Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
“But if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the
kingdom of God hath come upon you”
The tune for our first hymn this morning is called “Batty” and the postlude which concludes our service is a musical meditation based on “Batty.” Today’s Gospel, too, may drive us all a bit batty!
Darkness and desolation, devils and wicked spirits, divisions and temptations. What dark and disturbing images are set before us in the readings for The Third Sunday in Lent! And yet the finger grace of God is more than enough, it seems, for the kingdom of God to be revealed and known.
The Lenten Sundays seek to draw us into the Passion of Christ and its meaning for Christian witness and life. The focus is on what Christ suffers for us and why. This Sunday marks the deepest and darkest part of that journey and corresponds, I suggest, to the shadows and darkness of Tenebrae, the service on the Wednesday of Holy Week that anticipates the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday; in other words, the days when the Passion of Christ is present to us in its most concentrated form. Somehow the darkness is light.
“The whole life of Christ was but a continuall passion,” the preacher John Donne reminds us, pointing out how the shadows of the Cross are ever with us. But how to think the meaning of the Passion? Holy Week will immerse us in its horror and its glory. It will seek to move our hearts and our minds with the spectacle of human betrayal and divine love and will do so in very profound ways, the way of the Cross and our part in it. To be sure. But to get to Holy Week and to make greater sense of it we need the Sundays of Lent and, perhaps, this Sunday more than most. Why?
Because we do not take evil seriously enough. We are unwilling to contemplate the darkness and the evil of our own hearts. We refuse to see that heaven and hell are all around us and within us on a daily basis. It is there in how we think, in how we speak and in how we act. And if ever the western world is going to make sense of terrorism and, particularly, the spectacle of jihadis, it will have to begin with itself and with this picture of ourselves that Jesus presents in this Gospel, the Gospel of darkness and desolation without which there can be no light and salvation.
