First Sunday in Lent
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Readings: Genesis 2: 15-17 and 3: 1-7; Matthew 4: 1-11
Today, the first Sunday of Lent, we traditionally hear one of the accounts of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. And to go with that, from the Old Testament, we have the description of what we know as ‘the Fall’ – the disobedience, the fall from grace, of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There the devil is depicted as a snake – seen as a slimy, crafty, untrustworthy creature.
It’s Christian doctrine, of course, that humanity fell from grace in the garden, through one man’s disobedience, but was restored through the righteousness of another man’s actions – Jesus. So Jesus is often called ‘the second Adam’, as in the hymn Praise to the holiest in the height: ‘A second Adam to the fight / And to the rescue came.’ We see the beginning of that fight in the account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness.
We generally think of temptations as necessarily a bad thing. But it need not always be so. What tempts may even be beneficial: a workaholic, tempted to pause, might very well benefit his or her lifestyle by doing so. And temptation itself may also be necessary to help us realise what our morals, beliefs and standards are. Note that Jesus was led by the Spirit into his temptation – leading him into that time of soul-searching, with the Spirit assisting and sustaining him during it.
But those three temptations, if Jesus had succumbed to them, would have shown that he preferred to rely on his own powers rather than trust the goodness of his Father. Those temptations were the temptation to easy living; to easy fame and to easy power. The temptation to easy living – ‘Command these stones to become bread’; to easy fame – ‘Throw yourself down from the pinnacle and demonstrate how you can save yourself’; to easy power – ‘All these kingdoms I will give you if you will worship me.’ We don’t exactly face those specific temptations, but we do face choices about easy living, and popularity, and power or control over others. And whom do we really worship? What would people note as the priorities in your life, in my life? Would they see God at the centre?
It has been noted that Jesus’ three temptations recall the experience of the Chosen People in the wilderness, as related in the Book of Exodus. They cried out for bread, and received manna. They tested God at Meribah, where Moses struck the rock twice to give them water, and they worshipped the image of the Golden Calf that Aaron had made for them. Centuries later, Jesus resisted the temptations to which the people in the wilderness had succumbed.
It’s been said that the devil is the ‘father of lies.’ Sometimes in tv murder or detective dramas, we hear people build up a whole series of unlikely events and actions to justify what they have done. We can all act in the same way. How devious our desires can be! If ever one was tempted to doubt that there is such a thing as sin, or if there is then it doesn’t matter, just look at the whole Epstein affair; how innocent girls were trafficked, and politicians, entrepreneurs and other public figures were embroiled in Epstein’s schemes. Canon Angela Tilby, writing in Church Times last week notes that these people were driven by their own need and greed, whether for immediate cash, success, fame, others’ admiration, long-term wealth and a glamorous life-style, sex without inhibition, or, above all, perhaps, she suggests, a sense of invincibility, and indeed, I would add, a sense of entitlement. So many of these desires were exactly those repudiated by Jesus in his encounter with the devil.
Angela Tilby went on to say that nothing speaks more of the retreat of Christian values from public life in the Western world than what is revealed in the Epstein files. She cites the French philosopher Rene Girard who proposed that the root of our moral disorder was not pride, but envy. If envy is the first and primal sin, it explains why the fruit of the tree was so irresistible to Adam; it conveyed the godlike power of the knowledge of good and evil. The devil tried to make Jesus envious of what he said he had – all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour – but wasn’t it rather a case of the devil being envious of what Jesus had? A line at the end of the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard came into my mind, where the landowner says to the labourers who expected more, “Are you envious because I am generous?’ Was the devil envious – or afraid – of the goodness of God as seen in Jesus?
As Genesis says, the serpent was crafty – or subtle, in another translation. Whether I believe in the devil as an objective personality or not, what I would never dispute is the human propensity for or susceptibility to deceitfulness; to create illusions about our own lives, the way things are, who I am; about who God is and what my response to him should be, what my responsibilities to him are.
So Lent is a time when we’re asked to address these things and to try to deepen our reliance on the goodness of God, and ask “How genuine is my relationship with the Lord?” We’re given Jesus as our pattern. Maybe Lent is about going back to basics – which is certainly what Jesus did in the wilderness. No comforts, no distractions. As the hymn puts it: “Stones thy pillow; earth thy bed.” Just face-to-face with himself and the demon if not his demons.
And what are the basics? Humans are made in God’s image, deliberately. “In the image of God he created them”, as we read in Genesis 1 a couple of weeks ago. “And God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” Yes, we were created and loved into being. But we became fallen creatures through that spirit of rebellion within us, that destructive negative force that the Genesis writer saw epitomised in the hated serpent. But though the first Adam let us down, the second Adam came to the rescue, and we are redeemed through the perfect life and offering of Jesus. “Thanks be to God,” says St. Paul, “who has given us the victory through Jesus Christ.”
In those wilderness temptations Jesus seemed able to refute the attractive suggestions of the tempter because he was content to be what he was – God’s beloved and obedient Son. If we could live every minute in the knowledge that we are the chosen, created, loved and precious children of our Heavenly Father, perhaps the lure of temptations would be much diminished.
In popular understanding, Lent is seen as something rather negative. Give up this; forego that; focus on your sinful lives. Let us instead think of Lent as an opportunity to re-imagine ourselves as loved children of God; to focus on goodness and delight and on all that builds up and restores a right relationship with God and neighbour.