Matth. 3:13-17, 4:1-11. Feb. 19^th, 1996.

At the time of the first British Billy Graham Crusade in the ’50s a cartoon appeared with a man carrying a placard saying “Christ is the Answer.” He was closely followed by someone with a second one asking “What is the Question?” In ‘66 when we moved to N. America we were frankly amazed at the amount of churchgoing still going on. Now, scarcely a generation later, we all speak openly of a post-Christian relativistic society: we have left-wingers without sex-ethics, right-wingers without business-ethics, politicians without ethics of any kind. And it’s all so bewildering: nice people make dysfunctional families, good families psychopathic monsters, while society as a whole, in the face of an Olsen or a Homulka, can only bleat pathetically about a social enmeshment in evil of which my group is somehow free. It’s some years since an otherwise thoughtful lady complained to me (though she may have used slightly different terms) that she had sent her beautiful, faultless child to Shaughnessy Elementary, where it had picked up original sin from the other kids. We think it reasonable that the ball should run straight, and are appalled when the bias puts it into a curve. We have churches full, if they are full at all, of people that are ‘born again’, but seem to know nothing of radical repentance for themselves, church leaders who practise and baptize any old way of living, and Christians to whom Christmas is a pretty tale, the austerities of Lent an old-fashioned bore, Good Friday a mystery and Easter a fable based on wishful thinking.

Tonight my subject is technically the classic one, that is sin, repentance and preparation for Lent. Ash Wednesday is the time when we get our noses rubbed in some sombre subjects. Having little time I am going to leave to you most of the work of deciding whether you have made that decisive turn away from evil, and are making those necessary daily and hourly turnings away from gross sin, or little hidden untruths, dishonesties, cruelties, injustices and so on, which repentance means. I shall also leave to you to decide what to take on or renounce this Lent by way of discipline; this will vary with age, health, sex and circumstances. I am going to zero in on what seems to me the missing piece of the whole jigsaw. What IS the question?

We have our forty days of Lent because of Jesus’ forty days in the desert. So I invite you to follow Him there, and to think about the account which we have just heard from what may seem a new angle. We have all heard sermons from the viewpoint of spectators: the temptation of the Son of God was bound to be unsuccessful; he could not ultimately have done otherwise, or swerved aside from the hard way of proving his Messiahship. I think that it would help us to go into the desert with a human being whose choices were made in time, as ours are, were real to him at the time and who therefore might have chosen wrongly. How does the power of evil operate, how must we deal with it and where is God in the process?

The word ‘devil’ (diabolos) means ‘accuser’. It is his nature to make a case which God and we must answer. He is our implacable foe as the Holy Spirit is our friend, or counsel for the defence. He is an objective reality. There is in this narrative a clinching refutation of the modern view that our Enemy is just a primitive personification of the dark underside of human nature, for here Jesus is all alone with that Enemy, and Jesus by definition had no dark underside, no experience of evil interior to himself. Talk about close encounters with alien beings... Another deduction which may be made from the fact that the two of them are all alone is that yielding to temptation means essentially offending God: it may or may not also be an offence against human beings or other creatures. This entity both wills and plans. It comes at us straight after a spiritual ‘high’ when we are emotionally vulnerable. It is patient and persistent, keeping on for days on end. One must suppose that it spent some time working its way through the easier ones before the forty-day mark. As Luke says, and as we see from at least three later episodes in the Gospels, it regrouped and tried again after this attempt. It, or he, knows our weak points (in a warm climate after the first few days the faster stops thinking about food, there is a long period when lucidity is at its peak and starvation does not set in for at least five weeks. At about forty days everything changes), and he saves the hardball for the psychological moment. He is both more cunning and much stronger than any mere human. Only God is stronger. He knows Scripture well and, beaten back with it, can quote it for his own purpose. The dreams he invokes and the texts he slings are carefully chosen to appeal to what we know of God. Only a little twist, a little kink in the promise give away the corrupt intention. The first major temptation [ch. 4, v. 3] aims to get Jesus to put something ahead of God. Notice that the thing in question is perfectly all right in itself. “Come on now, you deserve the best; you owe it to yourself; everybody’s doing it; you’ve waited all this time; some Father to want you to starve...” The wrapping is clever and appealing; it conceals both box and contents. The box is a Chinese one: once opened, it will be found to contain another box, which contains yet another. The second suggestion aims to get him to put himself and his reputation ahead of God, with a fantasy about a spectacular miracle. The third asks him to put the devil ahead of God: in return for his worshipping God’s enemy, the whole world will become his, a promise whose fulfilment was part of Messiah’s destiny. Luke makes this box no. 2, not no. 3; but before we dismiss it as so blatant as to be naive, as though the devil were getting desperate, let’s face the fact that anyone who had bought the first or second boxes would have bought devil-worship into the bargain. NOT “trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God who is our home”. Sin is in our bloodstream: the instant we could walk across a room as tiny children and touch something we were forbidden to touch we did it, and our dark underside where the devil reigns is well-developed. Only because we live with self-deception do we imagine that we couldn’t fall for that one, put to us quite nakedly. Of you and me it must be said that we bought no. 3 inside 1 and 2 when we were quite small, and chose (as we all remember) to sell out to evil.

Immediately after Jesus was publicly endorsed by his Father as distinct in his sonship and sinlessness [3:13-17], as Matthew states at the start of Ch. 4, it was the Father’s purpose that Jesus was to be forced to confront evil head on [v. 1]. If we are to go with him, we should be mentally prepared for the same. The Enemy of God and of all that is good will be allowed to make an attempt on us. We are going to walk against a hurricane, swim against the tide. Step one is to expect this. Then again, Jesus had no Bible or concordance in the desert; rather he had been laying up the Word of God in his heart for at least three decades. Jesus sent each of the recorded temptations flying so decisively that we can be sure that he knew all of it by heart. We too should lay it up in store, even the bits which just now ring no bells. There will be choices; we must learn how to rip through seductive packaging. Jesus was fasting [v. 2]. One must assume that he chose to fast, as later he chose to refuse the drink before his execution, and that this was so that he could keep a clear head. We can’t afford to be sleepy. The devil is a very slick theologian: he specialises in confusing us.

What is God’s part in this? Does He send us out to face impossible odds, in effect pushing us out ahead of Himself, and then falling back, leaving us exposed? Where do grace and the Holy Spirit come in? Here we have to keep very clear heads indeed. We are certainly promised that we shall not be forsaken. But it is universal Christian experience that the felt presence of God is distinct from the real presence. There is a very real sense in which discipline is whatever equips us to stand firm when we have to practise what feels like His absence. Such times may well become more frequent as we go on; they are part of our growing through trials which only get harder. Perhaps Our Lord in the desert felt his Father’s presence strongly; there is no sign that this was how it was then, or in Gethsemane, or at the time of dereliction on the Cross. Of myself I should testify that in the fiercest temptation that I have faced so far God hid Himself, in my own vow made before Him, the simple word of a text and the voice of conscience. Only when it was over did He beam upon me again.

Cast thy care on Jesus... (581)

Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continually mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that, through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN.