Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, 10:30am service
“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”
The Christian season of Lent traditionally begins with the temptations of Christ on the first Sunday of Lent. The whole idea of Lent, the quadragesima, is derived in part from Christ’s going into the wilderness and fasting for “forty days and forty nights.” It recapitulates the themes of the Exodus journey of the ancient Hebrews; the forty years of wandering in the wilderness of Sinai. It takes on a symbolic significance. At once a liberation from the yoke of slavery under the Egyptians, it was also a time of testing, and, above all, a time of learning. Learning what? Simply what it means to be the people of God, defined ultimately by God who reveals himself and his will in two ways: first, in the burning bush, and secondly, in the Ten Commandments, the moral code for our humanity, if you will.
These are astounding stories. And in a way they are recalled and reworked in the story of the temptations of Christ which sets us upon the Christian journey of life, a journey into the greater promised land of our redeemed humanity, our humanity forgiven and restored, like the paralytic in the lesson from Matthew’s Gospel, our humanity called and empowered, like Matthew, to follow Christ at his word to challenge and proclaim the new reality of God’s absolute mercy for our wounded and broken humanity. Somehow in the season of Lenten fasting we are also reminded of the joy of the new life of redemption. “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?” Jesus asks. It is a provocative question which calls attention to something new and wonderful in Christ which at once corrects and completes all that belongs to the rigour of the law and to the disciplines of Lent.
