Lent: New Insight for the March Forward

Meditations in the March Forward Day by Day are by Episcopalian priest Helen Van Koevering, rector at Saint Raphael the Archangel Episcopal Church in Lexington, Kentucky. For her first meditation, Van Koevering presents an insight, new to me, that has brightened the first Sunday in the somber 40 days of Lent.

PHOTO: Walking with me to the Marietta Square Friday evening, my friend Susan stopped to point out this plant, known popularly as a "Lenten Rose."

Van Koevering comments on the season's origin story. Matthew, chapter four, tells how Jesus, hungry and alone after 40 days' retreat in the wilderness, refuses Satan's appeals to "materialism and worldly power." That's the familiar part. Van Koevering writes,

What happens in the wilderness does not stay in the wilderness, [but] plays out in Jesus' life and ministry. Jesus refuses to turn stones into bread for his own hunger, but soon feeds thousands with a few loaves and fish -- and teaches his disciples to pray for daily bread. Jesus refuses to test God's power [from the height of a tower] and later rests in that power from the height of the Cross. God's own beloved Son refuses the glamour of empire to offer the upside - down kingdom of God and the Way of Love to all.

That three refusals by Jesus to use power for his own wants should return as a three key displays of God's power working through him: that's a new insight for me. Van Koevering assures us, "The One who says that he is with us always ... is with us in our wild places too."