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The Peace Pulpit: Homiles by Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton |
By special arrangement, The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company is able to make available Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton's weekly Sunday homilies given at Saint Leo Church, Detroit, MI. Each homily is transcribed from a tape recording of the actual delivery and made available to you as an NCR Web site exclusive. You may register for a weekly e-mail reminder that will be sent to you when each new homily is posted. From time to time, Bishop Gumbleton is traveling and unable to provide us with the homily for the week. NOTE: The homilies are available here five days after they are given, always on Friday.
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First Sunday of Lent | February 29, 2004 | |
Today's gospel is about the temptations of Jesus. To probe deeply into God's word today, we must understand that what is happening in this reading is something that had already happened, in a sense, to the Chosen People. Notice how Jesus goes to the desert for 40 days. That parallels the 40 years that the Chosen People traveled through the desert after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. Then Jesus is tested. Well, during those 40 years that the Jewish people traveled from Egypt to the Promised Land, they were tested time after time. Reading the book of Deuteronomy, where the journey through the desert is described in greatest detail, we discover how the Chosen People failed the tests. But when Jesus went to the desert and spent 40 days there, he does not fail the test. He passes it and shows us what God expected of him, and therefore what God expects of us who want to be followers of Jesus. This season of Lent is a time for us to go into the desert to be with Jesus and to be tested as he was. It is a time for us to renew our deep commitment to be his follower and to be faithful to him and his way. So we must try to understand how Jesus was tested, because we too will be tested. Our hope is, as we commit ourselves to enter into this season of Lent, that through our testing, prayer and self-denial we will be able to do as Jesus did. We will accept God's way and follow God's way. The first test is about wealth. Bread, we use that sometimes as slang for money. There's nothing wrong with eating when you're hungry, of course. But when the devil asked Jesus to turn stones into bread, it was a temptation of greed, of wanting way more than was needed. It's also a test to see if Jesus was willing to trust God. The people in the desert were tested in the same way over and over again. Then they would begin to complain about hardships. They would begin to doubt that God would meet their needs. They even demanded of Moses, "Take us back to Egypt! At least we were able to eat everyday." They refused to trust that God would provide for them. Jesus was tempted in the same way. Do not trust in God; accumulate wealth, he is told. Jesus answer to the temptation was: You can't live just by wealth, by bread, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. So he's directing us to go deeply into God's word to find how God is leading us. In the world in which you and I live it's very difficult not to be captured by the desire to get more and more. Our whole culture promotes the accumulation of wealth. Just this past week, Forbes magazine published its list of the richest people in the world. To me this is a way we glorify wealth. There was a time when that list comprised millionaires and multimillionaires. Now only billionaires get on the list. There are 527 billionaires in the world, and their wealth together is more than one trillion dollars. If you look at the 527 poorest people in the world, their wealth is nothing. Or think of it this way: the collective wealth of one billion people in the world does not even come close to the wealth of those 527 people. We glorify wealth, and we get caught up in a culture that says have more and more. It's so easy to give in to that. We put our trust in wealth, and no trust in God. The problem with wealth is that we need some wealth, we need enough to live, but when we trust in it and it alone, then we fail to hear God's word. We fail to follow the way of Jesus. Wealth holds us captive, and it destroys our chance of growing in our spiritual life. And so Jesus rejected wealth. During Lent, I hope we will be trying to listen deeply every day to the word of God. We will read the word and listen deeply in our hearts, focus on that and learn to trust in God totally, as Jesus did. Next, the devil tried to tempt Jesus with power. We are easily tempted by power, tempted to dominate, to force people to do what we want. We're tempted by that in our everyday lives. We find ways to exercise power over others, sometimes directly, sometimes subtlety. Jesus invites us reject power. During Lent, I hope each of us will reflect on what this means. Individually, I think, it means examining our interactions with people so that our relationships are based on trust and integrity. But as a people and as a nation, we can also reject power. Power is always connected with armies and military might, the temptation to dominate the world. Think about how we have become the most powerful nation in the world. We have the largest arsenal in the world. We can exert our will wherever we want and dominate other people. We have wrought terrible destruction on Iraq, where the people are suffering. I have described to you my trips to Iraq. (See The Peace Pulpit for Jan. 25 and Feb. 1.) There is really no hopeful outcome at the moment. The Iraqis don't know what's going to happen to them, because we used our power there to kill and dominate. In the third temptation, the devil wants Jesus to manipulate God. He tells Jesus: Throw yourself down from the Temple, presume that God will hold you up. This extraordinary feat, the devil said, will attract great attention and then you can persuade, draw people that way. Of course, Jesus rejected that too. Do you know what that reminds me of? The temptation to manipulate people, attract attention and overwhelm people. Remember what our president said about the war when we went into Iraq? He said the attack would cause "shock and awe." We would use such overwhelming force that we would shock them, shock the world, make people in awe of us. That is totally contrary to the way of Jesus, the way of God. Jesus said no to that temptation, no to shock and awe. Jesus said to reach out in love. As we reflect on how using power is hurtful, I suggest that today we consider our brothers and sisters in Haiti. The United States has had a relationship with that country from its beginning. Two hundred years ago, we refused to support their revolution. When that country of slaves threw off the colonial power of France, we refused to recognize them. And we have intervened in Haiti many times. In 1915 we invaded and occupied the country, dominating it with a military force until 1934. Over and over again we've done the same thing. Now when they finally have a freely elected, legitimately elected government, a democracy -- which is what we say we want to promote throughout the world -- we undermine that democracy by refusing to support President Jean Bertrand Aristide, the elected president. Instead we support those who were involved in the coup in 1991. The same ones that were involved the last time are trying to overthrow government now and we're supporting them instead of Aristide. (Editor's Note: Bishop Gumbleton delivered this homily before news that President Aristide had left Haiti was widely known.)
All of this is being accomplished despite a continuing embargo by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We have supported an embargo against humanitarian assistance to this country. They were promised $500 million of international aid from the International Development Bank under the Organization of American States, and the United States has blocked that. A desperately poor country -- because of our power and our misuse of power -- is being made to suffer, is being crucified. Our government is trying to push President Aristide out of office, so that 2 percent of the people can once more control and dominate that tiny country of 8 million people. So that 2 percent of the people, who already have more than 50 percent of the country's wealth, will continue to accumulate more and more of that country's wealth. Jesus, when he was tempted, told the devil that he would not accept all the power of all the kingdoms of the world. He would not exercise his power in the world through violence and coercion. He would only do it through the power of love, the fascinating power of love. This is what we must try to do in our individual lives, and what we must try to do somehow within our national life. The temptations of Jesus are instructions. They remind us that we must learn to depend upon God and God alone. That we must trust in God and God's way of love, which means we reject the way of power, the way of shock and awe, the way of violence. Reject all of that and follow the way of Jesus. As I mentioned earlier, the Chosen People in the desert failed their tests. Jesus did not fail his test. He was willing to trust in God and to follow God's way right up to the cross, and through that death on the cross to the new life with God in his resurrection. We're presented now with the opportunity to go into the desert to try to allow ourselves to be tested and we pray that we will able to pass that test as Jesus did by accepting God's way and not the way of power and wealth, coercion and violence. Will we pass the test? We have these 40 days of Lent to make the effort. If we really do not depend upon bread but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, I'm sure that we will be able to change and will to come to Easter with a new commitment to follow Jesus. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
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