Day: February 26, 2023

“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”

Lent begins, we might say, with the temptations of Christ as set before us in today’s Gospel. It ends on Good Friday with the crucifixion of Christ, with his being pierced on the cross. Between the Greek verbs for being tempted, πειραω, and for being pierced, πειρω, there is, we might say, merely an ‘alpha’ of difference. The words are closely similar; each alludes in some sense to the other. They belong to the radical nature of the Incarnation in terms of the pageant of human redemption. God’s engagement with our humanity includes the whole range of the human condition and thus its brokenness.

The Litany is the earliest part of the English liturgy translated largely from Latin litanies into English by Cranmer in 1544. It marks the beginning of what would culminate in The Book of Common Prayer. In the Litany, we pray to be delivered from various forms of sin and evil, from disorders both natural and human that belong to the fallen world and to ourselves, but we pray for deliverance only by the grace of God in Christ. The obsecrations or sacred entreaties in the Litany begin as follows: “By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation, Good Lord, deliver us.”

The Litany is a way of praying the Scriptures as credally understood. In these petitions there is the unpacking of the essential doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. The “Incarnation” is the collective term and principle of all that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ as the Word made flesh, such as his “holy Nativity” which is the Christmas theme, followed by his “Baptism,” an Epiphany theme, but then immediately associated with his “Fasting, and Temptation,” the themes of early Lent. They, in turn, give way to his “Agony and bloody Sweat” recalling Gethsemane, his “Cross and Passion,” his “precious Death and Burial,” the themes of Holy Week. Out of those moments comes his “glorious Resurrection and Ascension,” his “sending of the Holy Spirit,” his “heavenly Intercession,” and his “Coming again in glory.” It is essentially a way of praying the Creed and highlights the inescapable interrelation of these themes.

“By thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation.” It is a powerful triplet of complementary and interrelated ideas. Christ is baptized for us even as his baptism is also an Epiphany of the Trinity and thus baptism incorporates us into the life of God through his being with us, even to the point of his being “made sin for us.” But what about his fasting and temptation? How is that an essential aspect of the Incarnation? Because it belongs to the larger pageant of redemption which is about God entering into our broken world and our broken lives to bring us back to himself. That turning back is repentance expressed and embodied in the activities and disciplines that belong to our being, as the Epistle puts it, “co-workers” with God in Christ.

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