REFLECTION ONE: RESISTING THE TEMPTATION
Every year on Ash Wednesday we begin Lent with two basic commands: Return to God with your whole heart, and do not be hypocritical – which really means there is one command that we are called to take very, very seriously.
Return to God with your heart. Implicit in this command seems to be the idea that our heart is not whole, or that our return is not whole – that some how our heart and our desire to return is divided.
In our Gospel yesterday, we once again encountered Satan tempting Jesus in the desert, as we hear every year on the first Sunday of Lent. Perhaps it is comforting for us to be reminded that even Jesus was tempted? Perhaps it is helpful to know just as Jesus resisted the urge to sin, to turn away from God, so can we resist the temptations that come our way.
But I don’t know that we really stop and consider what the temptations really are? Are they not connected to the divisions you just named?
Let me ask it a different way: is what you bring to confession connected to the divisions you just identified?
I find it helpful to begin with the basics: what matters to God? That is to ask, what does one heart for God look like? (In Mark 12:28, we hear that one of the scribes asked Jesus this question, and Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. AND ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.)