Lent 1
Luke 4.1-15
Sunday 9 March 2025
©Suzanne Grimmett
In 1623 when John Donne, then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, lay sick with a fever during an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city of London, he wrote in his journal. Across a few months he produced a series of reflections entitled, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. In the early stages of his illness, when he was unsure of its nature, he wrote this prayer reflecting not on his physical sickness, but on what he saw as his spiritual sickness, pleading;
Sharpen my hearing, Lord.
I want my warning signals to be hair-triggered, alert to the stealthy approach of sin, so that I may retreat quickly from what in the past I greedily flew toward. To hear your voice at the beginning of a sickness, of a sin, is true health. If I can discern your light early and hear your voice, O Lord, ‘Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear’ (Isaiah 58:8). I know the opposite danger as well: of an overly tender conscience, of cringing at every whiff of sin so that I hide away and avoid the world at all cost. Instead, align my conscience with your will so precisely, Lord, that I can trust you to speak to me at the beginning of every such sickness, at the approach of every sin. Assure me that if I hear that voice and run to you, you will preserve me from falling, or will raise me up again when I do indeed fall.[1]
This is part of a modern translation by Philip Yancey, but I think it captures something very important for this season of Lent. I don’t believe we are in the habit of keeping our inner ‘warning-signals hair-triggered’ to prevent us sliding into habits of sin- it is an idea that will likely sound repugnant to modern ears. But I wonder if we might think of sin instead as anything that robs us of our freedom to live fully and love abundantly. Are we aware of habits that make us less than who we can be? Ways of thinking, being and acting that lead us in a path away from our truest self in Christ? Isn’t it possible that we are satisfied with less from ourselves than God would dream for us, and have become inattentive to the mediocrity of fitting naturally into patterns that are less demanding, but also rob us of life and possibility for something better?
Turning to the Gospel reading from Luke of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, I think we may discern three clear examples of what it means to arrest a thought before it takes hold and steers down such well-worn human paths of selfish ambition, domination, control, prideful self-sufficiency and acquisitive greed.
The first temptation is directed at Jesus’ hunger, suggesting that he turn the stones of the desert into bread. On some levels this would seem okay. After all, God does not seek our starvation, and surely if it is within our power to produce what we want and what would meet our need, shouldn’t we do it? For Jesus, to magic himself some bread would seem to affect no one and yet would meet a genuine need. It would be easy to imagine how such apparently harmless thoughts could gather momentum and their justifications sway action. By extension, maybe Jesus could extend this to supernaturally feeding the starving amongst his own people under Roman occupation. This rock could become the place through which Jesus begins to manipulate the relationships of the natural world so that it might better align with desired outcomes for himself and his people.
There are many ways we meet our needs for food, that do no harm of which we are aware yet neglect the sacred nature of eating and the interdependence of all life. To be attentive to this sacred interdependence necessitates not a manipulation of supernatural forces, but a humble honouring of the relationships between all life that results in nourishing food for our bodies. So why shouldn’t we import oranges from the United States in summer when they are out of season here? What is wrong with creating food as a consumer product with glossy packaging and processing of ingredients to appeal most to our palates and therefore our wallets? Part of the answer might come down to the evil of seeing food just as a commodity to meet our needs and not a way of life that is shared and received as gift. How much do we really know about how food arrives in our stores, how and by whom it was produced? What are the conditions of the land, the animals and the communities who grow and harvest the food?
Perhaps this is why Jesus answered the devil, “One does not live by bread alone” because bread is not itself ‘alone’ but represents complex relationships between sunshine and soil, seeds and growth, nurture and cultivation, shared knowledge and combined human skill bringing it forth to arrive around a friends’ shared table to be eaten and enjoyed. To instead seek to erase these relationships and manipulate the elements to suit oneself is to miss the complex goodness and interdependence of life found in something as simple as bread.
The second temptation Jesus faces is the arrogant claim of the devil that all the kingdoms of the world belonged to him, and that if Jesus would only turn and worship him, Jesus could then claim everything as his to possess. The first thing to notice of course that this is a blatant lie- Psalm 24 begins with the statement, “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” Lying is always a feature of devilish language. Given God is revealed as Trinity, constantly in relationship which is ever giving and never being diminished by such mutual giving and sharing, the way the earth is the Lord’s is not so much possession as it is being in intimate relation, creator to creation, always opening to greater life and complexity in self-giving love. Yet the need to hold and to possess, to control and claim, are creeping sins of our culture which would see our greatest role as consumers, and the worth of our life proved to others by how much we possess. Do we notice that in ourselves? Do we notice when the desire to possess something, somewhere or someone overrules our ability to honour the nature of that thing, that place or that person? Jesus again responds relationally- he will not ever worship the devil for the sake of possession and power as this would disrupt the very relationship that gives him life and joy. “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him” says Jesus back to the devil.
The third temptation takes Jesus to the temple- the place which promised God’s protection to the righteous. We might imagine the doubt that Jesus could have experienced as he prayed in the wilderness. These words of the devil may have spoken to Jesus’ doubts and fears…
If you are the Son of God throw yourself down from here and God will protect you…and what a show… what a proof that will be…
There is ever the temptation to prove ourselves, and sometimes our efforts are careless of how we might be manipulating others in achieving that sense of self. Perhaps Lent is a time when we might notice the acquisitive greed of the self that not only wants to possess but desires to make a claim for status or attention or adoration independent of our identity hidden securely in God. Jesus responds, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’, pushing away the insidious whispering that would cast doubt on his identity as God’s beloved Son. How many times do we fall into habits of grasping or manipulating, becoming aggressive or greedy because we lose sight of the givenness of our identity as God’s beloved. How might we tune our spiritual senses to be ‘hair-triggered’ when our thoughts and impulses tend this way?
All too readily we live in reactive, unreflective ways. I know that is true of myself when we are bombarded with media, and groupthink becomes ever so much easier through social media. It is counter cultural to consider training ourselves to be spiritually attentive to our instincts and inclinations of greed and the commodification of others, habits of self-promotion and tendencies toward resentment and aggression, yet that is what Lent asks of us. It also seems to be something that Christians like John Donne centuries before us were in the habit of doing. We as humans seem to have some default settings that lead us away from life and reduce our capacity for love. Perhaps we might see this not as an exercise in self- chastisement but as ridding ourselves of all that prevents the freedom, joy and peace of the Spirit being realised in our lives and in our communities.
May we remember we were created to be better than our defaults, and may we accept God’s grace when we forget. May the Spirit work in us, and may we make a holy Lent. +Amen.
[1] Undone: A Modern Rendering of John Donne’s Devotions by Philip Yancey (Rabbit Room Press: 2023)