Lenten Reflection: 1st Sunday (Year C)
Brother Gabriel Hamilton OSB
The words that drew me out of all these readings were the words of the responsorial psalm: “Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.” I think this phrase really expresses the heart of Christian prayer.
To start, the fact of “troubles.” You have them; I have them. They are a basic fact of our life. We obviously, naturally want to be freed from all our troubles and to live in the protecting care of God: like the psalm says later,
No evil shall befall you,
Nor shall affliction come near your tent,
For to his angels he has given command about you
That they guard you in all your ways. (Psalm 91:10-11)
In today’s Gospel, Satan even quotes this psalm to Jesus in order to get him to throw himself from the Temple parapet: “With their hands they will support you / lest you dash your foot against a stone” (Luke 4:11; Psalm 91:12). Don’t you trust God to protect you? From the sound of this psalm, shouldn’t Christians be confident that God will prevent evil and suffering from befalling his chosen and faithful ones? Does God’s protection mean anything if we aren’t being protected from troubles?
But, as always, Jesus and his life give us the key to interpreting Scripture and our own experience of trying to live our faith. He combined firm-hearted confidence in God’s protection and care with an understanding that our life—which isn’t always pretty—must be lived in faith. His response to Satan’s temptation here is “It also says, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” (Luke 4:12). This response is not one that pretends to know the answers, pretends to know why we must suffer. This response is one of faith: “I don’t know how God is acting; I just know that he is good and that he is helping me.” The sufferings of life are a given, and prayer will not remove suffering from us—the message of Christianity is rooted in the fact that Jesus died on a cross, after all.
But it’s okay. Our psalm prayer says it all: “Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.” God is so near to us, and he is with us. That preposition (with) is a beautiful one. It expresses the hope and aim of Christian prayer: to be with God. But even more, the joy of knowing that he is with us, far more with us than we are with him. This is our comfort in suffering and our hope through sorrow: God is with us.
