Sunday Reflection, February 25: No More Peer Pressure

Scripture Readings
Deuteronomy 26: 4-10
Psalm 91
Romans 10: 8-13
Luke 4: 1-13

A few years ago, I heard an interview on public radio with a woman from Ireland who was celebrating her 102nd birthday. It was a very compelling conversation. This elderly woman was amazingly alert and vital. She seemed to be cognizant of all the news of the day. Charming in her manner, she was also filled with a depth of wisdom about life. At the end of the conversation, the interviewer asked her what “the best thing” was about “turning 102.” Without a pause, the Irish woman answered, “Well, one of the best things is that at this age there is not a lot of peer pressure.”

I laughed out loud as I listened to this wise woman’s delightful response to the question of the interviewer. Peer pressure is something that we usually associate with teenagers – young people in junior high and high school. I used to work at a retreat house where we conducted retreats for teenagers. Peer pressure was a regular topic on the retreat agenda and in our discussions with the students. I suspect that all of us realize, though, that peer pressure is not something that disappears once we have left high school. All of us grapple with it at different moments in our lives, at least until we reach the age of 102!

For teenagers, peer pressure can be particularly intense because their identity – their sense of who they are and want to be – is still very much in the process of being established. Their identity is in its formative stage and thus they are susceptible to outside influences that entice them to become a certain kind of person. Those of us who are adults also find ourselves pressured to act in ways that are not consistent with our true identity. In the heat of such pressures, it can be easy to forget who we really are – the kind of person we most deeply want to be.

The Scriptures for this first Sunday of the Lent suggest that living the Christian life requires the ability to remember. We need to remind one another and ourselves who we are and who God is. We need to make memory of the character of the God in whom we believe. These Scripture readings suggest that our greatest source of temptation is to forget our own identity. The moments in which we are most inclined to betray our vocation as disciples of Jesus are those times in which we forget what God has done for us and the person God has called us to be.

The reading from Deuteronomy is a very beautiful and important passage in the Hebrew Scriptures. It recounts the harvest festival in Israel, when people would bring the first fruits of the field to the temple and set them before the altar of God as a sacrifice of praise. In this act of worship they told their own story as a people. They recited the marvelous narrative of God’s mighty acts on their behalf. They remembered that God had liberated them and formed them into a people. They recalled that their ancestor Jacob went down to Egypt and fathered a people who were later enslaved. They remembered that when this people cried out to God in their suffering, God was not deaf to their pleadings. Rather, God bent his ear to hear their prayer: “God brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm…” Every year, even centuries after the Exodus, the people offered their gifts and recounted the great story of their salvation. In so doing, they experienced the presence of the God who was still with them, with his strong hand and outstretched arm. They celebrated with the priests and with the aliens of their own day, the foreigners in their midst. They knew that they must never forget that they were once foreigners themselves and that they were called to be compassionate to the aliens of their own day. They knew they needed to remember their roots -- where they came from, who God had been for them, and who they were called to be as God’s people.

In this Sunday’s Gospel account of the temptation of Jesus, he is presented as experiencing a difficult, even frightening, confrontation with the power of evil in our world. What takes place right before this section of the Gospel is very important. Before the temptation scene, Luke presents the story of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. At this pivotal moment, the voice from heaven proclaims: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” This is Jesus’ deepest identity; it is who he is as he takes up his mission of proclaiming the reign of God. He is God’s beloved Son, the one in whom the Father is well pleased. But soon after that, as he is praying and fasting in the wilderness, he is tempted to betray his own identity. He is tempted to live not as the beloved Son of God, trusting the Father and serving the Father. He is pressured to seek his own satisfaction, to make a display of his power, to opt for a quick, magnificent, self-serving triumph. He is tempted to forget who he is and to act like someone else. Will he remember? His responses to the evil one reveal that Jesus remains very much aware of who God is, of who he is, and of his own call to be a faithful servant. Jesus possesses an intimate knowledge of his own dignity as Son of God, and he knows that he must act out of that dignity.

Jesus is the Son of God in an utterly unique sense. You and I, who have been created by God and baptized in Christ, are adopted sons and daughters of God. We have been given a sublime dignity in Christ. At the heart of our Lenten journey is the call to remember the meaning of our baptism, to call to mind the dignity that we have as baptized Christians and to recommit ourselves to living out of that dignity. With the pressures of life, of society, of our peers, it is sometimes easy to forget all of that. It is also easy to forget who God has been for us. We can lose sight of the ways in which God has revealed his love and mercy in our lives, the ways in which God has freed us from our own personal “Egypts” – the fears and forms of slavery that have threatened our lives. Each of us needs to remember the mysterious ways we have experienced God’s strong hand and the power of God’s outstretched arm.

Every time we come to the table of the Eucharist we make memory of Christ’s saving life, death and resurrection. In so doing, we experience his real presence to us once again. At the table of the Lord, we remember the things that are most important in our lives. We also recall our identity as God’s daughters and sons. As we begin our Lenten journey, let us pray for the grace to live and act out of the sublime dignity that we have been given in Christ. Let us pray for the grace to remember the things that are really important.

Robin Ryan, CP