This week saw the beginning of Lent. We are supposed to be heading into the desert with Jesus, but many of us feel that we are already in the desert and have been there for months. 

As ICE continues raiding our towns and vanishing our neighbors; the administration batters us with one disastrous executive order after another; and war continues apace, our communities are leaning into our manifold resistances. We are setting up food sharing lists, helping families get documents in order, and distributing Know Your Rights pamphlets (like in Chicago’s Know Your Rights campaign, which has been working well in protecting community members). And yet, we cry out with the Psalmist today, “Be with me God, when I am in trouble.” We are vulnerable. 

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus is vulnerable. He is out in the desert, alone and “famished.” We can imagine him exhausted, dehydrated, maybe jumping at the howls of hungry animals in the night. And there in his vulnerability, he is presented with the idols of power and control that confront all humans. 

I have often heard others interpret this temptation story as illustrating Jesus’s rejection of the three big kinds of dominative power: economic, imperial/militaristic, and social. First, economic: Jesus refuses to make bread from stone, rejecting domination over material resources and instead respecting the reality of the Earth. Second, militaristic: Jesus refuses authority over “all the nations,” and asserts that insatiable imperial power is nothing more than idolatry. And third, social: Jesus refuses to make a grand show of spiritual power, rejecting the worldly status that would have come with it – including the elite religious position he could have most easily claimed. 

Jesus rejects these intertwined triplets of material, imperial, and social power as systems and norms for both society and for himself. He says “no” to the idols of resource-hoarding, violent rule, and social caste. Jesus says “no” to these forms of control so that he can say “yes” to a different kind of power: that of self-giving love and solidarity. 

In Luke’s Gospel, the temptation of Jesus comes right after his baptism and right before he begins his ministry in Galilee. Jesus has to say “no” to dominative, individualistic power in order to fully step into the work of proclaiming God’s liberating love to the people around him. But of course, resisting the drive for control is not a one-and-done deal – the Gospel tells us that the tempter departed only until another opportunity arose to return. 

Today, for us, it is not Satan in the desert but the talking heads of capitalism, militarism, and any form of social hierarchy (especially religiously-fueled) who lure us with empty promises of security, control, and self-preservation. When we are especially vulnerable, as we may be now, these temptations can feel particularly strong. When we enter into survival mode we may be inclined to just look out for ourselves and our own. We may cling more tightly to the things that seem to give us security: perhaps whatever resources we have, or our titles, or consumption, or whatever anesthetics we rely on. This is precisely the desire and calculation of fascists in power: that we will become too overwhelmed, too fearful, too vulnerable to do anything else but tighten our clinging grasps, isolate ourselves, and shut down – or even turn against our neighbors.

Though we encounter these “temptations” in our vulnerability, we don’t face them alone. We have communities to help us to say “no” to the empty promises of domination and “yes” to life-giving relationships of mutual care. One of my favorite Catholic theologians, Rosemary Radford Ruether, called these “communities of celebration and resistance” – people who help us nurture our “yes” and live in it (Gaia and God, An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, 268-274). 

Like the Gospel, Ruether asserts that we have to say “no” to a culture of “competitive alienation and domination” in order to say “yes” to compassionate solidarity (201). In our time, saying “yes” to a joyful life of simplicity means saying “no” to the rat-race of ever-more lucrative titles. Saying “yes” to loving my neighbors means saying “no” to any prejudices I may have been taught about them or any inclination I may have to stay at a distance. Saying “yes” to right relationship with the Earth means saying “no” to consuming more than I really need.

Saying “no” to structures of violence may also mean saying “yes” to vulnerability. This is what Jesus opened himself to: the reality that loving solidarity with the persecuted means permitting the possibility of becoming persecuted yourself. If this isn’t a reality you have had to confront before, it is now, as we all are faced with the question of what we will do if ICE comes to our town or if it becomes even more dangerous to tell the truth. Ruether writes, “As one struggles against evil, one also risks suffering and becomes vulnerable to retaliation and violence…But risking suffering and even death on behalf of a new society, we also awaken hope” (To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism, 28).

This week marked the start of Lent. If you haven’t already, consider setting a Lenten intention. To what will you say “no?” To what will you say “yes?”  (Another way to engage this prompt could be: In order to say “yes” to ____, I need to say “no” to ____).  

Invite the Holy Spirit into this discernment. What do you feel tugging you, drawing you in? What stands in the way of your full “yes?” What and who are the people, places, loves, desires, or practices that help you say “yes?” 

We all already have communities of celebration and resistance, in some form or degree, that we can strengthen and bring into webs of solidarity. Maybe it’s at your parish, your work, or simply among your friends. I look around at my own home in central Virginia and see communities of celebration and resistance in the St. Phoebe Circle for women at my parish; a local community farm where anyone can come get their hands in the dirt; free folk dancing classes; the county interfaith coalition that organizes for affordable housing and more public bus drivers; the community fridge at the local queer bookstore; and even simply among my neighbors who bake bread and shovel snow for each other. These are the communities, the pieces of the mosaic, with which we say “no” in order to say “yes.” We resist and we build, we lament and we celebrate, we equip and we nurture. We build the kind of power Jesus modeled: loving solidarity. 

What celebrating and resisting do you see around you? 

Reflection Questions 

• What pieces of the mosaic are you part of? What pieces do you see in your community, and what pieces could use some shoring up? How might you lean into them more during this time? 

When tempted with alienation out in the desert, while exhausted and weak with hunger, Jesus doesn’t come up with some long eloquent response or clever comebacks. He simply leans back on what he knows – scripture – and answers with verses he readily knew by heart. In other words, he lives steeped in a moral framework that he can call on when push comes to shove. What is yours? (You may also consider if there are verses or refrains you’d like to keep at the front of your mind these days, like “Love my neighbor,” “Christ in each person,” or even, “I’m just here to help”).