by CCW | 13 March 2011 14:10
Everything in this gospel must disquiet us. There is, first, the idea of Jesus being led “by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil”; secondly, there is the idea of the wilderness itself, an image which disturbs as much as it attracts.
Wilderness here is the place of temptation but under the guiding force of the Holy Spirit. This implies a kind of necessity about the wilderness in the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage. Somehow there is something good about temptation.
Wilderness. It is an intriguing term. What do we understand by the wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns.
The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, the wilderness of chaos as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Alternatively, we might think of the wilderness as a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best captured in the twentieth century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum. There is as well the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the greater wildness of the urban jungle.
In short, the wilderness as barren and desolate, empty and dangerous; the wilderness as a place of solitude; the wilderness of nature; the wilderness of man; the wilderness within; the wilderness without; the urban wilderness of inner city life; the suburban wilderness of empty boredom; the wilderness as an image of purposelessness, aimlessness and of violence born out of that sense of meaninglessness; the wilderness as an image of man’s destructiveness both of himself and his environment. Yet, in this story that begins the journey of Lent, there is another idea, the idea of the wilderness as the place of understanding, the place of learning, the place of testing. Such is temptation. It is about being put to the test.
Old Testament offers the beginning of a theology of the land as the place where we learn about our relationship with God and with one another. That theology of the land belongs to the divine promises of redemption which has its fulfillment in the Christ’s triumph over temptation.
The wilderness, initially, is the world as fallen, the world as it appears through our awareness of ourselves in opposition to God and to what God has made. And yet, even in the early chapters of Genesis, the world which God has made is understood to be good; and so even in our self-willed distancing of ourselves from God, there is the greater lesson about learning God’s will, albeit through suffering and labour. The wilderness becomes the school of our learning. As such the wilderness becomes the place of redemption, the place of our being called back to God.
The place of banishment becomes place of promise, the promised land; the wilderness is the place of learning God’s will. In the wilderness, Israel struggles to become Israel, to become the people of the Law. The Law is given in the wilderness of Sinai.
In the wilderness Jesus is tempted by the devil but overcomes the temptations. What are the temptations in the wilderness? They are our temptations.
What is the overcoming? It is Christ’s love for our humanity in his total love for the Father. The story of the temptations of Christ clarifies two things. First, the threefold temptations encompass all of the temptations that belong to human experience. They are all about the demonic desire to seize divine power for ourselves: the desire to pervert the natural order, turning stones into bread, thereby denying the integrity of nature; the desire that God should serve our immediate interests, thereby becoming the slave of our wills; and, the greatest temptation of all, the devil’s temptation, the desire that the world and all that is in it should be ours, not God who made it. It is the ultimate lie, the lie that makes a hell of every place on earth. It signals the complete rejection of the truth and power of God.
That this should be made visible to us is the wonder and the mystery of redemption. The Gospel makes clear to us “the devices and desires of our hearts.” But, secondly, it also makes clear to us the way of salvation and grace. We may discover and know with a kind of fall of our hearts our deceits and deceptions, the betrayals of our loves, the temptation to have our own way over others. To know that is the beginning of a kind of saving knowledge. But it is not salvation. We cannot overcome our temptations just by naming our temptations or on the strength of some willpower on our part. No. We have to recognize that the assertion of our own wills is always the problem for the simple reason that it ignores and denies God. No. The great wonder of this story is that the only overcoming of temptations in us is through Christ. He not only names our temptations; he is also the only overcoming of them. How? In his perfect love for the Father in the power of the Spirit.
Ultimately, the evil of our hearts is overcome only by the total goodness of God in and through the humanity of Christ. Here he suffers our temptations; his thinking obedience to the will of the Father in the Word of Scripture overcomes all that would deny the truth of that Word. But it is on the Cross that all the denials and destructive rages of our distempers are truly overcome. They are overcome by the love of God, the love of the good that is greater than the follies of evil.
The answer to the last temptation is what we see most fully on the Cross. There we see the love of God which perfects and restores human love. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve;” it is one of the lessons of the wilderness. Lent is about that programme of love in us. It brings us to the Cross. The wilderness of our lives becomes the place of the restored relation of God and man but only through the Son who names our temptations and overcomes them.
Fr. David Curry,
Lent I, 2011, 8:00am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/03/13/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-in-lent-800am-service/
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