The season of Lent to us is about commitments. Whether it’s giving up our favorite foods, social media, or refraining from other bad habits, our sacrifices during the Lenten season are commitments we make to ourselves, and ultimately, a way to share our love with God.
     
One may ask why we sacrifice something we might love and enjoy for forty long, seemingly agonizing days.  I found the answers in this week’s readings.
 
In the first reading, we are reminded of the time when Adam and Eve were able to live with God in the Garden of Eden.  The Garden is described as having delightful trees that provided food and everything they could possibly need, which God created so that Adam and Eve could live there with Him, in His presence.  They were, however, forewarned by God not to eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden by saying, “You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.”  The devil, of course, tempted Adam and Eve by saying that God’s warning was not true, that they in fact would not die.  The moment that Adam and Eve both ate from the tree, they experienced feelings of shame and immediately covered themselves.  Though they did not die physically, the repercussions of their distrust and disobedience in God resulted in their acts of sin, and ultimate banishment and inability to live with God in the beautiful garden, forever.
 
Thankfully, God provided a way for us to be united with Him again. Jesus was sent to us in human form with a mission- to save us all from spiritual death that comes from sin.  When we think of Jesus being sent, I think it’s important to remember that God was sent to experience everything that we humans endure here on earth.  Being sent in the flesh means that when Jesus walked the earth with no shoes, He felt the pains from every sharp stone that may have dug into His feet.  He felt sadness just as we feel sadness from time to time.  He felt the same discomforts we feel when we are tired, and even experienced the same pains we have when we’re hungry.  In fact, we hear of this hunger in this week’s Gospel, where the Word tells us of Jesus’ experience in the desert, where He was tempted by the devil.
 
At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry.  The tempter approached and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread."  He said in reply, "It is written: One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God."
 
I can only imagine the physical pains that the body endures without food or drink for a week, never mind forty days.  Despite the pain and physical discomfort Jesus must have been feeling, He shows His love for us by withstanding the challenges of the devil.  I imagine that when the devil attempted to provoke a physically hungry Jesus to convert stones into loaves of bread to finally satiate His hunger, Jesus’ mind flashed with visions of His beloved: you, me, all of us. We should also be reminded what Jesus is capable of.  Through scripture and bible stories, He has proven to us that He can produce enough food to feed five thousand hungry people with just five loaves of bread and two fish!  Despite this amazing power, Jesus responds to the devil by revealing that although we need food to live, He has enabled us with the ability to find and receive life from receiving God’s word. This passage tells us a powerful revelation that we need not just food to live, but that His word, which speaks of His infinite love for us, has the absolute power to sustain us.  His word gives us LIFE.
 
Through His word, which gives us faith and enforces our trust in His love for us, we are no longer bound to sin and death.  God has sought and continues to seek to be reunited with us, just as it was in the Garden of Eden.  This Lenten season, we choose to give up something we love to unite ourselves with Jesus’ sacrifice for us, which He has done with the deepest, greatest, most abundant love.
 
Although Jesus made it look easy to endure forty days of sacrifice for us, it’s undeniably difficult to make commitments and sacrifices for God.  Today, we are reminded that through our sacrifice, we receive the most wonderful gift by following through: we receive the gift of reconnecting with our Savior.