A Love Without Rival

Based on the Bible Reading for the First Sunday of Lent: Matthew 4:1-11

The  season of Lent  gives us an occasion to  confront the unpleasant topic of sin. During most of my younger days,  sin  was the  favorite topic  of preachers. We had a lot of  fire-and-brimstone preachers  then. Spiritual life  focused on  avoiding sins, which  seem to be everywhere.

I remember during the  Cursillo  I attended in the late 60’s one talk was on the “Obstacles to Sanctity.” The speaker spent the whole session describing the  different kinds of mortal sins. We counted  39  of them. And he concluded with  “and there are many, many more!”  The spirituality then was a  spirituality dominated by guilt and fear of hell.

However, in the  recent years  the pendulum swings to  the other extreme. Our technological society  tends to explain away sin. Pope Francis calls it a “therapeutic culture.” Sinful actions are increasingly viewed as indicators that such individuals were victims of an illness they had little or no control over. Our  evil deeds may be due to our  unhappy childhood, or the  environmental influence.

Rapes and murders are caused by  temporary insanity. The excuse for  infidelity  is that it is a way to prove that a man is  “macho” or is excused with  “sapagkat tayo ay tao lamang.” (We are only human). Today, people tend to put a nice names  to what used to be considered  grave sins. Lies are now a sorting out of facts. Abortion is now the exercise of a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted fetus. It’s a  Choice. Promiscuity is now renamed “sexually active.”

In today’s society you often find people who feel that  they have no sin. Has sin disappeared from our Christian vocabulary? Yet, the  First Letter of John  tells us: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So today, let us look into the  mystery of sin. For unless we speak of sin, we shall not speak sensibly of Easter, of resurrection, of Jesus Christ – even of ourselves.

What is the Christian scenario for sin? I mean a scenario that  balances reason with faith. I am not concerned about  scaring you out of hell, or to “scare the hell” out of you. I simply want you to  see sin for  what it is, for  what it does. Hopefully you will then happily  choose the opposite of sin, choose love, life, and Christ.

So, look at three questions —

First, what is sin all about? Perhaps the best source for understanding sin is the  Genesis story of the  first man and first woman, and the first sin, which tells us that  sin goes back to the beginning of the human drama. A man and a woman shaped to the image and likeness of God himself, the masterpiece  of His creative hand, turned their backs on their Creator. They ate of the tree of which God had commanded the man, “You shall not eat of it.”

Sin destroys a relationship, the intimacy with the God who  fashioned you out of nothing  -fashioned out of love alone.  For the  Jesus of John’s  Gospel,  sin is separation  –  separation from God. It means  you are no longer a son or daughter of the Father; you are  a slave  –  enslaved to Satan.

In John’s Gospel, sin has a frightful face: I no longer love God. Listen to the revealing confession of the prodigal in Luke’s Gospel: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

When we sin  we seldom rebel against God directly. Most sins echo  the sin of Cain,  who murdered his brother. Most sin is man’s inhumanity to man. Most sin takes place  because we do not love  our neighbor nearly as much as we love ourselves.

This brings us to the  next question: What has all this to do with the Christ of Lent?  St. Paul teaches us that  sin is an evil force that tyrannizes every man and woman born on earth. It is a  power hostile to God, a power that  alienates us from God.

But  Paul  was deeply aware of a  still more powerful reality. Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more … through Jesus Christ our Lord. Through Christ our Lord. That phrase reminds us of the Gospel of John, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John  3:16)

Lent  makes sense only because  in Lent  we re-live a love that has no rival, the love that is more powerful than sin – more powerful than the Sin that dominated human history from the very first rebellion in Eden, more powerful than the countless sins  that destroy God’s image each day on earth.

And unbelievably God had determined to conquer sin on a cross. Such is  the love we re-live in Lent: a God-man freely enduring a cruel crucifixion for a world that had sinned against Him; was still sinning, would never quite stop sinning. God shows His love for us in that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  (Rom. 5:8)

And that, my brothers and sisters, brings us to a  third question: What should all this say to us, today’s Christians, in Lent and beyond? The problem is this: Though Jesus has destroyed the tyranny of sin, he has not destroyed our ability to sin. Though sin no longer enslaves us, we are still tempted to sin, we are still free to sin, we still sin.

Unexpectedly, one concrete answer leaps out of today’s Gospel, out of Jesus “let by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Like Israel, 40 years in the wilderness, Jesus, the new Israel, is tempted – tempted when he is weak  from 40 days of fasting, tempted to betray his mission.

All three temptations are temptations to use power for his own benefit. Are you hungry? Well then, change these stones into bread! Do you want the  people to pay attention to you, to admire you? Well then, fly like Superman from the top of the temple and let the angels lift you up! Do you want  to rule over the world? Well then,  just worship me  and you’ve got it.

Rejecting the suggestions, Jesus responds, you’ve got it all wrong; your way is not my way. It is not bread that gives life; it is my word. It is not by dramatic spectacles  that I reveal myself; look for me among the lowly, the powerless, the crucified. It is not by political power that my kingdom will come; to use worldly power is to worship false gods.

When  Matthew wrote about the temptations of Jesus, he was writing from the context of his own Christian community. Here is a continuing temptation for the Church, for the Christians:  to use the world’s power to win the world.

Christians have tried it with the  Inquisition  and the  Crusades, with wars, the  cross and the sword. In all these we forget  one important fact: the kingdom of God is won by love, at its best, is  a crucified love.

For the  40 days of Lent, then, and beyond, let a crucial Christian challenge characterize your daily living. Rather than setting your eyes  on sin, rather than focusing on the  fear that our sinfulness can do, why not  shake loose the love in you, the love that is stronger than sin, the love that drives away fear.

Such, my brothers and sisters, is  the Lent that leads to Easter, the crucifixion that ends in resurrection, the dying that is Christian living. In the wake of such love,  sin runs a distant second – always a threat  because of ourselves we are dreadfully weak, but  never a tyrant  because  in Christ we are strikingly strong.

So then,  let our Lent not be simply a physical fasting, an excuse in slimming. Rather, let your Lent be large in loving, in the kind of love that can crucify, that did crucify. It will take a lot of weight off you:  the weight of sin, the weight of guilt.