Year: 2012

“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table”

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” we heard last week. It was Jesus’ response to the first temptation of the tempter, the devil. It captures, really, an entire attitude and approach to the Scriptures, especially in our Anglican understanding. It belongs to an entire theology of revelation. It speaks ever so profoundly to the deeper meaning of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures who are not and cannot be defined simply by the things of this world. This whole outlook and way of understanding is, of course, profoundly sacramental. Jesus will make the connection between bread and word ever so clear. “I am the bread of life”, he says, the bread of the Passover which he says is his body, “this sacrament of the holy Bread of eternal life” as the Prayer Book Eucharistic prayer so beautifully puts it.

This sacramental connection between bread and word is present in this Sunday’s Gospel, too. It tells the wonderful, though somewhat disturbing, story of the Caananite woman coming out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, seeking Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”. Some of the same themes present themselves here as last Sunday. The ensuing dialogue is about the strength of this woman who is an outsider, we might say, but who has an insight into who Jesus is for the whole of our humanity. The dialogue, which is initially so troubling, serves to bring out a tension within Israel about God only to conclude that through Israel God in Jesus Christ is for everyone. But it is not cheap grace. The importunity or perseverance of this remarkable woman is like the insistence of the blind man on Quinquagesima Sunday. It belongs to a remarkable insight into the power of God’s unconditional goodness in Jesus Christ. But it testifies as well to the necessity of our seeking what God wants for us. As the poet John Donne puts it in a marvelous and super-intense sonnet, “salvation to all that will is nigh”. You have to want it, to will it. But you can only will what God gives.

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells his disciples and us. And he tells them and us exactly what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem.

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all thigs that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death; and the third day he shall rise again.

He speaks of terrible things which we do, terrible things which our hearts and minds in disarray think and do towards one another and ourselves, terrible thoughts and words and deeds which, ultimately, we do or try to do to God. In short; Christ speaks about his passion. It is not a dream. It is the deeper reality of the love of God which wills to pass through our loves in disarray and disorder so as to set our loves in order.

Christ speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us. “But they understood none of these things.” It complements Paul’s phrase about how we “see in a glass darkly”. We understand so little. These things were hid from them and, in a way, they are hid from us. We can’t understand except through the journey of Lent.

Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde
To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde;
To me, who took eyes that I might you finde:
Was ever grief like mine?
(George Herbert, The Sacrifice, 1633)

So the poet, George Herbert, drawing upon the words of Isaiah and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, confronts us with the mystery of Lent, the mystery of human redemption. Christ “took eyes”, became man that he might find you and me, even in our blindness, so that we might see and be changed by what we see.

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“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

For centuries upon centuries Lent has begun with the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.

The text from Hebrews (5.8) makes the theological point that underlies the Passion of Christ which, in a very real sense, begins with the story of Christ’s temptations. To be tempted and to be pierced are etymologically related. The point on The First Sunday in Lent is that Christ is tempted for our sake even as he will suffer for us on the Cross. To be tempted is one thing; to give into it is something else. Christ suffers the complete package of temptation; in short, all our temptations are named in his. And we might add, too, that he knows the nature of temptation far more than we do precisely because he does not succumb, as we so easily do, but overcomes our temptations. The text from Hebrews makes a theological point about the Incarnation. “Although he was a Son,” meaning the Son of God and therefore Divine, yet “he learned obedience through what he suffered,” which is only possible through his humanity.

To succumb to temptation belongs to our sinfulness – to our falling away from the conditions of our creatureliness. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all the forms of our disobedience.

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