Temptations of Christ, Lent 1

First Sunday of Lent: Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11; St Paul's Knightsbridge

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

It was that great 20^th 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?     ORWas Christ not able to sin?

The answer of course is ‘Yes’ to both questions!

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.

And Jesus has to be both fully God and fully human.

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

Certainly not! 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 and temptation to sin.

One of the happy memories of my undergraduate engineering course 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 needed before the Omega point was finally reached and the bridge buckled.

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.”

Looking at the three temptations in today’s Gospel, Jewish readers would have picked up the parallels between Jesus and Adam, Jesus and Israel, and Jesus and Moses.

In today’s epistle Paul sees Jesus as the second Adam. The first Adam we read about in Genesis failed to resist the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit and followed the sensual in preference to the spiritual.

So he set the pattern of self-idolatry that we all follow.

Jesus succeeded where Adam failed and resisted the temptation to abuse his power to make and eat bread when he was famished.

Then secondly, 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 Psalm 91 “He shall give his angels charge over thee.”

But Jesus has construed its meaning aright and in quiet trust and confidence he submits to the will of the Father. He is the living water, and the Bread of Life, that comes down from heaven.

And in the third parallel, 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. So 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 (the Hebrew name for Jesus) - both mean 'Saviour' - succeeds and carries his people with him.

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 or Christian poetry, 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?

We are not tempted to turn stones into bread, but we may turn bread into stones for others by our selfish indulgence and the way we treat God’s world.

We are not likely to feel the urge to prove God’s care to sceptical friends – putting ourselves in physical danger perhaps by blatantly queue jumping for a Harrods 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.

No, it’s 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.

Lent can sometimes be quite hard for us if we set our disciplines too high. Better to have modest success than spectacular failure.

It reminds me of the priest who used to go into the Blue bar every evening after Evensong and order two Gin and Tonics. He would drink them both and then order another two.

After a few weeks of this the barman asked him why he always bought his drinks in pairs.

“Well its quite simple really” he said, “when my twin brother moved to work in Australia, we decided whenever we were out drinking we would always order two as a reminder of each other.”

After a few months the priest came in and ordered just the one gin and tonic. The barman feared the worst.

“Is everything alright with your brother?” he asked.

“O yes” said the priest “its just that its Lent and I personally have given up alcohol.”

So aim for modest success in lent.

And when at any time of the year and in your life, you are faced with big temptations, cry out to Jesus for help and remember

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

Valentine's Day Westminster School

Friday Assembly: Westminster School in Westminster Abbey

I was in the Tower of London last night for a dinner, and did you know that the oldest surviving Valentine was sent from there in 1415. It’s a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife. He had been captured at the Battle of Agincourt and was being held in the Tower for ransom.

The only two Valentine’s cards I ever remember receiving carried rather depressing messages: “Every time I see you Dearie, I can believe in Darwin’s Theory.”

And then, the last card I was sent in a Leap Year, when traditionally women can propose to men: “You are the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Not exactly what I prayed for; but apparently the answer…”

There are various prevalent views of love in the western world:

1. The cynical view. So Sartre’s view, summed up by Iris Murdoch: “Love for Sartre is a battle between two hypnotists in a closed room.” Or as someone remarked to me in John Lewis’s the other day when they’d just seen me marry a couple in St George’s Hanover Square: “Love is a socially engineered virus to keep the pretence of family life going.” This view is generally promulgated by those who are very unlucky in love.
2. The sexual view. Whether it’s the biological view of someone like Richard Dawkins’ in The Selfish Gene; or the less academic clubbing favourite from my youth “Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight...” It’s sometimes been called ‘the imperialism of the sexual’.
3. The affective view. That emotionally charged and powerful feeling which is at the heart of so much literature and so many lyrics; it often leads mature men and women to act in most bizzare ways. Publilius Syrus said (and I won’t attempt this in Westminster Latin) amare et sapere vix deo conceditur - “even a god finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time.”

Whatever mixture of these views, it is certainly firmly established in our western culture and is an emotional fact of life for those of us who have grown up in it that culture.

Why the early Christian martyrs named Valentine (there were probably at least 2 of them  - which might be why you can supposedly find their bones in Scotland, Ireland and Italy) are associated with the Valentine card bonanza is a mystery. Maybe it was because the feast day of one of them coincided with the pagan festival of Lupercalia which the church finally stamped out in the 5th century - or thought it did.

