The Temptation of Jesus (Lent I)

The Temptation of Jesus

Chapel Royal, Brighton 17^th February 2013

Deut 26:1-11

Rom 10:8b-13

Luke 4:1-13

+ In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

I would like to begin by thanking Fr David for inviting me to share Mass with you this morning.

We are now of course in the season of Lent! It is only a few short weeks since we ended the Christmas season with Candlemas and we now find ourselves entering a more reflective period of time over the next 40 days. Many of us would have received the ashes on Wednesday that help to remind us of our own mortality and are an outward sign of our repentance.

My own background is not one that particularly gave much emphasis to the liturgical year, other than Christmas, Easter and perhaps Harvest! It wasn’t until I came into the Church of England that I came to appreciate something of the richness of the changing seasons. One month we can be celebrating the excitement of Christmas and the incarnation of Christ into our world…….only a few weeks later the mood changes and we come face to face with our own humanity, and it’s not always a pretty sight.

Our gospel reading this morning sees Jesus coming face to face with a very real aspect of his own (and our) humanity. It follows on from the account of his baptism where he had become full of the Holy Spirit. He heads out into the wilderness…..into the middle of nowhere, and we are told that while there for 40 days he fasted. Although it’s not actually spelled out to us, presumably he also prayed. I suppose in today’s understanding he went on a sort of retreat, a time of prayer and reflection as he looks ahead to his future ministry.

You may be familiar yourself with the experience of going away on retreat or perhaps a Quiet Day. Taking time to get away from the distractions that are constantly all around, each of them trying to get our undivided attention. Now multiply that Quiet Day by 40, hold it in the middle of the desert away from anybody else, fast for the entire time………and we begin to get some idea of what it might have been like for Jesus.

 Forty days with no food would be a huge struggle for most of us and Jesus was no exception. At the end of that time he was famished and desperate to eat. He is faced with his own mortality…….ultimately if you don’t eat you will die! A very human and understandable reaction to the situation in which he found himself!

 While there alone in the desert he faced we are told, great temptation. Imagine for a moment standing there, starving hungry in that desolate place, you have maybe had small amounts of water to get you through each day, but no more than that. This was surely the perfect opportunity for Jesus to perform a quick miracle……or two…….or three! No-one need ever know!

Faced with the prospect of somehow “proving” that he was the Son of God by putting God to the test and serving himself or staying faithful to his mission and putting his trust in God, he chooses the latter.

He is offered instant prestige, power and authority over everything if only he will bow down and worship that which is not God. It’s easy perhaps to see everywhere we look how quickly people can often put a false value on power and prestige. How readily some can take to standing on a pedestal basking in the admiration of others. We live in a world that is obsessed by the idea of celebrity. Where very often people seem to have some kind of power and hold over others for no obvious reason except that they are famous. How easy it would be for Jesus to just accept all the adulation that was apparently on offer!

 Earlier this week we heard the news that Pope Benedict was stepping down from his duties and would retire instead to a former monastery to devote the rest of his life to prayer. Surrounded by the immense wealth of the Vatican and looked up to by billions of Roman Catholics for spiritual guidance he chose to set all that grandeur and opulence aside to return to the simple life of a priest.

Our own former Archbishop Rowan chose to step down much earlier than he needed to from his role leading the Anglican Communion to return to the life of an academic. And despite the many issues facing the church many would have seen his role as a powerful and influential one. Yet, it was a role that he willingly laid down.

Not for either of these men the outward trappings of power. Each for their own reasons was able to walk away from them. I wonder how many of us could do so, or would we perhaps have become so attached to the external glitter and gold.

Probably most of us don’t literally bow down to false gods, but how easy is it sometimes for us to give in to the temptation of jumping up onto the pedestal and putting ourselves first. In a world where self-denial is often mistaken for weakness and humility can sometimes be seen as a cop-out we are called to look to Jesus for our example.

 He came and shared in our humanity, and he invites us through the Eucharist in a few moments to share in his divinity. He, like us was tempted……yet unlike us, was without sin. We will continue to sin and give in to temptation, its part of what it is to be human! Yet in him we are offered grace and forgiveness, whoever we are.

Let’s use these weeks of Lent to reflect upon our own faith journey, where we have been and perhaps where we are going. As we can sometimes feel that journey is going through a kind of wilderness, may we know that Christ is right there with us, walking alongside us and very often carrying us.

May we each have a Holy and Blessed Lent.

AMEN