The Name of the Lord: 1st Sunday of Lent

Rage Against the Dying

Sadly, the name of the Lord is often not that first thing that comes to our mind. Especially when we most need it. More typical is what we see in the opening lines of the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

This is voice of a young man urging his father to fight back against imminent death, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Most of us, I think, when we reach our later years have the wisdom to understand the situation a little better. My own octogenarian father remarked a few years ago, in reference to this poem, “But I don’t want to rage against the dying of the light.”  But again, the narrative voice is that of someone much younger. Thomas himself was in his thirties when he composed it.

     All the same, there’s something universally human about the refusal to “go gentle into that good night.” We want to be masters of our world, and we want to leave a lasting legacy behind us when we do go.  We want, as the Roman poet Horace put it, to erect “a monument more lasting than bronze.”

A Forlorn Hope

It’s a forlorn hope.  As Thomas’ poem points out, all of us, the “wise,” the “good,” even “wild men,” learn at the end that our “frail deeds might have danced in the green bay” . . . but fell short of our hopes.  As Ecclesiastes says, all is vanity.

     The Good News, as Christians know, is that while our ambitions for ourselves might be vanity, our lives and even our failures in this world are not in vain. That is, if we turn our lives over to God, and join our failures to the suffering of Jesus Christ.

Temptations of Mastery

That’s the message of the First Sunday of Lent.  Our Gospel reading today, for instance, is Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11). The Devil offers Jesus the same temptations of mastery that attract all of us: feeding our appetites without restriction, exercising power without limit, and, in short, doing whatever we want without suffering consequences:

 

. . . and [the devil] said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.
For it is written:
He will command his angels concerning you
and with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus answered him,
“Again it is written,
You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” (Matthew 4:6-10)

 

Jesus, however, accepts human limitations. He has “taken the form of a slave” (Philippians 2:7), and He refuses all the allurements of Satan.

Rejecting the Mirage of Mastery

The example Jesus gives us, of rejecting the mirage of mastery in the here and now, and instead relying on God his Father, sets the agenda for the Season of Lent.  The austerities of Lent are intended to teach us that we don’t need the things we think we need. None of those things can save us.  That applies even to our religion, if we behave as if religion is there to put God to work for us, rather than to lead us to God.  Notice in the quote above how the Evil One cites Holy Scripture, Psalm 91, in his effort to separate Jesus from His Father.

Jesus, of course, knows that the images of Angels guarding us aren’t a promise that God will protect us from the natural consequences of our actions in this world.  And haven’t we all seen, over and over again, that bad things happen to even the best people?  The best person of all, in fact, Jesus Christ, although sinless, is sentenced to an excruciating death on The Cross.  We see the fulfillment of Psalm 91 in The Resurrection, God’s promise that for he “who [says] to the LORD, ‘My refuge and fortress, my God in whom I trust’” God says, “I will be with him in distress; I will deliver him and glorify him.”

Call on the Name of the Lord

The sacrifices of Lent are intended to strengthen that movement of our hearts away from the world, and toward Jesus Christ. Those who confess that Jesus is Lord, and believe in their heart that God raised him from the dead (See Romans 10:9), do not, and cannot, “rage against the dying of the light.”  The light of this world is only a passing reflection of the true light of Heaven, where there is

no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.  By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it,  and its gates shall never be shut by day–and there shall be no night there;  they shall bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. (Revelation 21: 23-26)

That’s what God promises to us, on the far side of the temptations of the Devil and forty days in the desert. We can’t do it alone, but if we call on the name of the Lord Jesus is there with us.

Featured image top of page: detail from the Ghent Altarpiece, by Jan van Eyck, c. 1430