Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, with the ashes of repentance and the idea of turning back to God. “Return to the Lord your God”, the prophet Joel exhorts us. But there can be no turning back to God without an awareness of our having turned away from God. That is the reason for today’s readings from Matthew and Paul, the one about the temptations of Christ, the other about our striving with God. Against the idea of the wilderness as a pristine place empty of human presence, Paul seems to suggest that the wilderness is inus. That is where the struggles of the soul for the good take place. And that is the true meaning of the story of Christ’s temptations. It illustrates the forms of our temptations.
The story of the temptations of Christ reveals to us a very basic and fundamental principle. All temptations have to do with our relation to the essential goodness of creation and to the will of the Creator. The very nature of God and the goodness of God is a challenge to us about what we think truly matters and what is truly good. This is what is set before us in the story of Christ’s temptations. The whole aspect of temptation turns on the idea of the good. That is what is primary and what the sequence of temptations in Matthew’s account shows us.
The temptations are about being put to the test. Temptation in that sense is about the relation of our knowing and our willing. Temptation tests us about our relation to what is good and true. They all involve a question about power in relation to truth. The devil here is the tempter as in The Book of Job and, as in The Book of Job, the matter of temptation is explicitly allowed by God; in other words it belongs to our good. Here Jesus is “led up by the Spirit”. The point is not about mere play-acting; the point is that the devil himself is good as a created being. His evil and the nature of all evil lies in his denial of his creatureliness and in his pride and presumption to be God himself. That is to will a lie. It is to turn your back on the truth of your own being. It involves a perversion of the good, a refusal to will the good order of creation and the will of God.
Temptation itself is not sin; sin is the yielding to temptation. The story of the temptations of Christ teaches us two things: first, the nature of all our temptations; and secondly, the way of the overcoming of all our temptations. In other words, we are shown the temptation and we are given the true response.
