First Sunday in Lent
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
The Temptation of Christ in the wilderness comes after his baptism, but before his Galilean ministry. John the Baptist had foretold the coming of one who would baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire. At his baptism Jesus was marked out by the voice of the Father as himself this coming one. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3: 17). The reference to the Son refers to Psalm 2, one of the so called “enthronement” psalms for a king. It was a Psalm about sovereignty that was later seen as foreshadowing the future messianic leader. The second part of the statement refers to Isaiah 42, one of the so called Servant passages in Isaiah. It is a message about service. In drawing together these two passages the message is proclaimed that the Messiah is not a warrior and a conqueror but a servant. His sovereignty is exercised through service.
In the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness after his baptism he was on each of the three occasions tempted to follow a course that was contrary to his vocation to be the Servant-Son of the baptismal voice. On each of the three occasions he replies to Satan with words from the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy portrays Moses addressing the children of Israel before their entry into the promised land. He looks back retrospectively on the period of the wilderness wanderings. The Israelites had not obeyed what had been commanded of them by God in the wilderness. They had been tempted to fall away from God, and they had succumbed to temptation. “When your fathers tempted me, proved me and saw my works”, as Psalm 95 which we say at Mattins has it.
But where the children of Israel failed, Jesus succeeded and thereby embodied in his own person the vocation of the true Israel of God, the Servant Son of the baptismal voice. As God’s Servant-Son he gave the responses to the Tempter that the old Israel should have given, but failed to give. As John Henry Newman wrote, “O wisest love! That flesh and blood, Which did in Adam fail, should strive afresh against their foe, should strive and should prevail.”
The first temptation was “If thou be the Son of God, command these stones be made bread” (Matthew 4:3). Jesus replied from Deuteronomy “Not in bread alone doth man live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.” While the Israelites disobeyed God by complaining about the food in the wilderness, Jesus refused to act in a manner contrary to the nature of God.
The second temptation was to perform a spectacular miracle for the world to see a conclusive proof of his nature. Jesus again replied from Deuteronomy “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”. He later refused the request for a sign precisely because it involved putting God to the test.
The last and greatest temptation is that of apostasy by worshipping Satan rather than God. Jesus, the true Israel of God, again gives the answer that Israel in the wilderness had failed to give. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve”. To win the world by the world’s own methods was the way of Satan rather than God. At the climax of his later Galilean ministry after the Feeding of the Five Thousand the people tried to make him king by force, but Jesus dismissed the crowd and withdrew by himself (John 6:15). His kingdom was not of this world, and he sought to educate his disciples into the way of the Cross. When Peter acclaimed him Messiah at Caesarea Philippi he was still thinking in triumphalist terms, but Jesus responded “Get thee behind me Satan, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men”(Matthew: 16:23). Peter was still thinking in terms of a conqueror and ruler, but the true Messiah was a servant. His future enthronement and rule could only come through reversal, repudiation, suffering and death. The world could not be defeated by the world’s own methods. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul” (Matthew: 16:26).
We are called to become by grace what he is by nature. This work of sanctification is an ongoing process. After St. Paul’s conversion he still had to endure many struggles, inward tensions and outward conflicts. He refers to these trials and tribulations in the Epistle to the Corinthians. We all fail in this process as we all succumb to temptations, but the good news is that the battle that we face is one that has already been won on our behalf, so we can rejoice even in our infirmities “as unknown and yet well known: as dying, and behold we live” (2 Corinthians 6:9).
The world promises a way that is not the way of the Cross (a way in which there is no need for Lent), and every day we are tempted to follow the way of the world rather than the way of God. The gate is narrow and the way is hard. In the last century perhaps the greatest challenge to the Christian faith came from the regimes of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. These regimes eventually collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. The Devil today tempts us in a more subtle form through the false gospel of the advertising industry that dominates twenty first century western societies. The advertising industry is constantly trying to persuade people to buy things that they do not need with money that they do not have in order to impress people who are not worth impressing. It presents a world in which everyone is young, everyone is successful, no one ever falls ill or dies, and everyone is encouraged to be competing against everyone else. What was once denounced as the sin of covetousness is now upheld as an essential part of the capitalist system. In the world of public relations looking good is more important than actually doing good. Much of modern Western Christianity has sought to accommodate itself to this false gospel of image and public relations, and seeks to downplay the need for us to resist sin, the world and the devil.
However, the Gospel and the season of Lent teaches us that this is not the way of Christ. The spirit of the age is very different from that of the Holy Spirit. What matters is not what is fashionable, but what is true. C. S. Lewis put it in these words “Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
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