The Temptations of Christ, Lent 1

The Temptations of Christ

Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 91; Romans 10.8-13; Luke 4.1-13

“He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Heb 4.15

It was that great 20th century commentator on the human condition, Mae West who remarked that “I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.”

In fact a popular theological conundrum for students (from the 5th century onwards when this Gospel was adopted for the first Sunday in Lent) was usually expressed in this form:

Was Christ: able not to sin?
OR : not able to sin?

The answer of course is ‘Yes’. If he had sinned, he would not have been the sinless God. But if he had not been able to sin, then he would not have been fully human. (I know that’s a bit hard for many of you, already weakened by much fasting and abstinence...)

So does this mean that the temptations were in some way a sham - not real temptations?

No! In fact the opposite is true. Only the sinless can know the full intensity of the temptation to sin. The holier the life, the more severe the testing.

One of my happy memories of my engineering course - apart from the week-long experiment Richard, my lab partner and I carried out on measuring the speed of ballbearings rolling down an inclined plane completely immersed in 20 gallons of golden syrup - cleaning up afterwards was such fun… one of my other happy memories, was designing and building a model bridge out of aluminium and testing it to destruction - the Omega point. The better constructed the bridge, the greater the pressure that needed to be applied before the Omega point was reached.

The life of our Lord was so coherent, so integrated, so well-constructed, that the pressure applied to break him was more than most of us can possibly understand.

We break far too easily, for our interior life is often ill-constructed. Oscar Wild’s dictum is the familiar pattern: “I can resist anything except temptation.”

And these temptations of Christ, recorded in the synoptic gospels, represent the continuous process of testing at every stage of the Son of God’s life, right up to the end. So in the garden, before the cross, he resists the allurement to let the cup of suffering pass from him, and sweats great drops of blood in his anguish and fight against temptation.

The film ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ for all its weaknesses, takes seriously the manhood of Christ, tempted in all points as we are.

Although this is a real account of the trials of our Lord, it is also stylized and symbolic in the way that Luke presents it. (Matthew gives a different order and slightly different detail; Mark gives only a summary.)

Jewish readers would have picked up the parallels between Jesus and Adam, Moses and Israel. Here is a recapitulation of history which Paul recounts in Romans and the OT lesson rehearses. Adam failed and followed the sensual in preference to the spiritual, laying down the foundation for idolatry which we all follow. Jesus succeeded where Adam failed and followed the path of obedience to his Father.

Moses spends forty days on the mountain, in preparation for receiving the Law. Later he is taken up a high mountain to survey the Promised Land of God. Jesus is set on a high mountain to survey the promised land of Satan. Moses never reaches the Promised Land - but Jesus, the new Joshua - Saviour - succeeds and carries his people with him.

Israel puts God to the proof at Meribah and Massah during their forty years of testing in the wilderness. They demand signs: water from the rock; bread in the desert. Jesus, as the faithful Israel, demands no proof from God but is trusting and obedient. Satan has quoted Ps 91 (today's gradual & tract) “He shall give his angels charge over thee” but Jesus has construed its meaning aright: in quiet trust and confidence he submits to the will of the Father. He is the living water, the Bread of Life.

Notice how Christ, in his weakened state, falls back on familiar Scriptures. In fact the three quotations are from the early chapters of Deuteronomy which recount the wilderness experiences of the people of Israel. Christ would have been educated as a Jewish boy, by learning Hebrew scriptures by heart. They were deeply embedded in his mind.

There is great value in having fixed in our memory, familiar scriptures, familiar prayers and hymns of the people of God. When we are physically and spiritually weak, they can be of great assistance to us. It’s a good Lenten discipline to try and learn some passage or prayer by heart.

The temptations themselves can be looked at in different ways. At one level, they were an appeal for Christ to misuse his divine powers to obtain the common human goals of Sustenance, Protection and Security. At another level, they are the common snares of Christian leaders to be selfish, to sensationalise and to compromise.

What of the temptations we face? They are many and different according to our personality and the setting of our lives. We are not tempted to turn stones into bread, but we may turn bread into stones for others by our selfish indulgence and the demand for immediate gratification.

We are not likely to feel the urge to prove God’s physical care to sceptical friends – perhaps by standing at the front of the queue for a Harrod’s Sale. But we may be tempted to care for ourselves and our own needs at the expense of others.

We are all likely to be offered much in order to gain very little.

The big temptations are not too difficult. They are obvious and we either sin boldly, or flee from the situation, like Joseph, leaving our garment in the hands of Potiphar’s wife - often with a mind to go back for it later - for when we flee temptation, we usually leave a forwarding address.

No, it is the thousand subtle temptations that sneak in every day and like the gentle acid rain falling on the great cathedral, wear away our defences and ruin us.

