Friday of the fifth week of Lent

In my distress I called upon the Lord,

and cried out to my God;

from his temple he heard my voice,

and my cry to him reached his ears.

Psalm 18 [17]: 7

 

Jesus said… “…the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” Then they tried again to arrest him, but he escaped from their power.

John 10

 

 

. . .

 

This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all aspects of asceticism: calling on God in the face of temptation. We want to overcome it easily, on our own, or to give in. To look temptation in the face and say, as Jeremiah does, “the Lord is with me like a mighty champion,” and to call on God for help, is slightly less attractive as an option. We then can claim no special achievement, as Amma Sarah testifies: “It is not I who overcame [lust], but the Lord Jesus”—nor can we enjoy the pleasure of succumbing to the temptation, however fleeting.

 

No, it is decidedly unheroic, unromantic, simply to say “help!” and find ourselves, like the monk in one of the sayings of the desert fathers, on the road back to the monastery. There are no brave stories then for us to tell our sisters and brothers. We can say no more than the psalmist who writes, “In my distress, I called upon the Lord…and my cry to him reached his ears.”

 

In theory—that is, in the moments in which we are not beset by temptation, this appears to be the best way. Praise God alone, of course, because the victory belongs to God and not to us. We know that it is God who protects us, God who assures us in the valley of the shadow of death, God who makes our way blameless, God who makes us rise up on wings like eagles. All this we know and we celebrate it. That is, after all, what the Mass is about: the victory of God in Christ over sin and death, closing the unbridgeable gap between God and God’s created image, humanity. We know that we did not, cannot, achieve victory over sin.

 

But when it confronts us, in all the small ways it confronts us in our daily lives, we forget to turn to the One who made us, in whom we live and move and have out beings and say, perhaps, ‘I believe; help my unbelief.’ Help me to resist this sin; help me to cling to Jesus; help me to walk in those good works you have prepared for me. For the Lord is with us like a mighty champion; our persecutors will stumble; they will not triumph.