THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT
Genesis 2:4b-9,15-17, 25-3:7
Romans 5: 12-19 (20-21)
Matthew 4: 1-11
Year A
In the history of the Hebrew
people, before there was any such thing as the Law, there was the story of a
man and a woman; the first ones in fact. They lived in a beautiful garden, full
of fragrant flowers, singing birds, and all manner of cuddly creatures. This
place of infinite delight contained all they could ever need or want; including
the palpable loving presence of God. God had been quite generous as parents go,
requiring only one thing of them, to steer clear of a certain tree; a Pandora’s
Box that God thought best left alone.
That’s what God asked of
them; although God’s love, being what it is, would not force their compliance.
The temptation took the form
of a serpent who slithered up and promised to stay as
long as it took. On the surface it appears all about the pursuit of pleasure or
pride, but on a deeper level it was the temptation to think that some things are
just too important to leave up to God. In picture form it names the tragedy of
sin; our willful separation from God and all that creation was meant to be.
In contrast Jesus faced the
temptation to not accept the fullness of what it meant to be human.
Unfortunately we often think
Jesus’ entrance into the wilderness was some kind of Outward Bound experience;
meant to toughen him up for the Passion. But Jesus did not go into the
wilderness to lower his fat consumption or do strength training. Neither did
Jesus wander into the wilderness by mistake. He was led there by the Spirit. At
the River Jordan God had named him as his own Holy One, but Jesus had to
wrestle with the depth of what that meant; of all it might possibly mean.
After forty days and forty
nights no wonder the rocks started to appear wavy, taking on the image of bread
and cities. The sun, glistening on the desert sand, began to look like cool
water. That’s when the Devil made his move.
First he asked Jesus to
perform a magic trick; to change stones into warm loaves of bread. Next he
invited Jesus to prove how much God loved him by sky diving without benefit of
parachute. Surely God would protect God’s own! Then Jesus was offered all the
kingdoms of the world; enough to make Bill Gates seem poverty stricken.
Jesus’ identity, his
faithfulness to God’s purposes, was not hooked by any of it. Instead he
embraced his humanity for God’s purposes. Jesus radically rejected any
interpretation of his mission in terms of ‘power politics’.
Any God-given powers he always used for others – for their healing, for their
sustenance.
Notice that Satan never
questions who Jesus is; he just questions what kind of Jesus, what kind of
Anointed One of God, he will choose to be. What kind of Messiah had God put his
bet on anyway?
It’s difficult for us to
identify with the questions Jesus faced in the wilderness. No one has tempted
me lately with making me monarch of any kingdom. And while I’d love to win the
lottery, I’d just settle for getting the dog to behave. So what does Jesus
entrance into the wilderness have to say to us today?
The wilderness is about naming
the truth and facing it; even when the possibility of doing so leaves us
vulnerable or threatened.
Jesus is the prototype of
what the first humans did not do; to resist the temptation to act out of fear
rather than faith and trust. He remained steadfast in the wilderness and even
after the worst of it, on Good Friday afternoon; he remained faithful and
trusting in God. This is where his
sinlessness is found – in the fullness of his humanity expressed as God created
it to be.
Episcopal priest Barbara
Brown Taylor writes:
“Jesus could play God or he could remain human. He
could go buzzing around in the air turning the desert into a gourmet bakery or
he could keep his feet on the ground and live with the ache in the pit of his
stomach, as hungry and tired as anyone would be after a six-week fast…Whereas
Adam stepped over the line and found humanity a curse, Jesus stayed behind the
line and made humanity a blessing. One man trespassed; one man stayed put. One
tried to be God; one was content to remain a human being. And the irony is that
the one who tried to be God did not do too well as a human being, while the one
who was content to be human became known as the Son of God.”
Who we expect the Messiah to be has everything to do with who we expect
God to be. It only takes something coming personally close to us, like the
tragedy in
Notice that the Tempter does
not appear at the beginning of Jesus entrance into the wilderness, but at the
end when Jesus seems all used up, hungry, tired, lonely, vulnerable; indeed,
human. The sky did not open. No voice of God’s presence was heard. We all know
that place. You don’t have to be in a desert geographically to be there. The
wilderness can happen in the midst of a crowd. The wilderness can happen in
your own house.
The temptation to act out of
fear rather than the trustworthiness of God is our ongoing struggle. Our
capacity to choose our true callings, our true identity, comes from the quality
of our spiritual fitness, and how close we allow the Holy Spirit to come to us.
What are we willing to invest in that fitness, you and I? This is what Lent
asks.
How open are we to embodying,
enfleshing, the will and purposes of God? What might it mean for us to make our
decisions and live out our lives based on faith as opposed to fear? The
solitude and the quiet of Lent, the agony of the wilderness, is a battle for
our hearts; of what and ‘who’ we will trust. As the Desert Fathers said, “It is by spiritual warfare that the soul
makes progress.”
To enter Lent means to go
deep within; to face our own wilderness, to hear the howl of the wind there, to
hunger there, to face the one who is there – you. The promise, however, is that
God is there with us. So the
wilderness is not necessarily a bad thing. It is like a magnet, drawing to the
surface whatever is broken in us, whatever is sin-sick in our soul and there,
out in the open, allowing the healing balm of God’s grace to make us whole.
That will not remove all the
perils of life that surround us. The world and the wilderness can still be
frightening places. No one knew that better than Jesus. At the Last Supper he
said “In the world you will face
temptation and persecution. But take courage, I have overcome the world”.
We are still vulnerable. We
grow weary, exhausted, hurt and afraid. But always close by, perhaps especially
at those times, God’s angels hover near. God sends them to come and lift us up,
for God does not mean for us to languish in any place of desolation.
For we are called to move on;
to Galilee, to Capernaum, to Jerusalem, to another place of holy emptiness; to
a tomb hollowed out and waiting, prepared for a new morning of creation and
boundless blessing in the presence of God’s glorious light.
AMEN
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett,
D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church