22 February 2026 - First Sunday of Lent ‘A’
Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7a; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
Homily
God created man and woman in His image. He made them beings of communion and even breathed into them His own breath, His spirit of communion. And He gave them an extremely dangerous gift, that of freedom. Since then, from the first man and woman to us today, human beings have been subject to temptation, that is, to the tension between the call to communion, which is a call to the fullness of life, and the tendency to refuse communion and withdraw into oneself.
This withdrawal into oneself, which is first a forgetting of the other, then easily a rejection of the other, is at the root of all selfishness, of all tensions between people and between communities or nations, and of all wars.
In the beautiful mythical account of creation, full of great revelations about God and man, which we find at the beginning of the book of Genesis, there is first a dialogue between God and His creature, with whom God wants to share everything. The first temptation was to refuse this dialogue, this otherness, this situation where there was giving and receiving of life and love, in the foolish hope of identifying with the other. ‘You will be like gods,’ said the tempter. There was also the temptation to prefer knowledge to love. ‘You will know good and evil,’ added the tempter.
As soon as the relationship of love with God is broken, all other forms of communion are affected. Man dominates woman, the rivalry between the two brothers Cain and Abel leads to the murder of one by the other. And this is the beginning of a long history of fratricidal wars, which is not yet over - we have many examples of this today.
When the Son of God became one of us, taking on our humanity, he took on all our temptations. This is what the evangelists try to highlight in this account, which they placed at the beginning of the Gospel, at the beginning of Jesus' public life.
In Jesus, humanity has a second chance. It is like a new creation. The same Spirit -- that hovered over the initial chaos at the moment of creation to give life, and which was breathed into the first man -- t hat same Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism.
The same Spirit that gave the first humans the wonderful but terrible gift of freedom also confronts Jesus with important choices by leading Him into solitude where, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He will encounter the tempter. Every time human beings find themselves in the desert, in solitude, they must choose between withdrawing into themselves in that solitude or making it an instrument of communion.
Communion always takes place between people who each have their own identity. The clearer and more assertive the identity, the more possible communion with the other becomes. This is the meaning of the desert in which Jesus is immersed – which is not a geographical desert with a name, like the Judean desert where John the Baptist preached, but simply a symbolic desert, the absolute desert. ‘Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert,’ the evangelist simply says.
In this desert, where human beings perceive themselves in their uniqueness, the temptation is to withdraw into oneself, to seek only the satisfaction of one's individual needs and desires, to bring everything back to oneself. This is the very essence of each of the temptations to which Jesus is subjected.
First, there is the temptation to use a kind of magical power to satisfy one's hunger. In each of us, there is this tendency to want to satisfy my hunger, my need for money, my need for recognition, my vanity. Jesus will one day multiply the loaves of bread, but it will be out of compassion for the hunger of others, to feed the crowds. It will be a gesture of communion and not of withdrawal into oneself.
The second temptation is to use God as a magician to satisfy all my whims. ‘Throw yourself down from the temple, and God will send his angels to catch you in their hands before you touch the ground.’ The god proposed here by the tempter is the magician god we pray to in many of our more or less superstitious devotions, where we want to put God at our service rather than enter into a true communion of love with Him.
But the deepest temptation, the one most deeply rooted in the human heart, is that of power. It consists in taking refuge in the absolute desert, the haughty solitude of one who wants to put everything—things and people—at his service. To have this power, one need only sell one's soul to the devil. ‘All this is mine,’ says the devil, showing Jesus the entire universe. I will give it to you if you worship me. In the exercise of power – which is very different from authority – all others are denied as relational beings. All people and all things become objects that satisfy the thirst for power, which is the worst form of isolation that man can experience and which makes him incapable of true communion. (In the same account, in the Gospel of Luke, the devil says to Jesus: "I give you all this power, which belongs to me and which I give to whomever I want. ' For Luke, power is diabolical!)
We see each of these temptations at work every day, if we are not blind, in our personal lives, in all the groups to which we belong, whether our family or our community, in the political tensions within our country and between countries on the international stage.
We must not hope that these temptations will disappear. They are part of our condition as human beings endowed with freedom. But Jesus revealed to us through his life as a human being that it is possible to overcome them, that it is possible for the forces of communion and life to be stronger than the lure of withdrawal and death.
It is by living in communion with Him that we can find the strength to overcome this tendency towards nothingness. The Eucharist we celebrate together this morning is both His offer of this communion to us and our acceptance of that offer.
Armand VEILLEUX