by CCW | 14 March 2021 08:00
The traditional readings for The Fourth Sunday in Lent have given rise to a number of titles or terms for this Sunday in such things as ‘Mothering Sunday,’ ‘Refreshment Sunday,’ and ‘Laetare Sunday’. The first and third derive from the significance of Jerusalem in both the Jewish and Christian understanding; Paul in Galatians speaks of “Jerusalem which is above which is free; which is the mother of us all,” our spiritual homeland, while the Latin Introit for this day is from Isaiah 66. 10, “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her.” The second term, ‘Refreshment Sunday,’ derives from the Gospel story of the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness in John’s account. These folk titles and terms have a hold on the imagination yet are meaningless without these Scriptural references. Other folk customs and practices have grown up around them such as the tradition of Simnel cake eaten on this day, or Mi-Carême in the French Canadian tradition in which people put on disguises and go from house to house singing and dancing and looking for treats, a Lenten version of the Christmas traditions of mummering in Newfoundland and elsewhere.
These things all help to mark the midpoint of the Lenten journey. At best they serve to remind us that the pilgrimage of Lent is not just to God but with God in the wilderness conditions of human experience. They remind us of an essential feature of the pilgrim ways, namely that it is a blessing and a cause for joy and not some kind of grim and tiresome restriction. We might do well to remember that in the face of COVID-19 and the ups and downs of its restrictions. “Blessed are they whose strength in in thee,/ in whose heart are the pilgrim ways; /Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well;/yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings,” as Psalm 84 (vs. 5,6) teaches. This is the counter to what N.T. Wright calls our “late-flowering Epicureanism,” which may or may not be the same as the rather restrictive nature of Epicurus’s teachings which are at some remove from contemporary hedonism.
Yet such things can also distract us from the way in which these readings connect us to the deeper meaning of Lent as the way of the Cross and to our participation in the Passion of Christ. The blessing of the pilgrim ways is in Christ and in his Exodus, or going forth into the wilderness of our sin and darkness. This Sunday is not a reprieve or a rest-stop on the way to a happy-clappy Easter. It looks back and it looks ahead, not only back to Exodus and to Numbers in terms of the wilderness journey of Israel which is reworked in Christ, but also back to the lessons of the last three Sundays. It also anticipates and so looks ahead to Maundy Thursday and to the Passion itself at the same time as it highlights for us the sacramental means of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice throughout the whole of the pilgrim ways of our life.
Temptation or testing, proving. Lent puts us to the test. About what? About faith, about our faith in the absolute goodness of God. Our Gospel begins with a question to Philip. “Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?” Jesus asks. This leads to comments by Philip and then by Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, about the difficulty if not the impossibility from a human perspective. “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient,” Philip says. Regardless of the currency exchange, the point is that we do not have the economic means to fix the problem. Economics is only part of a larger spiritual problem. Andrew notes, rather unhelpfully, that “there is a lad here, which hath five barley-loaves, and two small fishes,” but immediately adds “but what are they among so many?” We confront our limitations. Only God can make something and something more out of our nothingness and insufficiencies.
But before these responses by the disciples, we have John’s rather odd parenthetical remark. It reminds us that Lent is about how we are being put to the test, that we are always being called to account with respect to the ground of human agency and about how we face the wilderness struggles of our lives. The contrast between wilderness and city is the contrast between the earthly and the heavenly. We are being put to the test about what truly defines us and we are being reminded that the God who creates is the God who sustains in the pilgrimage journey of our lives.
“And this he said to prove him,” John tells us. The word is the same word as in the story of the Temptations of Christ on The First Sunday in Lent. Jesus is put to the test, as it were, by the devil under the aegis of the Holy Spirit since the devil has no agency, no power apart from God. The temptations are, of course, our temptations and the story draws out the pilgrim ways of grace that overcome the denials of grace. That theme of being put to the test is further illustrated in the moving story of the Canaanite woman on The Second Sunday in Lent whose prophetic insight (or intellectus) into the truth of God results in her sticking-with-it, persevering in the face of silence and rebuke, contempt and insult. The Gospel for The Third Sunday in Lent, especially in its more complete form, is equally about how we are tested about our trust or faith in God as opposed to ourselves. Passion Sunday, too, will put us to the test about what we think we want both for ourselves and for one another, reminding us that our good, our blessedness can only be found in the redeeming blood of Christ and in the way of sacrificial service. These are the teachings that belong to the journey.
“For he himself knew what he would do,” John further tells us. It is a theological insight about the divinity of Jesus at least in the commonplace interpretation. Perhaps. God always knows what he does, of course. But what if the testing is the teaching? The point here, I think, is to remind us that the Exodus journey of the Passion is something good for us not just despite our failings and limitations but in and through them. The theme of testing is a constant feature of the Exodus and so too of its Christian reworking, a point which the Matins canticle, the Venite, Psalm 95, highlights. “Today, O that ye would hear his voice:/ ‘Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, and as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness;/ when your fathers tempted me,/ proved me and saw my works.” The psalmist looks back to Exodus and Numbers in the complaining or kvetching of the people of Israel which is the setting for God’s providential care and provision for his people: water from the stricken rock, manna or bread from heaven. Our putting God to the test is turned around and we are put to the test about our relation to God’s care and goodness.
These themes are taken up and intensified in Christ. “God will provide himself,” Abraham says in the disturbing test of his faith at the moment of the intended sacrifice of his only son, the promised son, Isaac, the story that informs our thinking about Christ’s Good Friday sacrifice. The story in Genesis is explicitly about God testing Abraham (Genesis 22.1). On Good Friday, God puts himself to the test in Christ’s Passion, proving his love and goodness for us in the midst of human sin and evil. But that too tests or proves our love and faith. We look on him “whom [we] have pierced,” John reminds us (Jn. 19.37) by way of Zechariah (12.10). And so we are pierced. To be pierced and to be tempted or tested are closely related terms, only an alpha of a difference, we might say.
We are constantly being put to the test. Only so can we lay hold of the dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God, made in the image of the sacrificial love which is at once the Trinity and the Incarnation, the love which gives itself away yet is always more and never less. The wilderness is a rich and powerful image but the wilderness is really within us. It is about how we think about God as Creator and Redeemer, and about creation as providential care. As this Sunday reminds us, such lessons lead not to complacency and entitlement but to a sense of gratitude and joy. We have an end with God who is with us in the pilgrimage journey. We can only know our limitations and imperfections in the prior recognition of God’s good will towards us. The sacraments belong to such teaching and testing. They are “certain sure witnesses and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him” (Art. XXV[1]). Such are the blessings in the pilgrim ways.
The point is made in the liturgy in the post-communion thanksgiving prayer. We give thanks to God who does “graciously feed us, in these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ: assuring us thereby of thy favour and goodness towards us; and that we are living members of his mystical body, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom” (BCP, p. 85). A taste and promise of Jerusalem which is above is strength and comfort; a blessing indeed in the midst of the wilderness of human experience. A blessing in the testing.
Fr. David Curry
Lent IV, 2021
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/03/14/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-in-lent-11/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.