First Sunday of Lent
February 22, 2026
Gen 2:7-9; 3:1-7 | Rom 5:12-19,17-191 | Mt 4:1-11
As Lent begins, may we renew our commitment to prayer and individual and social transformation. We listen to the cry and moans of our brothers, sisters and planet, sometimes feeling impotent to create change. I believe that today’s Scripture readings speak to our context, question our attitudes, and enlighten and strengthen us in our commitment to Gospel values. Our first reading emphasizes the origin of human beings, Adamah, a Hebrew term for earth. It offers a beautiful image of God as a potter with whom we and the earth are intimately connected. The narrative tells us that God’s message is one of living in the garden earth in communion with Divine and all things. To preserve their joy, the only request of the first humans is to treat the earth with respect and to not eat fruit from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
However, the narrative tells us of temptation: “your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” This choice to choose unbridled power, to be equal to God leads to conquest and maintenance of power that over centuries, we see leads to lies and oppression rather than God’s generous providence of dignified living conditions for all people.
Today’s Gospel also speaks of temptations to power. After days of fasting, Jesus was tempted by the devil to turn stone into bread. At the time, the doctors of the Law, legitimized wealth and physical well-being as divine blessings. Jesus, however, devotes his mission to the sick, suffering and most excluded in society.
The devil then tempts Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, a symbol of prestige and protection within the religious hierarchy. We know that Jesus chose another path, one of service, courage in denouncing injustice and ultimately death on the cross. In the final temptation, the devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for his worship. This reveals the idolatry of power: elevating oneself or one’s group to dominate people, property, and the earth. Jesus repeatedly rejects being crowned king, directing his life instead toward building a community of justice, fraternity, and peace.
Looking at your individual and our social context, where do you see these temptations of power abuse and oppressions being played out? How can we embrace a just peace not rooted in power and fear? As Pope Leo reminds us, we need to embrace an understanding of peace as not just the absence of weapons but a force capable of dissolving the desire for violence in others. We need disarmament of the soul.
External disarmament is impossible without an interior “disarmament of heart, mind and life.”
In my ministry of nonviolence and restorative justice in Uganda, I met a remarkable young catechist and course participant, Alex. At one point, Alex shared that he would never forgive the perpetrator who killed his father during the insurgency waged by the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda. The civil war between the notorious LRA and the Ugandan government included cruel massacres against tens of thousands of civilians, the forceful displacement of almost 2 million people and the abduction of around 66,000 child soldiers. The abuse of power and use of violence to oppress so many was shocking.
Alex was heavily burdened by a desire for revenge. He was in a conflict with his father-in-law. As a young boy, Alex witnessed his father’s brutal murder by two men in the bush.
Years later, he married a wonderful woman, having known only her mother. When he finally met his father-in-law, he realized this man was his father’s killer. The father-in-law recognized Alex and threatened him: if he ever spoke about what he had seen, he too would be killed. His wife warned him to be careful, knowing her father was violent. Alex lived with intense resentment and desire for vengeance, believing that his anger honored his father’s life. He constantly struggled with the urge to use force and power to avenge his father. Despite this, he and his wife shared a good marriage — until the day her father arrived and took his daughter and their child back to his home.
This has been an incredibly painful process for Alex who said that the nonviolence and restorative justice course helped him to “express his fears and anger, cry out “enough” to vengeance, forgive his father-in-law and work on a plan to dialogue with him. “He has already started to implement this plan and is committed to bringing the peace he has found to his family, community, and parish.
By choosing a nonviolent, dialogical path, Alex has also been able to mediate other conflicts, including one in which a neighbor attempted to kill another.
Our second reading reminds us that through one righteous act, life came to all. May we, this Lenten season, be strengthened by Alex and so many others in our Cloud of Witnesses who resisted and overcame temptations of violence and abusive power. May Jesus’ mission to defeat evil in all its manifestations give us the courage to be strong in our example and actions. May we be arduous workers for a just and nonviolent society and promote the right to a dignified life for all.
Maryknoll Lay Missioner Joanne Blaney joined the lay mission organization in 1991. Her ministry at the Human Rights and Popular Education Center (CDHEP) in São Paulo, Brazil, serves marginalized populations with restorative justice workshops focused on nonviolence. In 2025, she traveled to Uganda with Maryknoll Lay Missioner Marj Humphrey to conduct conflict resolution workshops.
Questions for Reflection
What is your relationship to power structures?
How can you use your power to work for justice?
Consider a time you forgave a transgression. How did that change or impact you? The relationship? The person who caused the harm?
Prayer
A prayer from Apollo 8 for Universal Justice
Give us, O God, the vision which can see Your love in
the world in spite of human failure.
Give us the faith to trust Your goodness in spite of
our ignorance and weakness.
Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray
with understanding hearts.
And show us what each one of us can do to set
forward the coming of the day of universal peace.
— Frank Borman
To read other Scripture reflections published by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, click here.
Featured image: Maryknoll Lay Missioner Joanne Blaney (left) teaches a course in trauma healing and nonviolent conflict resolution in Northern Uganda. She is joined by local leader Immaculate Adong (right), who was 8 when her father was killed in the 1995 Atiak massacre, and who now manages a women’s cooperative while also raising her five sons. (Courtesy of Joanne Blaney/Maryknoll Lay Missioners/Uganda)
