NewCreation

Homily for the First Sunday in Lent, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the first Sunday in Lent. On this Sunday we traditionally have the readings of the temptations of Jesus in the desert. So this is Luke's version. After Luke has Jesus baptized by John, there's immediately a long pause, and then the whole of Jesus's genealogy is given, and it's after that in Luke's Gospel that we then say Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for 40 days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over he was famished. Now Luke had given comparatively little details about what was going on in the baptism, other than that this was Jesus receiving the spirit of sonship — it was being shown to everybody that he was the Son — and here he has been reenacting the 40 days of Moses in the desert. And here we have the devil, who makes very few appearances in Luke's Gospel as a protagonist. Only here — we'll see that there's a subtle reference to the devil at the very end — but it's only here that we get him. And what the devil does, and the form of his temptation, is the little word "if." He tries to get Jesus to doubt that he really is the Son of God, and therefore to attempt to prove it by himself. By reacting to the temptation, he would be doing something to show that he is something. And if you do something to show that you are something, it means you don't really believe you are. That's the temptation. So Jesus — the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Now remember, here Jesus has been in the desert 40 days; he's been reenacting the people of Israel going through the desert. This is the Son who has reenacted what Moses was doing, and of course Moses had famously given the people bread from heaven. So here Jesus is being tempted to show himself to be a greater prophet than Moses. If you're the Son of God, you'll be able to do this. And Jesus responds by quoting from Deuteronomy 8: "One does not live by bread alone." And it's not a quote that simply says that. The quote comes from this passage in the book of Deuteronomy: "Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his command…" "He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." So the quotation "one does not live by bread alone" comes exactly from the passage where it's talking about the giving of hunger serving to learn, through the experience of the manna, that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Jesus is replying to the "if" with exactly the context that the question raises. So the three moments of Israel's history, if you like, the three centers of Israel's history: the first, the prophetic — the Exodus. "If you are the Son of God, reenact it." But somehow now. Fast. Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. "In an instant" — the Greek word is stigmē, which is the same word which you have with "stigma," "stigmata." A hole in the hand was the word used for tattooing, a little puncture in the skin — a little puncture, an instant puncture of time. He showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours." Now here we have, if you like, the temptation of kingship. As the devil says, he has been given all this power. But the devil's understanding of it is very superficial. He's got all the apparent glory, all the mock glory — all the fake news is the devil's tunes. So anybody who looks at the state of our world and the state of kingships in it — and we speak as bombs rain down on Kyiv and Kharkiv — thinks, "Oh well, yes, he really does have the power. This is the one who is all-powerful, and perhaps it would be best to dance to his tune in order to sort things out." And Jesus again answers, this time from the compilation of text in Deuteronomy: "It is written, worship the Lord your God and serve only him." And please notice it's this question of time — the way in which a moment of time is shown to Jesus, and what Jesus is doing is slowly enacting the response to "worship the Lord your God and serve only him" over time. Because in just the same way as Jesus is not going to produce miraculous bread à la Moses — he is in fact going to become the bread — so here he's not going to quickly sing the devil's tune better than the devil. He's going to worship the Lord your God and undo the whole of the power of the devil over time. But it's going to be not in a puncture mark of time — that's the only thing the devil has got: clever ideas, puncture marks in time. It's the lived life over time which is going to undo the whole… mechanism by which the devil keeps us in fear. Then the devil took him to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of the Temple. So after the prophetic and the royal, now we have the priestly. The pinnacle of the Temple, saying to him, "If you're the Son of God, throw yourself down from here." Apparently there was a story of a priest who had thrown himself down trying to anticipate the great atonement, and that's the temptation here. "For it is written: he will command his angels concerning you to protect you, and on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone." So the devil knows that Jesus is the Son and is the great high priest who is going to perform the great atonement, and that the psalm does refer to him. What the devil wants to get him to do is to anticipate it. See if I can get him to do the atonement too quickly, because then it will simply be something which he's done to show who he is, and not the real thing. That always wants the fake, the cheap, the anticipated. Jesus answered him, "It is said: do not put the Lord your God to the test." Here he's quoting directly Deuteronomy 6:16, where it says, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massah" — and putting the Lord your God to the test is what Jesus is refusing to do. And Jesus is not saying "do not put the Lord your God to the test" to the devil; he's saying it to himself. "I am not going to put the Lord my God to the test," which would be performing something that obliges God to do something so as to show who God is. That was what was the temptation at Massah. He's saying no: he will perform the atonement, he will become and show himself as the priest, just as the king and as the prophet, in due time, when he has lived through everything and it is the right moment. And it said, when the devil had finished every test — so these were the three principal ones, maybe others we don't know — he departed from him until an opportune time. It's a very subtle little reminder that this whole thing is about time. The temptations in Luke: it's all about the difference between satanic time and the time of the one who comes in to give himself wholly and fully and without protesting, under obedience, who will then eventually live out the atonement. And of course it's at that moment — it doesn't say that it was the devil's voice saying it, but people say to him when he's on the cross, "If you are the Son of God, come down." It's the "if" again. That's the giveaway: that kind of knee-jerk response by which we are triggered to try and demonstrate something. And the trigger to demonstrate is the sign of the belief that we aren't the real thing. It's the sign of our imposter syndrome. So Jesus resisting… Resisting having to demonstrate what he is, because he knows that his being given sonship and his being the Son is the same thing — but it happens over time, and it doesn't allow him to be bounced into doing spectacular tricks to demonstrate, for his own self-satisfaction, who he is. The only reason for doing these things is for other people, and that does not mean showing off for your own purposes. So here we have this wonderful beginning to Jesus's ministry, as he shows that the Son of Man is going to become who he is over time, that there's something about the weakness and the historical journey that is not accidental to, but absolutely essential to, what he's about to do — and that doing that richly and in our midst, and overcoming our fears and our shame and our feeling of inadequacy, that we too are unable not to fear that sonship is something we have to grasp onto desperately, trying to prove it to others, but to allow ourselves to be loved into being, starting from where we are, so that we may give ourselves, starting from where we are, and actually show what sonship, daughterhood, looks like over time. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.