February 22 2026 Lent 1
Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7 Psalm 32 Romans 5.12-21 Matthew 4.1-11
In the Garden of Eden, the serpent was right, if you eat of this fruit, you will know good and evil. Up to that point Adam and Eve had lived a delightful life, having all they needed and desired, and knowing good, but not knowing there was evil because they didn’t need to know it. Or did they? Adam and Eve live in a world of ‘dreaming innocence’, ‘naked and unashamed’ until they recognized the vulnerability of nakedness. This journey of Adam and Eve describes our own journey from childhood to adulthood, and also the evolution of the human race which is not only a fall into sin but also a fall upward into freedom and creativity.
Adam and Eve abdicate responsibility for their decision, blaming each other and the snake. We abdicate responsibility for the destruction of our planet blaming government policy and corporate business. Like Adam and Eve, we have left the garden of innocence; we know death; we know destruction; and our complicity in it. But this knowledge of good and evil is an invitation for growth and maturity, to embrace the process of divinization prized by early church theologians.
Paul speaks of the universality of sin and grace. Even though sin and death are realities we cannot escape, their power is finite. God’s grace is everywhere and in its universality it provides hope for even the most wayward of us. Paul tells us that sin is not ‘original’, but it is part of being human, and it is shaped and transformed by the ultimate, and always, love of God.
In our gospel Jesus travels to where the ‘wild things are’ and discovers that wild things are both internal and external. In examining his journey we discover the importance of mindfulness in the spiritual journey. Jesus has just been baptised and heard the affirmation “you are my beloved child” and he now goes into the wilderness to discern this call to ministry. Just like Adam and Eve, and persons of power in our world today, Jesus’ power can destroy and create. He is tempted by very enticing and worthy things – power, security, sustenance – all of which, if we turn away from God’s vision for our lives, can destroy us. His response is an exercise of simplicity and mindfulness. He is aware of temptation, and turns to God in prayer. He places God’s vision at the heart of his decision-making and through using his temptations, he finds his true vocation
The reality of Satan, described in this wilderness story, is an important one. Even if you do not hold with the reality of a personal Satan, we can acknowledge that the powers of evil are real and destructive. We need to remain vigilant against the evils that can take over institutions and individuals, sometimes even unknowingly. We need to be on guard against powerful personages, spiritual and political, who create chaos, division and destruction all around. Broken power can be transformed and healed. We are challenged to examine, challenge, and critique the evils of our own Empires, personal and corporate, and do what we can to be God’s companions in healing the soul of the nation and the world.
Lent reminds us to put first things first, and the first thing is God. When we seek God’s world and vision first, we create simplicity and self-awareness and remain open to seeing God’s way amid life’s multiple possibilities. Lent offers us the opportunity to go on a daily wilderness retreat. Stepping back and simplifying. Examining gracefully our temptations and cutting off what gets in the way of embodying God’s vision in our personal, relational, and political lives.
So let’s take a look at an overview of our gospel. Following his baptism Jesus goes into the wilderness to work out who he is and what he is being called to do and be. After forty days of fasting he is ‘famished’. Physically, he is at the end of his strength. Socially he is alone. Spiritually, he is desperately trying to hang on to his identity as the memory of his baptism fades. And it is then that the tempter arrives to try to pull him away from his belovedness and vocation.
It may be difficult for us to contemplate Jesus ‘struggling’ with who he was and what his mission meant. We may ‘know’ that Jesus was human, but we may also not be ready to contemplate ‘how human’ he was. The tempter challenged Adam and Eve to be ‘like God’, now he is challenging Jesus in this time of total exhaustion. But unlike the challenge to Adam and Eve, he challenges Jesus to be ‘fully human’, to ‘abdicate power’, to ‘work in obscurity’.
Now you and I may think that the idea of Jesus ‘zapping’ a rock or two into food is not really that big a deal. God is supposed to be Jesus’ protector, an omnipotent commander of angels, so why not call on the protection of his father. And as Jesus is the rightful ruler of all the earth’s kingdoms, what’s wrong with him receiving the worship that is his due. But the tempter is not asking Jesus to do ‘something bad’, he is tempting Jesus to do something perfectly reasonable, but for all the wrong reasons, he is testing his motivations. Testing him to be ‘fully human’ even as he is ‘fully God’.
