Stepping back a season in the Church’s life, if we were to condense the whole season of Epiphany into a single question and answer, it might go like this: “Question: What would Divinity look like if it ever got loose in the world? Answer: It would look like Jesus.”

Now if that is the question for Epiphany, the one for Lent might be this: “If Jesus is what God looks like when God acts in the world, how do we go about cooperating with that?”

Sometimes late in Lent it is tempting to look back on the last few weeks and to measure the time by how successful our cooperation with God has been. How patient was I? How many times did I forgive? How strictly have I kept the fast? How intentional was my prayer? Is this the year I am actually going  to finish my Lenten reading?

But maybe the successes don’t tell the most important story of any given Lent. Because it has not turned out, in fact, that by being merciful I am learning compassion, but in being allowed to see myself as uncompassionate. It has not been so much that by forgiving I am learning forgiveness, but by being allowed to see myself in a state of unforgiveness. One can be so distracted by successes that the real opportunities for progress go unnoticed, hidden as they often are under much that is good.

What is related for us today in the Gospel of John is a crucial turning point in the life and ministry of Jesus, but a turning that without discernment could easily have been missed. Jesus has been attracting crowds of people for weeks and weeks now, so much so that he has hardly had a moment to himself. Up to now, Jesus has been preaching and proclaiming to his own people the message that the reign of God is about to commence—as he said to the Canaanite woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. But today, hanging around the edges of the crowd are some non-Jews—Greeks so intrigued by Jesus that they ask the disciples to be taken to see him.

Here in this moment Satan has returned as promised. It is the beginning of his opportune time, for he presents Jesus with the same temptation of worldly greatness he had offered him in the wilderness three years before. But Jesus recognizes the moment for what it is. He has come to glorify not himself but to show the Father to the world and in that way glorify him. So Jesus trusts himself to the Father and takes the path that, from a long way off, he has seen his obstinate and blinded people are conspiring for him to take.

Though "being found in the form of God," Jesus would teach us and lead us, not by spectacular appeal or by domination, but by showing what strong humility looks like. Jesus would lead us by the long way of obedience, and so he set his face to drink to the very last the full cup of humanity that the Father had given him.

The young man Jesus opens his mouth and instead of saying, “Cool! Now we’re getting somewhere!" says "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” Jesus forsakes the temptations offered to him by success and embraces the way of the cross, the foolish power that will save the world.

And Jesus does not ask us to do what he himself would not do, or take a way that he has not himself first gone. "Whoever serves me must follow me," he says, "and where I am, there will my servant be also." Out of love Jesus did not refuse this hard way but instead, refused to go by any way we could not also take to follow after him. He expects the same of us.

As we walk through these last days of Lent, the question before us is this: can we rejoice in our small cooperative successes as the products of divine grace that they are without being led astray by the tempter close at hand? At the same time, can we discern God's other methodology for our learning, hidden as it often is underneath so much apparent good?  Because in a mystery, it is more by the way of failure that we learn true wisdom, and it is by a hundred different kinds of falling and dying that we enter into life. In Nomine…