The temptations to live as though God did not matter; to live as if “I” am the centre of the universe; to love things and use people, rather than use things and love people; to neglect responsibility; to wound others; to lack compassion.

Lent is a time to take stock and make repairs; to remember that we have a flawed human nature. As Luther put it: “I’m more afraid of my own heart than of the Pope and all his cardinals.”

And Lent is a time to strengthen our defences, by selfless giving, by disciplining our demanding bodies, by fortifying our minds with the truths of our faith, by reminding ourselves through our devotions that we are greatly loved by one who gave himself for us and longs for us to live full lives by following his example. And in case we think this is an impossible dream, then we are urged to remember that

“He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Heb 4.15

Candlemas 2007

Malachi 3.1-5; Hebrews 2.14-18; Luke 2.22-40

“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Luke 2.35

I sometimes used to sit in church after the last 7pm Sunday mass at St Mary’s, when the lights were out , the doors locked, but the votive candles were still alight at all the shrines around the church.

There is quietness and the strange beauty which flickering candlelight brings to a house of prayer; the lingering smell of incense, the aroma of God; dark, cavernous shadows and pools of golden light.

It is a beauty that is concealed in the shadowless brightness of the halogen bulb; the full glare of day.

I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

“Glory be to God for dappled things—
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”

Life only holds its interest because of the shadows, because it is bittersweet: from the pain of bringing a child into the world who then brings such joy; to the pain of passing through death and into eternal felicity.

And yet as humans we cannot but long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible it would be dull.

Mary’s life was certainly bittersweet. All the confusion and shame of the conception, the agony of labour, the long uncomfortable journey, the indignity of the stable - all is past.

Now she brings her pride and joy, this six week old baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.

Both she and the baby God are ritually unclean through childbirth. They must offer the two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, for the firstborn belongs to the Lord and must be redeemed.

These are the dual aspects of this Feast, as Bishop Cosin acknowledges in the 1662 Prayer Book which he entitles: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called, The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin.”

It was primarily a Feast of Our Lord, rather than of his Mother, as the ancient collect I sang earlier, taken from the 7thC Gregorian Sacramentary, makes plain.

And the blessing of candles? Well this was probably another example of the early Christian cross-cultural trick. Take a pagan festival, to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it; Christianize it!

So because Christ is the Light to lighten the gentiles, we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year.

And like our pagan ancestors, we process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel grey skies of winter, and never mentioning the pagan feast of Imbolc & Oimelc which we have displaced.

While we are at it, let’s make St Blaise (February 3rd) the patron saint of Ear, Nose and Throat, and bless parishioners’ throats with the newly blessed candles to protect them from all the colds and 'flus so prevalent at this time of the year.

Of course our American cousins are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards. So Candlemas, a Christian feast, becomes the much more politically correct, Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:

"If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,
there'll be twa winters in the year."

A sunny Candlemas means the severity of winter will continue – the groundhog will return to its sleep. But if it is dull and overcast, the worst of winter is past.

Candlemas is also a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple; and yet we look forward towards Lent and Passiontide: the agonies of our Lord’s pierced Body; the anguish of our Lady’s pierced soul.

In some of the older rites, where the blessing of candles took place after mass, the white and gold vestments of the mass were exchanged for penitential purple for the procession of lights.

Candlemas reminds us of Life as we Know It, dappled and pied with pain. Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bittersweetness of parenthood?

Who has not loved deeply and not known the bittersweet wounds of affection?

The joyful comfort of lovers, friends and family is always eventually plundered by death and grief.

And with all our conviviality and social pleasures, who has not sat down and felt so alone, and, but precariously, loved?

We should be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, while knowing that we are constantly nagged by intimations of despair.

As Hazlitt put it: “Man is the only species who can laugh or cry because he is the only being who knows the difference between what is and what should be.”

We can long for peace and yet stand looking year after year at war and violence.

We can reach for the stars and in minutes be only too aware of our human mortality and of the contingency of all things.

But, the Light shines in the darkness: that spark of hope which God implants within all of us.

We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life, but in the gloom and we can see the beckoning light of Christ. Or to use CS Lewis’s metaphor, ‘God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.’

As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draw us to him, the source of all light, our comfort and joy.

At the altar we see the bittersweet man of sorrows who has been through what we go through, as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us in today’s epistle: like us; tested like us. Here at the altar he is crucified and yet exalted; the Lamb that was slain who yet lives.

And we live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ.

John Donne lived his life to the full, and knew pain and pleasure, shame and holy exultation. His vision of heaven was of a state of being where these two sides of human life and human nature would be miraculously transformed into the equanimity of Christ our Lord; perfect composure.

So he prayed:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion...

And with this confidence in the Gospel, as we celebrate this Candlemas, we shall not fear, even if

“A sword shall pierce through (our) own soul also.” Luke 2.35