THE DEVIL IN THE DESERT
“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test,” Jesus replied to Satan from Deuteronomy 6:16: but the rest of the verse says, “as you tested [God] at Massah.”
Massah means testing and Meribah means contention.
Psalm 95:8 says, “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
The wilderness are the places in our lives of no water and where the people grumble, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?”
Or “Why did you give me this project at work with so little resources to complete it?”
Or “Why do you expect me to clean this house in only 2 hours without any help?”
The church has understood the temptation of Jesus as a recapitulation of Israel's experience in the wilderness and as a paradigm for its own struggle in an alien environment.
You won’t always camp at a well-watered location, although you are supposed to (Josh. 11:5, Exod. 15:25, Num. 21:12)
The traditional purpose of temptations is that it is an experiment, attempt, trial, proving, to test one’s faith or fidelity, integrity, virtue, and constancy by an enticement or temptation to sin, whether arising from the desires within or from the outward circumstances.
The Chosen People wandered in the wilderness for forty years as a time of testing (see Deut. 8:2). That was the first lent.
The Wilderness is essential for believers to learn the way of the Lord’s will and for our spiritual growth in a place of barren emptiness and hardship.
Wilderness experiences are inevitable for every Christian as way forward to the promised land, somethings are to be done there which can be done nowhere else.
Massah and Meribah the places where there are pressures everywhere and contradictory claims at every turn.
Moses would go and just fall on his face before the Lord telling him that he can’t handle the conflict.
Sometimes we just got to fall on our face before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and just say “I can’t, only You can.”
The Lord helped Moses every time and supplied water from the rock.
But, one time, Moses took things into his own hands and took credit for supplying the water and did not manifest the holiness of the Lord, and so God punished him, and so Moses did not enter the Promised Land.
The message is: from the highest leader to the lowest member, ALL must take God’s promises seriously.
Faith and trust in divine mercy is a genuine response to the Lord’s Presence.
As a new convert, Ignatius of Loyola had frequent visions of a hovering serpent, luminous and beautiful. Appearing on and off, the spectacle captivated Ignatius’ attention and emotions, derailing the pilgrim’s interior peace.
About the same time, a troubling interior voice pestered him: And how are you going to be able to stand this life the seventy years you’re meant to live?’
The tempter isolated the demands of a devout life from its heavenly source and finality.
Like all temptations, this ploy contains a partial truth: Ignatius could not sustain this life alone. However, the enemy deftly tried to turn the pilgrim away from God’s grace and towards his own insufficient strength.
Ignatius’ response is swift and firm: ‘Sensing that it was from the enemy, he answered with great vehemence, “You wretch! Can you promise me one hour of life?” And in that way, he overcame the temptation and was left calm.’ (Autobiography, n. 20)
Ignatius ‘perseveres’ in spiritual reading, in resisting disordered passions, in regular confession and communion, in set times of prayer, in fasting and so on.
Ignatius’ perseverance had everything to do with his growing stability and happiness (n.20).
The spiritual tradition has understood perseverance as both a grace and a virtue.
In the life of Ignatius, an extraordinary grace delivered him from depression, while grace also inspired his steadfast discipline and piety.
Psychologically, the experience of temptation could be usefully defined as that of a conflict in the desire.
One of the most familiar and comforting of Biblical passages is 1 Cor 10:13 with its promise that God will not permit the believer to be tempted beyond his ability to endure.
Trait self-control (TSC) is typically conceptualized as the ability to resist immediately gratifying (but problematic) impulses, and it predicts many positive life outcomes. Recent research, however, suggests that the benefits of TSC may operate not through effortful resistance of temptations, but rather, via good desires and habits.
It is in the wilderness that the Lord tests us by depriving us of the things that we have come to expect, to show us what He already knew—what was in our hearts of self-interest.
God brought his people out of slavery in Egypt, now he had to get Egypt out of them.
The first generation of Israelites failed the test in the desert except for Caleb and Joshua, who actually benefited from it, who experienced that God’s sufficiency and mercy is not to be questioned even when others are doing so.
There is no other way to get to the Promised Land—the purpose of the desert is to sift us and to bring to the surface hidden weaknesses.
He needs to deliver us from a world of pretense into a world where we are wholly committed to his will.
Amen.
source for much of this homily: Angus Gunn, In the Wilderness with God
