Author: CCW

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

For centuries upon centuries Lent has begun with the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.

The text from Hebrews (5.8) makes the theological point that underlies the Passion of Christ which, in a very real sense, begins with the story of Christ’s temptations. To be tempted and to be pierced are etymologically related. The point on The First Sunday in Lent is that Christ is tempted for our sake even as he will suffer for us on the Cross. To be tempted is one thing; to give into it is something else. Christ suffers the complete package of temptation; in short, all our temptations are named in his. And we might add, too, that he knows the nature of temptation far more than we do precisely because he does not succumb, as we so easily do, but overcomes our temptations. The text from Hebrews makes a theological point about the Incarnation. “Although he was a Son,” meaning the Son of God and therefore Divine, yet “he learned obedience through what he suffered,” which is only possible through his humanity.

To succumb to temptation belongs to our sinfulness – to our falling away from the conditions of our creatureliness. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all the forms of our disobedience.

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“For without me me ye can do nothing”

There is something rather terrifying about the feast of St. Matthias. He is the apostle chosen by lot to go “into the place of the traitor Judas,” as the Collect puts it. The Lesson from Acts is no less clear: one is chosen “that he may take his place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell.” That one is Matthias, now numbered with the eleven, making the eleven twelve.

We know virtually nothing about Matthias. Which is fine. It is more than enough to contemplate the idea that he has been chosen to take the place of the betrayer of Jesus. Yet it must seem an uncomfortable thought. Betrayals are difficult but necessary things to behold. To take the place of the traitor, it seems to me, must mean contemplating the betrayals in our own hearts. For it has to be said that we are all the traitors of Christ. We are all like Judas.

Such is the deep and grim reality of sin. Matthias is chosen to take his place. Not to be another traitor but in the face of human treachery and deceit to be a man of faith, steadfast and sure. “There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face” Shakespeare’s King Duncan, in the play MacBeth, says about the first Thane of Cawdor who was a traitor to the King. “He was one,” the King says, “upon whom I built an absolute trust.” At just that moment, MacBeth appears, MacBeth whom the King had just appointed the Thane of Cawdor in the place of the traitor. MacBeth would prove to be the far greater traitor. And unlike the first Thane of Cawdor who confessed and repented, it will not be said of MacBeth, as it was said of him, that “nothing became his life like his leaving it,” meaning a kind of nobility achieved through repentance and confession.

No. Matthias stands in the place of the traitor Judas but not as another traitor but one who knows the treachery of human hearts and the need for heavenly grace. And that, it seems to me, is the point of the Gospel reading that accompanies the lesson from Acts. Jesus says, “for without me ye can do nothing.”

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“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”

Where are our hearts? Ash Wednesday is the stark reminder that our hearts are in disarray, in darkness and confusion, in sin and folly. We don’t like to hear this perhaps and yet the message of Ash Wednesday is the strength and comfort of the Christian Gospel. It convicts us, to be sure, but only so as to set us on the path of redemption.

Year in and year out, it seems. The path is at once easy and hard, the ways at once difficult and yet altogether possible. It is about the grace of Christ in us and through us in the course of our daily lives.

Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
But is compos’d of passion.

Wise words from the poet of the Anglican spiritual way, George Herbert. He has put his finger on the challenge of Lent. It is to be welcomed, even loved. Why? Because of the importance of temperance – one of the four cardinal virtues and the one which speaks directly to the matter of self-control – and because of the necessity of authority. As he rightly intuits, it is hard to imagine which we reject the most, the idea of temperance in the culture of self-indulgence, or the idea of authority in the culture of the tyranny of our own subjectivity; in short, “you are not the boss of me!” It is, I fear, the underlying mantra of the culture of arrested adolescence. Lent provides a counter to these disorders and disasters, a welcome counter, as Herbert suggests.

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“I will show you a yet more excellent way”

That more excellent way is Paul’s great love-song. The image of our lives together as a body encompassing diverse gifts and distinct parts where each works for the good of the whole has its ultimate perfection only through the activity of love, the perfecting virtue. Without love, we are nothing, he says, but “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, lives that are “full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing” as Shakespeare puts it in MacBeth. Charity is love, love in its profoundest sense, love as “setting love in order” and bringing to perfection each and every part of the complex of the body, each and every form of love. Ultimately, that body is the body of Christ, the Church, the body within which every other body, both individually and collectively, finds its place and voice.

Love is motion towards another. It does not arise simply from ourselves. For in ourselves our love towards one another is always suspect and self-serving; in short, selfish. It is always less than what it should be, even less than what we want it to be. The poverty of our own loves convicts us. In ourselves, our loves, our desires are incomplete, dangerous, destructive and even quite deadly. “We see in a glass darkly”, incompletely and confusedly, especially about our loves, it seems.

We have to learn this in one way or another. At the same time, we have to learn the greater lesson of the perfecting grace of Christ. Christian love is not about comfort and convenience. It is about sacrifice and commitment. The love of Christ would teach us about the true love of God in and through the forms of our unloveliness but only so as to set us right in love. Without the love of God – so clearly and strongly indicated on this day – there could be no journey, no pilgrimage, no Lent; in short, no love. Without love we are dead.

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