Into the desert: sermon on the first Sunday of Lent

By a Dominican Friar   |   5 March 2025

“We exhort you, that you receive not the grace of God in vain.”

Why did our Lord fast these forty days and nights in the desert? Not, surely, because He needed to, as if He would not otherwise have been ready for His public life. He did it to set us an example, because we do need to fast, if we are able. But why is this?

I could mention several benefits that fasting brings with it, for example, that it makes it easier for us to pray, or that it makes us stronger for resisting temptation. But instead, I’ll mention just one other benefit: fasting is a way to expiate the offence against God caused by our sins.

Sin is an offence against God. That’s the first thing we need to understand. The prayers of the Church tell us this. For example, on the day after Ash Wednesday, the collect begins, “O God, who art offended by guilt, and appeased by penitence …” God is offended by our guilt; and this offence is something objective. Compare what happens if I take a brick and throw it through the window of my neighbour’s house without his permission. That is an objective offence against my neighbour. So, even before he finds out what’s happened, I have offended against him. 

Well, almighty God, is no less personal a being than my neighbour. And all creation belongs to Him. “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness.” So, whenever I misuse any part of creation, for example my tongue in speaking evil or my eyes in looking at it, I am offering an offence to Him, as Creator.

The other point to appreciate is that one of God’s attributes is justice. “The Lord is just in all his ways,” as the psalmist says. This attribute, like all God’s attributes, has to be made manifest in creation, or else how would we ever come to know it? If God sent the great flood in the days of Noah, it was to imprint His justice on the memory of mankind for all generations to come.

So, because sin is an offence against God, and because He is just, He wills that sin should be expiated. Why else did Christ come into the world? The Father sent His Son to expiate our sins. And He was doing this not only on the Cross but throughout His short life. That hunger, for example, that Jesus experienced in the desert after His great fast, He surely offered to His Father to win mercy for us.

But if Jesus has made satisfaction for our sins, does this mean that we don’t need to bother about them?  If that was the case, why did St Paul fast? We hear today that he did, in that brief description of his life: “in labours, in watchings”(that means, praying at night), “in fastings, in chastity, in long-suffering, in sweetness”. Or, if it’s no longer necessary to expiate sin, why did St Paul say to the Colossians, “I fill up those things that are lacking in Christ’s sufferings, in my flesh”?

No, it’s precisely because we’ve been made sons of God, sons in the Son, that we share in the life and work of Christ. That includes His work of expiation. “Take my yoke upon you,”He says, “and learn from me”. We are to help expiate our own sins and those of others. And how many there are to expiate today, and how few people to do it. Yet we learn from Scripture that God would have spared even Sodom and Gomorrah, if He had found ten righteous persons living there.

Because finally, Lent, though it is a time of expiation, need not be a grim season. It is a time of grace. The Father gives us His graces more abundantly, precisely so that we may make satisfaction to His justice. So, let us not receive the grace of God in vain, but go out with Christ into the desert.