Why Lent?

Matthew 4.1-11 (LIT Bible translated by Brandon C. Vélez Johnson)

¹ Then Jesus was led into the Wilderness by the Life-Breath to be tested by the False Accuser. ² At the end of fasting for 40 days and nights, he was starving.

³ “If you are the Son of God,” the Tester said after coming to Jesus, “Say the words that would make these stones become loaves of bread.”

⁴ But Jesus responded, “It is written, ‘To live, a person won’t live because of bread only, but rather because of every statement that comes out of the mouth of God.’”

⁵ Then the False Accuser took Jesus to the sacred city and had him stand on the corner of the temple. ⁶ “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “Throw yourself down since it’s written that ‘God will give divine messengers a directive about you,’ and ‘They will support you with their hands so that your foot won’t hit a stone.’”

⁷ “Again,” Jesus asserted, “It is written, ‘Don’t test the Lord your God,’”

⁸ Yet again, the False Accuser took Jesus to the top of a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world system and their prestige. ⁹ He told him, “I will give you all these things if you fall to the ground and bow down to me!”

¹⁰ Then Jesus told him, “Get away, Adversary! It is written, ‘You will bow down to the Lord, your God, and serve as the Lord’s representative only’!”

¹¹ The False Accuser left him then, and—notably—messengers came and began to take care of him.

Who gives a shit about Lent?

There’s so much going on in the world these days, spiritual practice seems pointless.

People are being stolen from their homes for the color of their skin. If you resist this state sanctioned violence against our neighbors, we risk being murdered. To government itself is sliding deeper and deeper into authoritarian government with its fascist playbook. People are willfully lying under oath to prop up the ego of one man.

The economy is in shambles, unless you are part of the oligarch class of billionaires who can willfully ignore the needs of the many for the pleasures of the few. Pedophiles are being protected, while their victims are being doxed and vilified.

The weight of the reality of our days weighs heavily on anyone willing to pay attention. We ache for relief. Our bones lament and our souls cry out for something else, something better, something liberating.

How do pray these days? Throwing words in the air seems ineffective at best when my heart is exhausted. Reciting ancient prayers feels hollow when my bones feel the grief of all this. Praying from the heart quickly turns into a rant because of the rage that fills me in the face of all this injustice.

I don’t know how to pray, how to worship, how to approach scripture. I am consumed by the news, feeling the crushing weight of each revelation of horror, each blatant lie and cover-up, each atrocity.

I want something different.

I need something better.

I long for a way to make a difference.

This is why I’m coming into Lent hot this year. I don’t know why it matters. I don’t know what we’re even doing in the lectionary. I want to get out on the street and prophesy to the powers until they physically crumble. Then I want to salt the ashes. I want a way out of this mess, a way to fix it all, a way to change it all now, whatever it takes.

And that right there is why I need Lent now more than ever.

In my haste to name all the evil in the news cycle, in my desire to fix the injustice that crushes us, in my craving to act in the face of all these horrors I risk losing the very bit of heart that set me in opposition to injustice.

My quick trigger reactions want to shoot first, never bothering to ask questions. What I’m really doing underneath the quick-to-rage flash point is hiding.

I’m numbing myself to what is actually happening. I’m longing to not be in the discomfort anymore, so I’ll change it by any means.

And that desire to end the discomfort is exactly the trap that will turn us into the empire we are opposing.

The adversary came and tempted Jesus with this very thing.

Jesus in the wild, hungry, and alone. He had spent forty days and nights coming to terms with his baptismal identity as the beloved of God, preparing for the ministry that would eventually get him killed. He was in need of sustenance and someone to attend to him.

And here comes Satan.

“You’re hungry. Rightly so. You’ve been out here for forty days! You know, you could end this hunger—this discomfort—by changing those stones into bread.”

This seems reasonable. The symbolism of Jesus in the wilderness for forty days and nights—it’s comparison to the flood, Moses on the mountain receiving the Torah, and Israel in the wilderness—had come to an end. It was over. Jesus could take care of himself now.

Underneath that reasonable argument was a temptation not just to take care of himself, but to be self-sufficient. Jesus didn’t need the farmers to grow the grain. He didn’t need bread anyone else baked. He didn’t need someone to bring it from the oven to the table. Jesus didn’t need to give thanks for the provision of daily bread. All he had to do was make stone edible.

All Jesus had to do was not need anyone else.

Just like the rugged individualism, we are force fed in the U.S.

We’re told that we can be anything we want, that we can have money, power and fame without anyone else. All we need to do is work hard and believe in ourselves.

Never mind intergenerational wealth.

Never mind sociological positions.

Never mind generations of oppression because of skin color.

Any of us can become a billionaire is a lie that is dangled in front of our faces by capitalism in order to keep us in the system of scarcity and grind. If I don’t need anyone else, then success and failure are in my hands. If I don’t need anyone else, then other people are expendable, useable as long as I get to my own goals.

The lie of self-sufficiency is sold to us in so many ways. And the truth is we don’t always need other people, but we belong to each other. It’s not a matter of being useful to other people or how people can be useful to you. It’s about the web of community that is woven through each of us, connecting our hopes and dreams, fears and grief to those around us.

Jesus was offered the lie of self-sufficiency as a way of bypassing his desire and need. He refuted it by saying that it’s not the bread alone that we need, but God’s word. And what word did God give us in the beginning?

“It isn’t good for humans to be alone.”

