Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”
Two phone calls, back to back; the one about the baptism of an eight-month old child, the other about the dying of a ninety-five year old lady – Helen Gibson. Birth and death, rebirth and the hope of the resurrection. “As dying and behold, we live,” as Paul puts it this morning (2 Cor.6.9). It is remarkable sometimes how the meaning of our lives is wonderfully concentrated and clarified in such seemingly serendipitous moments.
There is something wonderfully clarifying about the clear air of wilderness places, even about the air of the wilderness winters of February that have so beset us this year. “Jesus,” we are told, “was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” Mark is even more emphatic. He tells us that the Spirit drove him, literally threw him out, into the wilderness. “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by satan.”
The whole marvel of the stories of the temptation of Christ is partly about the significance of the wilderness. It is an important biblical concept found in the Scriptures time and time again: from the Fall to Moses; from Joshua to the Babylonian captivity, itself a kind of wilderness; from the prophets in exile to the ministry of John the Baptist. “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?” Jesus asks the followers of John about John. Now Jesus is in the wilderness and so must we. There is something intriguing and complex about the wilderness both for the ancients and for us as moderns. That intriguing complexity and ambiguity about the theme of the wilderness is captured in the story of the temptations of Christ.
Somehow in the wilderness of human life we learn about the nature of our life with God, about life and death, rebirth and renewal.
