WHISPERS FROM THE GARDEN

The Monday after the Third Sunday in Lent

Shortly after the Lord’s forty days and forty nights in the desert, St Luke tells us He returned to Nazareth. He'd been to the “big city,” Capernaum, where He’d made a name for Himself as a teacher and healer. There was excitement in the village. It was the Sabbath Day, and Jesus went to the synagogue; people thronged to see the Local Boy Who’d Made Good. If He’d done all these wonderful things elsewhere, what would He do at home?

He preached. It was a sermon full of hope and promise: their day of deliverance had long last come. “Today, in your hearing,” Jesus said to them, “the Scriptures are fulfilled.”

“Great. Yeah, that’s great. But what are you going to do for us? You’re from here. Do something. Like you did in the big city. We’ve heard the stories.”

Jesus looked over the anxious, perspiring crowd waiting for excitement and entertainment. His Heart sank. “No prophet is accepted in his own country—and there will be no signs here.”

“What? What the—He owes us! He’s from here; who does He think He is? He’s just Joseph’s son, after all!”

St Luke tells us the congregation turned into a mob—they grabbed the Lord, pulled Him through the streets and tossed Him out of town. He’d let them down. They knew they deserved something if one of their own made it in the world.

Those blind Jews.

Think for a moment: when was the last time you heard a teen-ager complain? Nine chances out of ten, their whining began something like: “Everybody else is doing it..." “They all have one..." “If you really loved me, you’d let me..." or, the perennial classic “It just isn’t fair!”

Psychologists even have a name for this: “narcissistic entitlement syndrome.” That’s not to say that every teen-ager who whines and complains about how nobody understands them has NES, but enough do that we’ve got a “syndrome” to describe the problem. Parents run up high debts to make sure their kids have all the stuff they crave, trying to show love by giving ‘em stuff (which they seem to value more). Problem is, the more stuff they’re given, the more stuff they demand. This spills over into the other areas of life: they come to expect good grades with no study and demand trust without accountability. Someday that will translate into an expectation of high pay for little work and marriage without commitment and their last state will be worse than the first. (I understand none of you reading this have children or grandchildren like this—but take it from me, they exist).

Those damn kids.

Think for a moment: when was the last time you were treated unfairly? When you didn’t get what you deserved—you were overlooked for a promotion, people made much of somebody else instead of you, or something happened you didn't deserve-your car exploded while you were shopping in the mall or your hair got dyed the wrong color?

None of us get what we think we deserve. Each one of us, in the secret, musty places of our minds, knows we deserve just a little bit more than anybody else, because there’s just that indefinable something about ME that’s better than you. I’m entitled just because I’m me. We don’t even have to consciously think this in order to believe it—whenever anybody steals something they do it because they know they need it—they deserve it—more than the person who owns it. Wherever there is injustice, one of us is there, getting our just deserts at another’s expense.

In the Garden, the Serpent whispered to Eve: “You’ll be like God.” Since then, we’ve been convincing ourselves—each of us—that in our own way, we are. It’s not the blind Jews or the damn kids—we each carry this warped sense of entitlement around in our souls. It poisons what we want and what we do.

“I know what I should do,” cried St Paul, speaking for us all, “but I don’t do it! Time and time again I fail! Who can save me from this agony?” Then, in a voice of fixed confidence he answers his own question: “Jesus Christ our Lord, for which I thank God.”

As we begin a new week of our Lenten observance, we’re entering a new week of Grace. There will be struggles with your Lenten rule, a bushel of undeserved Graces—they surround us if we look—and whispered temptations of the wily Serpent, offering you the same promise he offered Eve. “Go ahead, you deserve it, nobody’s quite like you, nobody knows what you’ve been through, blah-blah-blah. His cant is always the same. When will we tire of it?

We'll have to hear it until we learn to listen to another Voice, One which tells us what this new Lenten day really can offer: “Today, in your hearing, the Scriptures are fulfilled.”