March 13, 2011 - Lent 1, Year A (RCL)
It's green, down by the Jordan, date palms and olive trees
shading the ground
and the river
running through the middle,
shallow but cool.
A nice place to rest,
except for the crowds
pushing forward to see the Baptist,
leaving no room to think
or even sit.
But that's what he needed, space and quiet.
He'd heard the stories
from his parents
about his birth, the angel and shepherds and wise men,
the prophecies and the expectations. his childhood
had been like any other,
and for the last fifteen years
he'd been working in the family business,
building furniture and making doors,
and occasionally carving toys for the children in the village.
Until he heard of his cousin,
down by the Jordan,
and went to see what he was doing,
ready to take a report back
to his mother and aunt.
But when he got there,
and stood in the river alongside John
and heard the voice,
he knew he could never go back home,
not back to the same old life.
Because he had heard the voice,
"This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased."
And knew
that he was being called
to something,
something
that he had known deep down
all along,
but now was the time,
the time to bring the good news
to the people.
But first he needed time,
time to o think, time to pray, time to plan.
And there by the river
wouldn't do. Too many people; too much noise.
And so he walked south, around the curve
of the Dead Sea,
and up into the hills.
There were no people there;
not just no people, no anything.
Out of the flat plains by the river
the vegetation shrank and shriveled,
the ground changed
from grass to dirt,
and rocks mixed with it, until there was no dirt at all, just rocks ground down into sand,
and mountains carved out
by the rush of spring floodwaters,
and caves drilled into into the cliff sides.
The landscape was harsh,
but here he could think, could pray, could plan.
And for forty days he stayed there, the best part
of six weeks,
occasionally finding drinkable water caught in a hollow,
but never any food,
forty days,
much of it spent wondering
what exactly
God wanted him
to do.
And it was in at the end of the forty days when he heard it,
"why not turn some stones into bread? After all, the voice said
you’re God’s son...”
And then again,
“throw yourself off the roof of the temple. And angels will catch you. If you’re really
God’s Son...”
And then the last one,
“Why worship God, who has made you spend 7 weeks hungry, in the desert? What sort of future is in that? Just worship someone else, and you can be ruler
of all...”
Each time
Jesus pushed the thought away;
each time, he answered the voice
with a quotation
from scripture.
That’s the only certainty
he had.
And suddenly, it was over.
The voice was gone.
He felt at peace.
And he knew what he had
to do.
We don’t know
if Jesus really faced
some sort of embodied devil,
though I doubt that it came
dressed in red, with horns and a tail.
It may be that he heard the call of evil
from within his own mind,
the product of hunger and hallucination.
But we do know
that the temptations were real.
If Jesus was the Son of God,
if he was the Messiah, then people would expect him to do dramatic things.
Turning stones into bread - solve all the problems of hunger
in one go.
Leap off the temple roof,
and have the angels catch him.
Shades of superman,
but no one could have denied that God was on his side.
Be in control of all the kingdoms of the world. No need for war;
a peaceful takeover.
The Messiah as the great political leader;
God in control.
Jesus was being tempted
by shortcuts.
Shortcuts to the sort of Messiah
that everyone
expected.
The only problem was
that the sort of Messiah they expected,
a Messiah who would throw the Romans out of the country
and establish political control,
who would do great dramatic miracles,
who would
wasn’t the sort of Messiah
that Jesus was.
Yes, he did miracles,
but they were mostly on
a pretty small scale,
one person made to walk again,
another given his sight.
Or they took place
so far from the center of power
that they were barely noticed - the feeding of the five thousand happened up in Galilee
a full week’s journey
from the center of power in Jerusalem.
Jesus’s mission
at least the first part of it
was connecting with people
one by one,
a fisherman here, a tax collector there.
In three years
he’d met a lot of people,
but few had chosen to follow him.
In the end
it was just eleven who stood by, along with a few women,
as he hung on the cross.
One of the chosen twelve
had even betrayed him.
It looked like
a failure.
Three years of hard work, and all for that?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”
He might as well
have succumbed to the temptations.
It couldn’t have been much worse.
But we know
what happened next,
what Jesus could not be sure of,
given the unreliability
of human free will.
We know
that after his death
and his resurrection,
those eleven, along with the women,
met together again, and chose a twelfth to join them,
and those twelve were together
when the Holy Spirit came upon them at Pentecost,
and next thing
they had grown to five hundred
and then thousands,
and the gospel of Jesus Christ spread throughout the world
and on through time,
and we are inheritors of it.
Jesus was never supposed to be the great political ruler, the emperor
of his time,
nor even the wonder worker.
It was his death and his resurrection
that would bring forgiveness for us
and life for all.
Today is the first Sunday in the season of Lent.
Lent often has a bad rap: we associate it with deprivation,
giving up something (often chocolate), and going round bad tempered because we’re missing it so badly,
and perhaps even fasting one or more days a week.
But what was so often forgotten
was the point of that deprivation and fasting.
The point was not to make you feel miserable,
but instead
to provide space and time
to turn your thoughts
toward God.
And the focus of that turning
was to look at your life honestly,
the way God might look at it,
and work our where you had sinned.
Where you had messed up.
So that by the time it came to Good Friday
and we faced our Savior on the cross, we had confessed our sins
and were ready to receive his forgiveness.
The problem is
that over time,
the acts of fasting and deliberate refraining from something we like
got separated from the turning to God,
and had a life of their own.
And somehow the other part, the part where you turn to God
and examine yourself and confess,
so that you’re all ready to receive the fullness of forgiveness
that Christ offers,
and enter the celebrations of Easter
clean and new,
that got lost.
But that’s what this season is about.
We follow Jesus
into the desert,
metaphorically, anyway.
We follow him into a place
where we can’t avoid
facing our temptations,
the places in our lives
where we are most likely to go wrong.
Often the temptations
aren’t necessarily bad in themselves;
they just pull us away
from living the life that God created us for
and calls us to.
It was like that for Adam and Eve, in our reading from Genesis.
Adam was put into the garden
to till and keep it,
to work it and care for it.
The garden wasn’t there
simply to provide whatever Adam wanted;
instead, he was there to look after it.
And in return, it would
provide for him.
So when Eve took the fruit
from the one tree
that Adam had been told
to keep apart,
the one tree
he’d been supposed to care for separately,
the one tree
that wasn’t there
for his pleasure,
he gave in to temptation, and lost
God’s trust.
He could no longer be trusted
to do the work
that God had given him to do.
Lent is a time
when we stop and take stock
of the temptations
that plague us.
Temptations
to take short cuts;
temptations
to live in ways other than God has created us for,
temptations to focus on things other
than what God has called us to do.
And what has God called us to?
According to the prophet Micah, it’s to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly
with our God.
According to Jesus, it’s to make disciples.
And above all, way back in the beginning of the bible, and echoed by Jesus himself,
it’s to love the Lord our God
with all our heart and mind and soul and strength and to love our neighbors
as we love ourselves.
And so this Lent, I invite you
to examine yourselves. Think about what the temptations are
that come back again and again.
Confess to God
where you have failed,
and ask God
to help you to resist temptation
next time round.
And prepare, prepare for the coming of our Lord
in the sorrowful glory of the cross
and the bright glory of the resurrection,
for his coming with forgiveness, and healing, and new life.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010