Sermon
The First Sunday in Lent
Sunday February 22, 2026
The season of Lent begins once again as it always does with these temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. Now, have you ever thought about how these events made it to the scripture? Who was there to observe them? Wasn’t Jesus alone in the desert fighting with the devil? The only possible explanation that scripture scholars give us why this is even known to us is because Jesus must have shared the details of these temptations with his apostles with his disciples. And so here we have a very important insight into the life of Jesus because it’s a bit of an autobiography that Jesus offers to us.
Jesus tells us about his experience of temptation in the desert. That’s the only possible way we would know about it. So it’s important for us to know it. Jesus thought it important enough to share it. Now certainly if we ask the question why is it important it we can easily deduce that it has nothing to do with Jesus trying to win some kind of favor by showing how pious and how holy he is. Jesus doesn’t need that. Anyone who is saintly or holy doesn’t need that kind of affirmation. And so there is something here for us to know about Jesus and also to know about
ourselves in the fact that God in the person of Jesus begins his plan of salvation for us by taking on a fight.
He’s walking towards a battlefield. And it’s not even his fight to have. It’s our fight that Jesus engages in. As it said so beautifully in the second reading today from St. Paul to the Romans, it was the disobedience of Adam that led us to this place of war within ourselves, within the world, the flesh and the devil. The challenges we face are an effect of humanity turning away from God in the person of Adam. And yet it is going to be the obedience of Jesus to the father that’s going to undo all of that. Disobedience towards God leads to the war that is waging. And that war, I don’t mean it in terms of external realities because that’s just that’s just the fallout of what happens in the human heart.
The battle we wage begins in the human heart. This is clear from sacred scripture and all the psychologists and all the studies that have shown that it all begins in the human mind, the human heart. That’s the battleground. And so we see Jesus going to the desert which represents a place where we disconnect from all the distractions so that he can enter head on into this battle into this challenge. He needs to represent us at the very beginning. And it’s important for us to know that this happens precisely after Jesus has been baptized by John the Baptist. Why is this important? Because fathers of the church, many of them tell us that the words used during the baptism heard from heaven. Remember the words that were heard. You are my beloved. In you I am well pleased. This is a precise quote from Psalm number two. A psalm of coronation of kings. This was the quote used whenever a king of the Jewish people was crowned as king. You are the son of God. You are his beloved. And so Jesus goes to battle for us as our friend but also as our king.
Imagine if the rulers of the world, kings, governors, prime ministers, presidents, whatever, how beloved they would be if they didn’t ask us to fight our battles, but that they showed their own
concern for us, to represent us as our friend and as our ruler by battling for us by going to a danger place and by overcoming our struggles. The details of the temptations in the desert are not really that important, I don’t think, because Jesus just reveals examples, I believe, of what happened there. Obviously, we don’t know the whole story. We don’t need to know the whole story. But what we do need to know is that Jesus goes there and is resolute in following in obedience the word of God. And anything that goes against the word of God, he will not engage.
Jesus is tempted in all kinds of things. tempted. Or you can use the word tested because testing is the more appropriate translation of that word that’s used for temptation, a test. And we all have to go through those tests. I remember as a child I have younger siblings. So my younger siblings from time to time would bring their friends from the neighborhood to our house. And I remember those friends would often come in and even though we lived in a very simple house, it was always very clean. Not because of me or my siblings, but because of my parents. They
really tried to keep everything nice, neat, and clean. And I remember those children coming in to this clean house and saying, “Wow, this is like a palace.” This always stuck with me because we have these sayings that go beyond just mere sayings. You know, they’re deep. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Why do we say that?
Well, because the external things, the way we engage with external things reflect something of our internal disposition. No one likes to clean, but everyone likes to live in a clean space.
And there is something about that in our spiritual life. No one likes to engage in works of penance, temptation. That’s hard work. That’s doing internal battle, saying no to things that we really wish we could have but are not good for us. Things that are forbidden by God in sacred scripture. And yet when we overcome, and we all know this from experience, when we’ve done the hard things and come out of it victorious, we’ve noticed the change in our attitude and the way we feel. Our sense of self-identity and purpose has been elevated. And we love the way we feel even though we didn’t particularly like having to go through the struggle. I hear that from people who have experienced all kinds of addictions in their lives. Going through the process
of dealing with those addictions is a hard battle. We don’t want it. But we don’t do it for the battle. We do it because we love that freedom that comes from overcoming an addiction. It’s a real freedom.
Jesus in revealing to us his own battles that he engages with in the desert is simply showing us that our pathway in following him in living a life of freedom and peace is by remembering that
all the hard things we do in life because they are the right thing to do lead to a greater sense of identity and peace that all of our struggles and battles ultimately have a purpose to them even
though we may not know what that is in this moment.
I’m always fascinated by engineers. I think I’ve told you that before and I think of it often. I think
how sad it is for a for someone who spends their entire life as an engineer or let’s say a car mechanic. How sad it is to always deal with problems. Think of a life of a car mechanic. Every job he does is fixing problems. And after a while, if we’re only fixated on problems, we begin to forget how wonderful of a machine a car is. Same could be said of doctors, psychologists, and the same could be said of us as spiritual children of God, Christians. Yes, we have to fix problems. But from time to time, it’s good to step back and take something apart that is not broken so that we can marvel at how wonderfully something is created, is made, is engineered.
And the same is true in our spiritual life. Yes, there is sin and there’s temptation and all kinds of things that need to be need to be fixed in our life. Yes, but God wants us to go beyond just what is broken and to also marvel at what works so well in our world. It’s so easy to only notice what is broken, what is still not repaired, what still needs to be done. But do we sometimes forget and lose that joy, that sense of joy by forgetting that there are so many things that are working well and how beautifully God created everything.
And so to me, the season of Lent is not just about focusing on sin and penance and all these things for the sake of that being my goal. He is fixing everything within me. But to focus on the word of God and marvel at what God has created and how God has led us and continues to lead us. And so I invite you as a spiritual practice, read the gospel again, but ignore the words of temptation. Ignore the evil one altogether and just read the words of Jesus, the words of
inspiration, the words that guide us to engage not only in the battle of life but in the beautiful journey of life, the gift that God has given us.
Every once in a while, I come downstairs in my house and I look around and I force myself to not only see what still needs to be done, but what already has been given to me and how gracious and wonderful God has been in my life. And because of that, I want to continue to follow him even in the battle of my life.
Amen.
Father Wojtek Kuzma