Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

admin | 9 March 2025

Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

At first glance it reads like a debating challenge, a war of words. And in one sense it is, yet not as a contest for what most persuades but rather as a testament to what is most true. That is what is at issue in the temptations of Christ.

They are our temptations. Matthew and Luke, though ordering them differently, present three temptations which encompass the meaning and nature of all temptation. Yet they all come down to one thing really: the denial of God, on the one hand, and a picture of the truth of our humanity as found in Christ, the word and son of the Father, on the other hand. All temptations are about turning to what are partial, incomplete, and distorted forms of the truth.

The three categories of temptation vary only in the degree to which God is denied. The three temptations can be understood as the temptation to distrust, the temptation to presumption, and the temptation to defiance and denial explicitly. All the temptations common to our humanity are comprehended in these three and all belong to the Lenten project of setting our loves in order over and against the forms of the disarray of our affections and thoughts. But what is the point of this whole matter of temptation? To highlight for us and to compel us to the realization of what properly belongs to the truth of our humanity and to the redemption of our humanity in the one who overcomes the tendencies in us to lose sight of the truth of our being which is only found in the truth and goodness of God.

“If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The first temptation is to distrust because it suggests that God will not provide for us, therefore we must shift for ourselves by way of whatever means, even unlawful and unnatural means, such as turning stones into bread, which is to say, subverting the order of things in creation to our own immediate ends. The temptation is to distrust God’s power and goodness. It is the false fear that God will not provide. The Old Testament form of this is the temptation in the wilderness (recalled in the Venite), “the temptation of Meribah” – the hungry temptation – when the people of Israel murmured against God’s provision for them in the wilderness, the provision of manna, the proverbial ‘bread from heaven.’

They denied, in effect, the will of God for their good as signaled in his Word. At issue is what God provides for us in the way of our journeying. What he provides is always sufficient for us; always good. That is the point of the petition in the Lord’s prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread” means trusting in the goodness of God who provides for us in the wilderness of human experience. The temptation is our fear that he will not; in short, that God is not really God. Thus we deny God by murmuring against his will and by neglecting the ordained means of heavenly grace by which he would sustain us; in short, the Word and Sacraments of Christ.

The second temptation is the temptation to presume. “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down.” This temptation goes to the other extreme. If the first was a lack of confidence in God’s will for us, this is an overconfidence, an improper expectation, a false hope in the will of God, which drives us away from the lawful use of created things and the ordained means of grace, and drives us towards unnecessary, luxurious and presumptuous means. It is the presumption of thinking that everything will be alright for me whatever I do. I’m saved, I can do anything and I’ll demand everything because God is answerable to me. It is a perverse reversal of order: we presume to make God subject to us.

The Old Testament form of this is “the temptation of Massah” when the people of Israel were dissatisfied with what God had provided for them and demanded something better, recalling the luxuries of Egypt. They complained. They wanted the salad bars and the surf’n turf of life back in Egypt! This temptation presumes upon our standing with God to deny the ordained means of his will for us. It puts God to the test for the sake of our amusement and entertainment. If the first denies the Creator in the provisions for his creation, the second denies the form of our creatureliness and the nature of our relation to the Creator. It reverses the relationship.

The third temptation is, if you will pardon the expression, the “greatest” of these three. It makes explicit what is hidden in all of them. It is the temptation to defiance and denial, the temptation to put oneself in the place of God. “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me,” the devil says to Jesus. “All these things” are “the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.” As if such things were the devil’s to give! As if he were to be worshipped instead of God! It is the grand illusion, the ultimate refusal of the creature’s relation to the Creator. Such is the devil himself in the nakedness of his pride and folly. The devil, Satan, the tempter – note that all these titles are present here – would substitute himself for God, thus denying both God and himself and the truth of creation. The prince of this world is, indeed, the prince of lies. He is the very principle of the soul’s defiance and denial of God.

The story of the temptations of Christ represent and replay the story of the Fall, on the one hand, and show the restoration of the image of God in us, on the other hand. Adam and Eve are tempted by what is pleasing to the senses and thus are drawn to distrust the provisions which God has made for them which they know to be good. They are tempted to presume that by eating the forbidden fruit they will become like God. They are tempted to deny God altogether and to defy his will. In short, they succumb to the beguiling wiles of the serpent, the tempter, the one who insinuates doubts about God and his will for his creatures.

But in Christ the temptations are overcome and they are overcome for us and for us to see and know. The overcoming of the temptations overcome our false relation to the goodness of God, to the goodness of the God-givenness of our being.. As such the temptations belong to our redemption. They show us the untruth of our souls even as they point us to the truth of ourselves in Christ, the Word and Son of the Father.

The overcoming of temptation belongs to the overcoming of all sin and evil through Christ’s Passion and Sacrifice. Thus, the story of the Temptations of Christ belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection and thus to the truth of our lives in Christ. “As dying, and behold, we live,” Paul tells us, pointing us to the new life in Christ and not to live as before. Our life is to proceed from the fullness of life that belongs to the restoration of the image of God in us through the grace of Christ. It is not about our striving for perfection but about living from the perfection of our being accomplished in Christ. “The Christian life, the life of grace, of faith and charity,” as Hans Urs Von Balthasar puts it, “is necessarily one that proceeds from fullness of being, and is, therefore, a life of thanksgiving: eucharistia.” The challenge of Lent is to “let [ourselves] be led by the current of Christ’s life so as to become [ourselves] wholly an expression of [his life].” He in us and we in him.

There is a counter to each of the temptations. It is nothing less than the clarifying Word of God who dispels the clouds of distrust, presumption, and denial: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God; Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

These are the powerful words of truth that counter the deceptive and beguiling words of deceit and partial truth. But of these three, the last is the greatest. It points us to the true end of our humanity in the worship and service of God. Both Matthew and Luke add one word to what is found originally in Deuteronomy; the word “only.” “Him only shalt thou serve.” There is no other. God is God and is not to be confused with any pretenders, with the false idols of human pretension.

On this first Sunday in Lent everything ends in worship and loving service just as Lent itself will end! How? Only through what Christ proclaims in his word. It is the counter to all and every temptation. It awakens us to the radical truth of our being as defined by the love of God signaled in the Word of Christ. Hearing Christ’s word in this war of words lifts us into the presence of the living Word and Spirit of the Father. But only through what Christ undergoes for us in the body of our humanity in the wilderness. He makes a way for us through the wilderness of human sin. Such is the love which attends so completely to the goodness of God. That is the point of worship. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” for there is no other.