God spoke the expanse of our need.

God spoke the reality of the goodness of community.

God spoke the truth that we belong to each other.

That’s how we get out of this twisted logic of empire.

Jesus is then taken to a high point on the temple in Jerusalem and told to throw himself off, “after all it’s written that angels will support you and you won’t strike a foot on a stone.”

Jesus is now challenged by the very thing he refuted the last temptation with. Scripture becomes twisted in the mouth of the liars, and Jesus is faced with a logic that tells him he could prove he is something special, someone worthy of worship.

Jesus is alone in the wild, away from the eyes of the nation. No one knows what he can do, who he is. If he is going to be the messenger of God’s message, shouldn’t he prove to people that he is someone special, someone worthy of the message he was to preach? Wouldn’t that prove that the message was something to pay attention to?

The world would stand in awe of him, of his status… and there’s the real temptation. This wasn’t about believing angelic messengers would protect him. No, Jesus was being tempted to establish a hierarchy instead of incarnation.

If Jesus had jumped, if angels had caught him, it would have proved he was above others, that he was the son of God… the very claim that Ceaser made about himself, that he was worthy of worship. That hierarchical power dynamic would have made people believe his message, but at what cost?

The incarnation is about humility, about self-emptying to be in solidarity with all humanity. Jesus wasn’t out to prove he was the savior, come from on high to save us poor peasants. Jesus came to tell us that God is one of us, God is with us, God is found among the poor, the disinherited, the broken and hopeless.

It’s not through power that liberation from the empire’s systems of dominance happens. It’s through solidarity. We don’t protest empire by rallying under a superhuman banner, by establishing a famous one to be our figurehead. We can’t abdicate our agency to someone who sits above us because that is simply making another Ceaser, another dictator, another empire. And empire, no matter who is at the head, will always seek to rule by dominance and fear.

Our temptation may not be to prove supernatural protection, but it is to garner dominance through displays of power. Often these displays are violent, physically and emotionally. We can’t learn to protest through lament if we are dedicated to making a name for ourselves that rivals the conditioning of empire. When we seek our own prowess, our own strength, our own means of overthrowing empire, we rely on what empire has taught us: violence, fear, and dominance get results.

That isn’t the way of self-donation. That’s not the way of co-suffering. That’s not the way of love.

But is the way of love enough?

Can we find liberation through something that seems so impotent in the face of the systems of violence and domination?

Jesus thought so.

The last temptation in the wilderness was a temptation to bypass the cross, to establish the kingdom through compromise. If Jesus would just bend a knee to the adversary—pay homage to empire—then the entirety of the world would be given to him. The truth is, this would have worked. If Jesus had picked up the sword and become a different Ceaser, he could have destroyed Rome and established a Pax Christos, an empire where he ruled. The world could have been his.

All he would have had to do was worship empire.

But this isn’t the way of love.

What happens when we abandon love? We fall into the glistening traps of self-sufficiency and empire logic. We begin to build our own empires, our own systems of domination and fear. We begin to believe the lies of scarcity.

In short, when we abandon love, we cease worshiping God and begin to worship at the altar of empire—often times without even realizing it.

See, God told us how to worship the divine:

Love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.

When we abandon love, we are abandoning the source of love (God) and the expression of our love (our relationships with other people). When we abandon love in favor of self-sufficiency, fame, power, and the rest that empire relies on to keep the wheels of oppression grinding us to a pulp, we give up the only thing that can undo the violence of empire.

The ultimate temptation for Jesus and for us is to be changed by empire, to become like empire. If we succumb to that temptation, we may not die on a cross, but we will perpetuate the suffering and oppression that we are trying to escape.

We must resist becoming empire. This cost Jesus his life, but it also led to his resurrection.

The kingdom of God—the kingdom of love—is so different from empire that we often fail to recognize its strength and the ways it liberates us from the pressure and demands of empire.

We live deep in our own Rome. There is no denying this.

But we don’t have to become Rome. We can be citizens of the kingdom of heaven, citizens who belong to each other, who live in solidarity with each other, and who love each other with such ferocity that we know the divine fire of love will one day consume empire, transforming it into the community we all desperately need.

Love brings liberation to us all. That is the message of Lent.

When we fast, we fast from the ways empire keeps us numb to each other, to love. When we seek to prepare ourselves for the cross and resurrection, we seek to put to death in ourselves the internalized empire. By spending time with Jesus in the wilderness, we are planting seeds of love that will bloom into a harvest of compassion, solidarity, lament, grief, and all the ways we exist against empire.

This is Lent: a time to learn love without self-sufficiency, without hierarchy, without domination.

This is how we lament, grieve, protest, and protect each other.

This is how we resist.

If you’re aching to listen for God in the real stuff of life—grief, wonder, doubt, desire—I offer spiritual direction as a space to breathe and be heard. We listen together for the Spirit moving in the ordinary, the hidden, the in-between. No fixing. No formulas. Just presence, honesty, and room to be fully human before God.

If that sounds like what your soul needs, I’d love to walk with you

I am in the process of becoming a community chaplain with The Order of Hildegard. This program is designed to help form people into spiritual leaders that lead and serve from the margins. It’s for the people who don’t quite fit with the traditional church because of trauma, disability, or identity. If you, as my community, would like to help me fulfill the financial obligation this chaplaincy program has, you can give at the link below. Thank you for the myriad ways you support me.