March 9 Lent 1
Deuteronomy 26.1-11 Psalm 91.1-2; 9-16 Romans 10.4-13 Luke 4.1-15
As we start our Lenten journey, we may have attended the Ash Wednesday service where we were challenged by the invitation to face the paradox that we are beloved of God, and yet we will die. The first does not prevent the second and the second does not negate the first.
As we face our current global situation of conflict and fighting, we consider what it means that we – all of us, regardless of where we live and what our political viewpoints are – are small, mortal, vulnerable and defenceless.
And in many ways, this is the reality Jesus wrestles with in our Gospel. He has just come from his Baptism where he has heard ‘who he is’ and that he is ‘beloved of God’. Yet now the Spirit has taken him into to wasteland to face a series of powerful assaults on that truth. He has to learn how to discern God’s presence in this barren wasteland, he has to trust that he can be beloved and desperately hungry, that he can be valued and vulnerable. He had to learn that God’s care is found within his flesh-and-blood humanity, within the fragile vessel of his body that can crack and break. And to be beloved does not transcend the other, more grim truth, the truth of dust and ashes. We will die.
In this barren place, Jesus is confronted with three opportunities to walk away from this essential lesson. And this offers us space to reflect on how these may become invitations for us to trust God’s love in the barren places of our lives. It is easy to trust God in retrospect – after the challenge has passed and is resolved. It is an entirely different thing to trust God while we are undergoing painful, devastating, confusing moments when the comforts and certainties we cling to have burned to ash.
The first temptation targets Jesus’ hunger, it implies that God’s Son should not hunger. As far as the devil is concerned, unmet desires are an unnecessary aberration, not part and parcel of what it means to be human. His invitation to ‘magically’ satisfy his hunger is an invitation to deny the reality of the incarnation. Instead of waiting, paying attention to his hunger and leaning into God for lasting fulfilment, the devil asks Jesus to ‘cheat’ his way to satisfaction.
Many people ‘give up’ something for Lent, chocolate, wine, social media, alcohol. And the goal of these fasts is to ‘sit’ with our hunger, our wants, our desires, and learn what they teach us. What is the hunger beneath the hunger; can we hunger and still live. Can we desire and still flourish. Can we lack and still live generously without exploiting the beauty and abundance around us. Who and where is God when I am desperately hungry for whatever it is I long for. Hunger, in and of itself, is not a virtue, it is classroom. To sit patiently with desire and still embrace my identity as God’s beloved is not easy. But this is the invitation of Lent. We learn that we can be loved and hungry at the same time. We can hope and hurt at the same time. The agony of the wilderness teaches us that when God nourishes us, the nourishment is not manipulative or disrespectful. The food God gives us will not necessarily be the food we prefer, but it will feed us. And through us, if we learn to share, it will feed the world.
The second temptation targets Jesus’ ego. Having been shown all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus is promised glory and authority. Fame, visibility, recognition, clout. A kingdom to end all kingdoms, here and now. The implication being that God’s beloved should not labour in obscurity; that to be God’s child is to sit under the ‘bright lights’, visible, applauded, admired and envied. That if God loves us we will not be abandoned to live a ‘modest’ life in what the world considers insignificance.
It would be an understatement to say that Christians have an uneasy relationship with power. So the question we are asked in this is whether we can embrace Jesus’ version of significance; a significance borne of humility and surrender. Is it important that we ‘be noticed’. That we are praised or liked. Does our belief in God’s love rely on a definition of success that does not come from God at all? Can we trust that God sees us even when the ‘powers-that-be’ don’t? Can our lives as God’s beloved thrive in quiet places, secret places, humble and obscure places?
And the uncomfortable truth about authentic Christian power is that it is found in weakness. Jesus is lifted up – on a cross. His power is the power of self-surrender for the sake of love.
The third temptation targets Jesus’ vulnerability. ‘throw yourself off from here and let the angels catch you’. The implication being that if we are God’s beloved, then God will keep us safe. Safe physically, safe emotionally, safe from frailty and disease, safe from accidents, safe from death. And that enticing lie, targets our deepest fears about what it means to be human in a broken, dangerous world. It would be nice to get a guarantee that God will rescue us if we ‘just believe hard enough’. But it is not true. If the cross teaches us anything, it teaches us that God’s precious ones still bleed, and ache, and they still die. We are loved in our vulnerability, not out of it. We are children of a God who accompanies us in our suffering, not who guarantees us a lifetime of immunity. And this is good news because we are also the children of a God who resurrects. There is no suffering we will ever endure that God will not redeem. The story of humanity is not a story that ends in despair. It is a story that culminates at an empty tomb, in a kingdom of hope, healing, consolation, and joy.
Three temptations. Three invitations. So what will we do with them.
In some ways, the story of the temptation in the wilderness brings the ancient story full circle. The snake asks Adam and Eve ‘can you be like God, will you dare to know what God knows?’ In the wilderness, the devil offers Jesus a clever inversion of those primordial questions ‘can you be fully human, can you exercise restraint, can you abdicate power, accept danger, can you bear what it means to be mortal?’
If these forty days in the wilderness were a time of self-creating, where Jesus, Son of God, decides who he is and how he will live out his calling, then here is what he chooses. Obscurity over honour, emptiness over fullness, vulnerability over rescue. At every point when Jesus can use the ‘magical’, the ‘glorious’, the ‘safe’, he instead reaches for the mundane, the invisible and the risky.
The Gospel tells us that Jesus does not choose to enter the wilderness, he is led there by the Spirit. But, he chooses to stay there until the work of the wilderness is completed. We do not always choose to enter our wildernesses, we do not usually volunteer for pain, loss, danger, or terror. But the wilderness happens. Whether we find it in the guise of a hospital waiting room, a struggling child, a difficult relationship, a sudden death, or a crippling panic attack, the wilderness does come, unwelcome and uninvited, at our doorsteps. And it insists on itself. And sometimes – (although this is difficult to think about) – it is God’s Spirit that drives us into the barren places amidst the wild beasts. So does that mean that God can redeem even the most painful times in our lives, if we choose to stay and pay attention? Does it mean that our deserts can become holy even though they remain dangerous? Yes.
What does that mean for our Lenten journey? Maybe it means it is time to follow Jesus into the desert. It is time to stay and stare evil in the face. It is time to hear evil’s voice, recognise the allure it has, and confess its appeal. It is time to decide ‘who’ we are, and ‘whose’ we are. Lent is not a time to do penance for being human. It is a time to embrace all that it means to be human. Human and hungry. Human and vulnerable. Human and beloved.