So what of the Christian virtue of love which St Paul extols and which Jesus points to as the identifying mark of the Christian?

The demonstration of this love is simply displayed in the self-giving love of Jesus – in his life, death and resurrection.

Some people find it very hard to accept unconditional love, often because they don’t love themselves. Some of you probably secretly loathe yourselves.

George Herbert 1593-1633), who studied here as a boy in the beginning of the 17^th Century had trouble loving himself and so had trouble accepting that God loved him. He wrestles with this as he things about going to the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Mass, where we see the costly love of Jesus.

He has a discussion with him in this poem, and calls Jesus ‘Love’, for God is Love, and Jesus is God.

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'

Love said, 'You shall be he.'

'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on Thee.'

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

'Who made the eyes but I?'

'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.'

'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'

'My dear, then I will serve.'

'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'

So I did sit and eat.

Hymn: Bread of heaven, feed me now and evermore.

Collect for Quinquagesima

O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

Epiphany

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, though he was rich, yet for your sakes became poor, that you through his poverty might be rich.” 2 Cor 8.9

In the little thumbnail sketch of themselves, which some people put on Facebook, there is a heading entitled, relationship status, and another entitled, religious views.

Some of my friends have in both those boxes the simple phrase “it’s complicated”.

Well relationships are sometimes complicated and none more so than our relationship with God.

However simple our faith may be:

Jesus loves me

This I know

For the Bible tells me so;

the way we sometimes come to faith and grow in faith is often complex.

Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 and added to his extremely complicated human relationships a devout but complicated divine relationship.

Twenty years later in 1950 he wrote probably his least-known book: Helena.

It’s an historical novel that explores faith through St Helena, the mother of Constantine, as she travels to Palestine in the 4^th Century to find the ‘true cross’.

On this day, the Eve of the Epiphany, she finds herself at the place of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem contemplating the magi and her own late arrival to the Christian faith.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - has been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were. That’s why we have the traditional three in our crib scene, but these two magnificent kings on elephant and camel still travelling over here by the sacristy. And we don’t know when they arrived. Matthew makes clear that Jesus was probably a toddler by the time they presented their gifts.

Traditionally, they came to be known as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar and many customs have grown up around them especially in Europe.

There will be some Anglican and Roman Catholic priests tomorrow visiting the homes of the faithful and chalking over the doors the initials of the three kings:

20 + C + M + B + 14

This represents a New Year blessing: Christus mansionem benedicat (May Christ Bless this house).

And here this morning we will have our own Galette des Rois - King Cake – with our wine after the service.

But let’s return to Helena in Evelyn Waugh’s Novel, and listen to her meditating on the Magi around the shrine of Christ’s birthplace:

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculations, where the shepherds had run barefoot!

How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room at the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love…

You are my especial patrons and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents…

For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

The Church in London continues to grow and we see at baptisms and confirmations that many now come to faith later in life, and often they come with a complex understanding of their relationship with God in Christ.

As Waugh and many others have recognised, we often come thinking we have gifts to offer God; only to find that the gifts are accepted, although not needed - accepted because they are brought with love as a response to the love of Jesus which we celebrate at the altar.

And of course, like the magi, for all our learning and good intentions, we often get side-tracked along the way, and fall into the company of Herod, who seems intelligent, cultured and entertaining, but who is capable of such horrors.

And who has not, through politeness, as Waugh puts it, made themselves partners in guilt?

For others of us, the first part of the journey, when the star shone so brightly, was indeed easy and simple.

Then knowledge and life experiences made our faith seem more oblique. It would be so easy to give up following the star and join the cynics round about us.

But the wise men persevered and although they did not understand whom it was they worshipped with their gifts, they realised that an encounter with Jesus would change the rest of their lives.

Perhaps this is why they are remembered.

They are, not just for Helena, but for many of us, our special patrons, for they encourage us through all our doubts and fears and wrong turns, to persevere in following the light God has shown us. For all of our life is a quest to know God, and therefore ourselves, better – faith seeking understanding – Anselm’s motto, fides quaerens intellectum, which for him means an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God.

And we are so much richer than the magi, for we have the Holy Spirit, the Bible, the church, the bread and the wine, and two thousand years of Christian witness.

We bring simply the gift of ourselves, the adoration of our hearts, and with the wise men, we worship.

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, though he was rich, yet for your sakes became poor, that you through his poverty might be rich.” 2 Cor 8.9