Christ Church

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the Prophet Joel belong to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Yet they have a powerful resonance throughout the whole of Lent and even more throughout the whole progress of the Christian life of Faith. In a way, it is all about the turning. This is an important spiritual principle which was well understood by one of the outstanding preachers and masters of the spiritual life in our own Anglican tradition, Lancelot Andrewes.

A celebrated preacher at the courts of Elizabeth and James in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, he stands not only with one foot in one century and the other in another but in the moments of transition between the medieval world and the early modern world and in ways that look back reflectively and profoundly upon the Fathers of the Patristic Period as well as ahead to the ambiguities and uncertainties that belong to our contemporary world. His sermons and his prayers are themselves an outstanding monument to the spiritual tradition which has come to be known as Anglicanism and which above all else connects that tradition to the essential Catholicism of the universal Church. It is, we might say, one of the counters to the fideism of our current situation by which I mean the narrow retreat into the ghettoes of our minds at the expense of the breadth and depth of the Catholic Faith in its truth and beauty.

Andrewes was a celebrated preacher in his day and his sermons and prayers have had a remarkable influence well beyond his time and place. While they are intense and demanding sermons, it seems to me worth considering the salient features of some of his Lenten Sermons precisely because they bring out a deep biblical wisdom understood creedally and doctrinally. They are indeed a redire ad principia, not just in terms of repentance which he especially refers to in these terms but because the whole of the Christian life is a turning back to God, a return to the principle, a point which appears in many of his sermons. Our endeavour will be simply to point out some of the themes of repentance that are presented and explored in some of the sermons which he preached in Lent.

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“One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”

The temptations which belong to the beginning of Lent connect to the end, to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. He who is pierced for us is tempted for us.

To be tempted and to be pierced are related words. The overcoming of temptation belongs equally to the overcoming of his being pierced, namely, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The cross and the resurrection are obliquely, yet strongly, present in the temptations of Christ. There is a resurrection into the presence of the living Word and Spirit of the Father, but only through the burning love of the crucified, a love which is already signaled in the temptations of Christ read on the First Sunday in Lent.

To be tempted is to be drawn to think and act in ways which we know to be wrong and false. This implies as well that we are drawn away from what we know to be right and true. Our reason is beguiled; our will is seduced. We are at once deceivers and deceived.

Temptations are received in the soul. It is there that they have their force of attraction, drawing us to what we know in some sense we should refuse. But there is always a choice, a crucial moment of decision, whether to give in or withstand. This is the counter to all of the forms of determinism in our culture and day. The problem is not that there are temptations – these there must be – but how we face them. Sin, after all, does not lie in the temptations themselves, but in our yielding to them, whether inwardly in our thoughts or outwardly in our deeds. Temptations actually belong to the path of our spiritual journey to God and with God. They are, we might even say, necessary to the perfecting of our wills, to the matter of setting love in order. They belong to our freedom in Christ.

The temptations of Christ are our temptations. His will to bear them belongs to the divine will to redeem. The temptations of Christ clarify the meaning of all and every temptation. There is no temptation which does not fall under one or other of the temptations of Christ. Our understanding is clarified and our wills are fortified by reflecting on the temptations of Christ. They sanctify our temptations. They are made part and parcel of the way of perfecting grace in us. By virtue of Christ’s temptations, we are inwardly strengthened in resisting, even as the force of the temptations themselves is abated, because we can see them in Christ for what they are and how they can be overcome.

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