newspapers and magazines, and the various things that may be fine in themselves but crowd our lives with noise so that we can’t hear God and with clutter so that we can’t see God. The first temptation we face in Lent is to refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that our Lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up booze and sweets. We need silence. We need prayer. As Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea wrote in his recent book The Power of Silence, “God is silence, and the devil is noisy. … God’s first language is silence.… In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God. [God] waits for our silence to reveal Himself. Regaining the sense of silence is therefore a priority, an urgent necessity. … The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and toward others.” The first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ’s voice from the desert saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31).
* The next lesson we need to grasp is what is supposed to be the fruit of that time in the desert. What does the Holy Spirit who drives us to this Lenten desert experience want to help us to achieve? Jesus shares this lesson with us as soon as he finished that first 40-day retreat. He returned saying, “Repent and believe in the good news.” These are the words he shared with us earlier this week, as we were marked with ashes on Wednesday. To repent — what metanoia means in Greek — is to revolutionize the way we look at things, at the world, at ourselves, at others, so that we might put on the way Christ looks at things. It means to turn one’s thoughts around, or better right side up. It’s as if we’ve been going in one direction and Jesus tells us, “Stop, turn around and go in this new direction.
