Lent 1

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews 

‘And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.’ ‘Immediately’ is a favoured word in Mark. He uses it to drive along the narrative, no sooner telling you one thing than rushing you on to the next. There’s an urgency to his proclamation as he tells the story in a way that draws us in and carries us along.

Immediately Jesus was driven out into the wilderness. This happens hot on the heels of Jesus’ baptism. You get the feeling that the Jordan water is still making his clothes cling to him, that his hair is dripping with it as the voice from heaven goes on ringing in his ears. ‘You are my Son, the Beloved.’

It’s a startling juxtaposition. One moment there is the revelation of divine favour, the next, Jesus is being driven into the wilderness. We’re still in the opening chapter of the Gospel, so those of us listening to it or reading it thinking that life with God will shield us from such difficult things as the wilderness and temptation and Satan are in for a shock.

Lent’s 40 days take their pattern from Jesus’ time in the wilderness, itself a recapitulation of Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness after the exodus, when God saved them from slavery and before they entered the Promised Land.

 In the wilderness, the people of Israel had to learn to trust God, to live by the faith that the One who had called them his people and rescued them from slavery would keep his promise. So many things made them doubt God: their fear, their dissatisfaction with Moses and each other, their sore feet and rumbling bellies, the way they grew nostalgic for Egypt.

 Matthew and Luke give us more detail about Jesus’ experiences in the wilderness, but woven through them all is a similar temptation: to distrust the voice that has called him the beloved Son.

As we keep Lent, as we spend a bit of time in our own wilderness, this is so often the temptation we face. We don’t trust the voice that calls us beloved.

In our baptism, the same Spirit that descended on Jesus descends on us. The same voice that acclaims Jesus as the beloved Son calls us his own beloved children. This is our fundamental identity: this is the relationship for which we are made.

And temptation undermines all that. The tempter doesn’t show up with horns and hooves, brandishing a pitchfork. He would be much easier to recognise and resist if he did. But like the serpent in the garden of Eden, the tempter is much more subtle than that.

And part of the discernment we each need to do is to learn what face the tempter wears for us, with what voice he speaks. His purpose, as it has been since Eden, is to make us doubt God.

And though it might seem paradoxical to us, it is often the times when we are actively seeking God, wanting to grow in relationship with him and commit ourselves to the sorts of practices that support that – times like Lent, in other words – that the tempter shows up. If we’re already living in a way that mostly disregards God, or even opposes him, there’s not a lot for the tempter to do. It’s when we seek God that the tempter goes into battle.

And he sows doubt. ‘Did God say…?’ he asks Eve in the Garden of Eden, making her question the goodness of God and his commandments.

‘If you are the Son of God…’ he says to Jesus in the wilderness, tempting him to use his divine Sonship for his own ends, to test God, and doubt his promises.

I wonder what that voice sounds like in your life?

Maybe it’s the voice that insinuates itself into your good Lenten practices, the one that says,

‘why bother?’

‘Do it tomorrow’

‘I don’t feel like it.’

Maybe it’s the voice that appears to console you in your hunger, your need, your want with the promise of illusory satisfaction. The voice that speaks through the secret habit, the hidden craving, the appetites we get out of kilter, reassuring us that ‘no one will know’ and ‘it’ll make you feel better.’

Or maybe it’s the voice that makes you doubt your identity in Christ as a beloved child of God, the one that says ‘God can’t love you’, or ‘you’re not worth it’, or ‘you’re not good enough.’

The tempter comes sowing fear and doubt and regret and pride and confusion, stirring up distrust and seeking to lead us away from who we are and whose we are.

And so, ‘lead us not into temptation’, we pray in the words that Jesus gave us. It’s a good prayer to make our own this Lent. I know that too often, I can approach Lent as though it’s a great test of will, a feat of endurance in which I can triumph if only I flex my spiritual muscles and try hard enough. This, by the way, is an example of the way the tempter can work even through our good desire for holiness, and instead end by leading us away from God.

For what the petition in the Lord’s Prayer actually acknowledges is what the prayer book names when it says that ‘we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves’. Like St Peter confidently telling Jesus that even though everyone else may desert him, he never will, we can be prone to over-estimating our spiritual strength. To pray that we be not led into temptation is to pray that we avoid this presumption of thinking we are equal to the fight. It is a petition that springs from the recognition – perhaps reluctant, perhaps joyful or grateful – that it is the strength of God’s grace we depend on, not the strength of our own will.

So it is a prayer to be rooted in that grace, and in our baptismal identity. The life of the Spirit will include wilderness periods – the annual one of Lent, or others not of our own choosing. While we are there, we pray that we will not face a temptation or trial we can’t withstand, that when the tempter cajoles or beguiles or entices us, we will listen for the voice that declares ‘you are my beloved child’ and trust it.

At the other end of his ministry, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus faces another temptation as he prays for the cup to pass from him, and he tells his disciples again to pray that that they may not come into the time of trial (it’s the same word in the Greek, which we translate trial or temptation).

And from this we take courage and strength. Because Jesus went into the wilderness alone, we don’t have to. Because he faced the ultimate trial and testing in his passion, to the point of feeling forsaken on the cross, we no longer need to face trial or temptation alone. God has answered our prayer not to be led into temptation, by himself enduring it, going to its limits and into the hands of death itself, to bring us back to him.

The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, and the Spirit will accompany us into the wilderness, too – the same Spirit who descends on us in baptism, who is sent into our hearts so that we can call God ‘Father’, who prays in us, and who helps us to face the tempter and resist him, by recalling us our identity as God’s beloved children.