by CCW | 14 February 2016 15:00
The conjunction of The First Sunday in Lent and Valentine’s Day is at once fortuitous and providential. Valentine’s Day, to be sure, has largely become a secular event caught perhaps in the tension between the erotic and the romantic, between kitsch and extravagance, overwrought with emotion and expectation. Yet somehow it is about love! No doubt there are temptations too! The temptations of wine, woman and song, perhaps?! The First Sunday in Lent is certainly about love and temptations though of a deeper and more serious nature. Nothing like a bit of Lenten discipline for us too gathering here in the Hall, Valentine’s Day notwithstanding. It is just a wee bit too cold in the Church given the cold snap and wind chill.
The temptations of Christ are our temptations seen in a certain light of clarity and with a kind of intensity. They raise important and necessary questions about love, about what we love and how we love and in what way. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, a journeying to God and with God in Jesus Christ, a journeying that seeks the perfecting of our loves which implies already that there are problems about our loves. Temptation shows us something about those problems. The temptations test us about our loves. Yet temptation is not sin. Sin lies in giving in to temptations in which our limited loves are confused with the infinite love of God. The temptations illumine the true nature of our loves.
Paradoxically it is through the temptations of Christ that we learn what is to be loved and in what way. It takes a struggle and one which belongs to the nature of our Christian identity. The temptations of Christ recall us to our baptisms, to who we are in the sight of God and in the body of Christ. The struggle is about life and death just as in baptism there is explicitly our dying and our living again through our incorporation into Christ, into his death and resurrection. The temptations of Christ illumine the struggle for us in our lives. They reveal what we have to die to and what we have to live for. They recapitulate, in a way, the vows of renunciation in our baptism which are critical for our affirmation of faith in Christ.
There is our saying ‘no’, resoundingly, to the things which stand between us and God. There is our saying ‘yes’, resoundingly, to the things which God wants for us in our identity with him. The saying ‘no’ means our renunciation of “the world, the flesh and the devil”. These are all present in Christ’s temptations.
They remind us that this is the constant struggle of our lives, even as our baptisms, as belonging to the saving work of Christ in overcoming all that stands between us and God, remind us that the victory is solely in him. It can only be in us through him. It is a matter of his victory in us. Living that out is the constant struggle of our lives.
The temptations of Christ are, surely, the temptations of the flesh. Will we be defined by our sensual appetites alone? The temptations of Christ are, surely, the temptations of the world. Will we be defined by the desire for vain glory and spectacle and show? The temptations of Christ are, surely, the temptations of the devil. Will we be defined by the very principle in person who denies and stands in opposition to God? In short, the temptations of Christ are all about our identity in faith. They are all about the denial or the acceptance of God.
These are questions about our fundamental allegiances, questions about who we are and what we are called to be. The temptations are about the struggle within us against appetite, entertainment and the desire for absolute power and control. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how these things are very much part and parcel of our world and day.
There is and there must be the constant struggle to prove the goodness and the truth of God against the immediacy of our sensual appetites – as if we were merely consumers. There is and there must be the constant struggle against the imagination of our hearts for vain glory, entertainment and show – as if everything was simply there for our amusement. There is and there must be the constant struggle against the tyranny of our desire to be God – as if we were not creatures who find ourselves in a world which we did not make and do not rule. The temptations of Christ challenge us about our primary allegiances and about the constant struggle to set love in order.
That “man shall not live by bread alone” does not mean that bread, signifying the things which belong to our natural, physical and sensual sustenance and life, doesn’t have its place. It does but only as from the hand of the God. There can be no bread, no life apart from the Word of God. That “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,” does not mean that God cannot and does not do wondrous and marvellous things for us in our lives. It does mean that God is not the plaything of our whims and fantasies. He is not there for our entertainment and amusement. God is God. We live for him “whose service is perfect freedom.” It is not for us to put God to the test as if God has to prove himself to us.
That “thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve” does not mean that we don’t have other duties and obligations, responsibilities and powers with respect to the world and to one another. It does mean that all these things come under and are found within this primary and absolute requirement: God first without whom there is, after all, nothing else which is why, perhaps, Matthew adds the intensifying word “only” to the Old Testament command. Everything has to be brought into this primary relationship. Everything has to be brought into the primacy of worship and service. It means dying in order to live. It means learning how to love aright.
Christ’s answers are not pat formulas easily and conveniently trotted out. They are borne out of the struggle in the wilderness of human sin. They constitute an entire commentary on the age-old, biblical struggle between sin and grace. The clarifying words of Christ should be emblazoned in our souls and imprinted on our consciences. They belong to our daily struggle in faith to make visible the truth and the glory of Christ.
It all comes down to the matter of our baptismal profession “which is, to follow our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto him; that as he died and rose again for us, so should we, who are baptized, die from sin and rise again unto righteousness, continually mortifying all evil desires and daily increasing in all virtue and godliness of living” (BCP, p. 530). “To decline from sin, and incline to virtue” as the Penitential Service of Ash Wednesday so beautifully reminds us (BCP, p.614).
“As dying, and behold, we live,” St. Paul bids us in a wonderful pageant of paradoxes. This is the journey of love, the love of God in Jesus Christ who overcomes our temptations, our sins and our deaths. We journey with him in the love that makes all things lovely.
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/02/14/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-in-lent-4/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.