Kerlin Richter's homily on the first Sunday in Lent gently turned the "temptation of Jesus" narrative on its head. Acknowledging that we generally place ourselves in Jesus' shoes when we hear this text, thinking on how we deal with our own temptations, Kerlin invited us to see ourselves in the devil's shoes, or cloven-hoof Crocs as it were (perhaps the devil does wear Prada).
Are we the accuser who wants stones turned to bread, who wants our God to give us what we want or crave when we want it? Do we want a super-hero God, one who flies in to fix all our ills? Do we want a rock-star personality who easily gathers our worship, gathers crowds and paparazzi wherever he goes, no matter what cost to his integrity or vision?
The homily left open these questions as well as this: what will we do when Jesus proves to not be any of those things? What if the Liberator is poor, humble, humiliated, and above all ordinary? "Hey Fred, you still have those heavy nails and those wooden beams lying around?"
But mercy is shown richly to all, even to those of us who are, to our shock, in sympathy with the devil. Thomas Merton noted once that Saint Antony the Great, the early hermit whose life-story took the late classical world by storm, remarked that even the devil has some good in him since God created him. I'm told that the Eastern Orthodox believe that the mercy of God is so boundless that even the devil shall be redeemed.
Some Western Christians no doubt would find this thinking disturbing, because we prefer our theology and world-view to consist of winners and losers, we prefer to have a villain who wears black and is terrifying and utterly evil, we prefer a shining hero who will destroy him (usually him) and confirm our view that there is light and darkness, the old dualism that is far more Manichean than Christian. That dualism, where it is clear and clean who are the good guys and who are the baddies, and where ultimately we deserve the rescuing we hope for as we are of course part of the good guys...well, I don't think this has any place in the world of the Gospel, and I don't think the world can withstand any more of this kind of thinking. The earth is littered with the bones of those slain because we in the West have adjudged them to be on the side of darkness, or they unfortunately lived too close to those allied with darkness and they are, in that terrifying banal phrase, "collateral damage." See the towns and fields of Syria for one.
I am more comfortable, on this first Monday of Lent, acknowledging my sympathy for the devil, because today I choose to trust in the mercy of God and since this mercy is boundless I am capable of owning my kinship with the accuser who gazes skeptically at the solitary dusty figure of Jesus fasting and trembling in the desert. That devil, that tester, poses questions out of my own hopes and fears and prejudices. I think I am safer here, rather than holding out for a hope that is cleaner and more powerful and more, well, unreal, a Jesus who belongs more in a Marvel Comic than in the pages of the Gospel.
And I'm not feeling pessimistic or despairing about any of this. This Monday starts gently as I am not due at the hospital until 11:30. Am continuing with Merton's journal readings daily; today the selection ends with "I am happy that I at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I've got, but it is already all that is essential. And He (sic) will take care of the rest."*
*A Year With Thomas Merton, Jonathan Montaldo ed., p. 47.
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