by CCW | 22 February 2026 10:00
The words of the Venite allude to the forty days of Lent in scriptural terms. Theologically, it raises the question about God grieving but identifies that rather anthropomorphic idea with our hearts and minds. What is the cause of this apparent ‘divine’ grief? It is captured in the previous two verses. “Today, O that ye would hear his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness; when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works’.”
Wilderness, temptation, grieving. These are all interconnected. “Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” John Hackett’s formidable, exhaustive, and comprehensive 17th c. treatise of 21 sermons on “Christ’s Tentation”[sic] begins with the observation that the purpose of his going into the wilderness was not to fast but to be tempted; the fasting was secondary, just as Moses’ fasting for forty days on Mount Horeb was not an end in itself but for the purpose of receiving the Law.
What do we understand by wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns. The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, of chaos, as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, where it is not just the fear of the unknown but the fear of the unknowable. For others the wilderness is a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best seen in the 20th century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum or even denied. There is, too, the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the wilderness of the urban jungle.
In short, the wilderness as barren and desolate, empty and dangerous; the wilderness as a place of solitude; the wilderness of nature; the wilderness of man; the wilderness within; the wilderness without; the urban wilderness of inner city life; the suburban wilderness of empty boredom; the wilderness as an image of purposelessness, aimlessness, and of violence born out of that sense of meaninglessness; thus, the wilderness as an image of man’s destructiveness of himself and our world. Yet, in the story that begins the journey of Lent, there is another idea, the idea of the wilderness as the place of learning and understanding, the place of testing.
Wilderness in the biblical sense is mostly the world as fallen, the world as it appears through our awareness of ourselves in opposition to God and to the created order. And yet, in Genesis, the world which God has made is understood to be good; and so even in our self-willed distancing of ourselves from God, there is now the greater lesson about learning God’s will albeit through suffering and labour. The wilderness becomes the place of redemption, the place of our being called back to God.
The wilderness is the place of learning God’s will. In the wilderness, Israel struggles to become Israel, to become the people of the Law. The Law is given in the wilderness. In the wilderness Jesus is tempted by the devil but overcomes the temptations for our learning. What are the temptations in the wilderness? They are our temptations, first and foremost, and they belong essentially and necessarily to the Passion of Christ as the ultimate overcoming of human sin and all evil.
Temptation is about being put to the test about what truly defines human character at the same time as it reveals the weaknesses and faults of character. Paul famously says about the human condition that “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” As he acknowledges, “I do not know my own actions,” and recognises that the problem is that “sin dwells within me.” To know our temptations is necessary for understanding their overcoming which cannot be by our own actions. Our not knowing God’s ways is intimately connected to our not knowing ourselves. The Temptations of Christ reveal both God and ourselves.
In Exodus, the people of Israel tempted God, manifesting our human failing. What does it mean to put God to the test? It is the attempt to make God accountable to us, even though, as the Psalm puts it, we “saw his works;” seeing but not understanding. Yet what grieves God is ultimately what makes us grievous; we err in our hearts and minds. Why? Because “they have not known my ways.” We see his works and fail to understand what we see.
John Hackett highlights the significance of Christ’s temptations in the contrast between the outward and the inward aspects of Christ’s suffering. “It is a mystery of humility, that God himself would be spit upon, and beaten, and be crown’d with thorns; it was very much, and yet these at the very worst were but the evils of punishment”; in contrast, what is more serious was “to be solicited to distrust in his Father’s providence, to be ambitious, to be an Idolater, these are far more [contrary] to the Son of God, because they are the evils of sin.”
There are different ways of thinking about the threefold nature of temptation. One is, first, the temptation to distrust God’s providence in the good order of creation, second, the temptation to be ambitious, and thirdly, the temptation to idolatry. These are all interrelated. Another way is to see the temptations in terms of the baptismal renunciation of the works of the flesh, the world and the devil. Both ways speak to some of our contemporary assumptions about human personality and agency.
The first temptation to turn stones into bread reflects the sense of distrust towards God by the people of Israel in the wilderness journey of the Exodus. They complain about God’s provisions for them, even to the point of wishing they were back in Egypt where there was ‘surf ‘n turf’ as opposed to manna from on high! And there is the echo of the story of Moses’ striking the rock out of which comes living water. Such things point to both a distrust of God’s will and care for our humanity and to our focus on the things of the flesh, as if our humanity is fundamentally and essentially carnal whereas the Exodus story, recapitulated in Christ’s temptations, highlights the primacy of the spirit in our learning what God seeks for us. Our life naturally and spiritually depends entirely on the Word of God who has called all things into being and whose Word is the sustaining principle of all reality. This is basic theology in terms of creation itself and about how we think about ourselves.
The second temptation puts God to the test by the ambition to exceed the human limits of our created being, to go beyond the limits of creation and the world itself. As if we could act without regard to the limits of gravity, as it were, and to fly as if we were angels impervious to any kind of physical danger. We may be enthralled by our Olympic athletes in pushing the limits of faster, stronger, higher, but see in them the ecstasy and the agony of our humanity. Ambition without humility is the epitome of pride, leading to the not uncommon consequence of falling from great heights, literally and metaphorically, especially in the pursuit of worldly recognition. The temptation to overweening ambition and the world’s praise confronts us with ourselves. As if we can be simply what we are in our dreams and fantasies about ourselves.
The third temptation underlies all of the temptations in a scriptural and theological sense. The devil takes Jesus up into an exceeding high mountain, and shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory and promises all these things to him if he will fall down and worship him. This is idolatry because it confuses a created being with the Creator. The devil, after all, is created by God and as created is good, but the devil is not God, is not the Creator, and, therefore, is not to be worshipped. All the temptations confuse and confound the Creator with the created.
The temptations speak to aspects of our contemporary culture. To turn stones into bread assumes a mastery of nature that sees the world as just stuff for us to manipulate in any and every way we can; in short, as if we were God. This denies the givenness of things. For all of our technocratic prowess everything that we do depends entirely upon the nature and structure of the universe. Nature may be – and this is at least a nod to ancient wisdom and to quantum physics – far more complex, more robust, and more complicated than we realise, but our conceits in manipulating nature may often be quite disastrous for the natural world and ourselves. Yet we can only work with what is given and it is folly to think otherwise. For all that we do technologically in changing the material world and even our bodies to what fits our minds, doesn’t change reality, what Marilynn Robinson calls “the givenness of things.” That would be to forget the nature of the Giver and to deny the true worth and dignity of our humanity.
The psalm speaks of provocation as temptation – our provoking God leads to God being aggrieved. This attributes to God a human emotion or affection. But “our rule,” as Andrewes puts it, “is ever to reflect the same affection upon ourselves which is put upon Him; to be jealous over ourselves, to be angry or grieved with ourselves for that, which is said to anger or to grieve God.” It concerns us, not God. Such is the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Christ undergoes our temptations for us but in his humanity, in what belongs to our being, showing us what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity, especially in the overcoming of temptation. He who knows the secrets of our hearts as divine adds to that knowledge what is learned experientially, knowing things from within the frame of our humanity.
What is that overcoming? The overcoming is what is written, summed up, we might say, in the purpose of our learning God’s ways. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” This recalls us to God and to ourselves. For what is written in the Word of God is written in the flesh of Christ’s humanity that we might learn and know God’s ways.
Fr. David Curry,
Lent 1, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/02/22/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-in-lent-14/
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