Before and Therefore
Christ as a Model in the Wilderness
Two quotes from a Karl Rahner sermon for the first Sunday of Lent stuck out to me this week. Reflecting on the gospel Matthew 4:1-11, Rahner observes patterns in Jesus’s behaviour that I think are good framing ideas for us as we begin Lent.
In the first, Rahner observes what Jesus does before he faces temptation:
Before he begins to announce the kingdom of God that has come in his person, before he begins to preach, he prays. Before he appears in public, he goes into the wilderness. Before he mingles with the multitude, he enters the solitude. Before he seeks out men and women, he first seeks the face of his Father in heaven. And he fasts.1
His repetition of before functions like a series of bullet points to identify a likely list of reasons that temptation impacts me differently. In a sort of “cause and effect” approach, Rahner then offers a list of therefores that double down on this point:
Therefore Jesus goes into the desert, therefore he fasts; therefore he leaves behind everything else that a man needs even for bare existence, so that for this once not just in the depths or his heart but in the whole range of his being he can do and say what is the first and last duty of humankind — to find God, to seek God, to belong to God to the exclusion or everything else that makes up human life. And therefore he fasts. Therefore through this cruelly hard act, this denial of all comfort, this refusal of food and drink, through the solitude and abandonment of the desert, through everything else that involves a rejection, a self-denial of the world and all earthly company, through all these he proclaims this fact: one thing only is necessary, that I be with God, that I find God, and everything else, no matter how great or beautiful, is secondary and subordinate and must be sacrificed, if needs be, to this ultimate movement of heart and spirit.2
As we settle down into the Lenten season, I can’t help but think that this structure of before and therefore might hold us as we become present to our whole selves during this time — it might help us jettison those things that try to convince us that we need something other than only being with God.
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Karl Rahner, The Great Church Year, p.129.
ibid.