In the world of the devil, unmet desires are not worth thinking about, whereas for you and I, they are part and parcel of being human. So Jesus is being challenged to ‘cheat’ his way to satisfaction rather than ‘waiting’, ‘paying attention’ to his hunger and ‘leaning in’ to God for lasting fulfillment. Our Lenten observances teach us to ‘sit’ with our hungers; learn from them; discover what is the hunger ‘beneath’ our hungers; discover who and where is God when we hunger for whatever it is we hunger for.
The second temptation implies that if we are God’s beloved, then God will keep us safe. Safe physically; safe emotionally; safe from frailty and disease; from accidents and even from death. And it is such an enticing lie, it speaks into our deepest fears about what it means to be human in this broken, dangerous world. We would love to believe that we can ‘leverage’ our belovedness into an impenetrable shield. That if we ‘believe hard enough’ God will rush in and rescue us. But if the cross teaches us anything it is that God’s children still bleed, they still ache and they still die. We are loved in our vulnerability, not out of it.
The third temptation focuses on Jesus’ ego. Jesus is shown ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ and promised glory and authority. He is promised ‘fame’, ‘notoriety’, ‘clout’, and the implication is that God’s beloved does not need to work in obscurity; as God’s child, you need, deserve, to be ‘front and centre’, admired, envied, applauded. That a God who loves us would never ‘abandon’ us to a modest life lived in worldly insignificance. And this is something we as Christians, over the centuries, have fallen victim to. Church history is full of the ugly fallout of ‘Christian’ ambition, power, fame and authority gone wrong. So the challenge for us is, can we embrace Jesus’ version of significance, borne of humility and surrender. How important is it for us to be noticed, to be praised, to even be liked. Is our belief in God’s love dependent on a definition of success that does not come from God. Are we able to trust that God sees us even when the ‘rest of the world’ does not. Can our life as God’s child thrive in quiet places, secret places, humble places. The uncomfortable truth about authentic Christian power is that it resides in weakness. Jesus is lifted up, but he is lifted up on a cross.
Three temptations, three invitations. If these forty days were a time for Jesus to discern who he was and how he is to live out his vocation, then we need to consider his choices. Deprivation over ease. Vulnerability over rescue. Obscurity over honour. Every time he was given the opportunity of certainty, or the miraculous, or extraordinary, he chose the precarious, the quiet, the mundane. And let’s not forget, this wilderness experience was orchestrated by God’s Spirit. The Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to be ‘tempted by the devil’. And personally, I am not sure what to make of that.
Is it possible to see it as signifying that even wilderness will not separate us from God’s care? After all, most of us do not ‘choose’ wilderness either. We do not ‘volunteer’ for pain, danger, terror, loss; but wilderness happens anyway. Whether it be in a hospital room; through a troubled relationship; a sudden death; or unshakeable depression; wilderness appears uninvited and unwelcome, and we usually have no choice but to journey into its barrenness. But I do not think it means that God wills bad things to happen to us. But I think it does mean that God can redeem even the worst times of our lives; our deserts can become holy even if they remain dangerous. The reality of being human and living in this world is that it is fragile and broken; it includes deserts; but God’s ‘modus operandi’ is to take that which is death and bring resurrection from it.
So what does Jesus’ temptation mean for us as we begin our Lenten journey? Maybe it means we need to follow Jesus into the desert. Maybe is means we can crouch down and stare evil in the face. Maybe it is time to hear evil’s voice, recognise its appeal and then decide who we are and whose we are. Maybe it means that we can ‘journey with’ others who are in wilderness, and assure them they are not alone. God does not leave us ‘alone’, and neither should we.
Lent is not a time to do penance for being human. It is a time to embrace all it means to be human. Human and hungry. Human and vulnerable. Human and beloved.