What do we do with Lent?
Some people give things up in this season like chocolate or Facebook. I love this joke. You need to know your 80’s pop to get it! Just heard the devastating news that Rick Astley’s given me up for lent. He said he never would.
We began Lent with Ash Wednesday the other day. The collect of the day begins, “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent.” We are God’s beloved children, God’s creatures, even if we’ve been created from the dust of the earth.
Psalm 51, the Psalm written by King David seeking forgiveness from God after Nathan the prophet had confronted him about being a very naughty boy, going after someone else’s wife is the Psalm set for Ash Wednesday. David asks God to create in him a clean heart. The word used for create in the plea is the same Hebrew word used to describe God creating the world in Genesis. Only God can create the sort of new beginning David craves in the prayer.
I am reminded that the prayer asks God to blot out our offences. When we used to use ink at school and the bottle spilt, we would use blotting paper to clean up the mess. I had a steward when I was a lay pastor at Markyate chapel in Hertfordshire from 1991 to 1994 called Frank Pearce. Frank had a vestry prayer I remember “Lord, we thank you for your servant, Ian, now blot him out.”
Not only do we pray for a blotting out of our offences but also a blotting out of our selfish agendas, pride, and ignorance. Lent reminds us of our place. That our life is simply to serve God and follow him faithfully and that we need to return to God urgently.
What needs blotting out today? When I look at the world tonight there is much. And maybe we need to help that process. Pope Leo says about this Lent, "I would like to invite you to a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbour. Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgement, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves. Instead, let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace."
We blot out what is not good and we are marked as God’s people. Let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame.
Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less
than we are but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made. That’s where Lent begins.
Secondly, Lent is a time to be driven to think about who we are. What’s the most desolate place you’ve ever been to? Imagine being stuck there for forty long days with nothing. In the biblical narrative, the desert is a stark, barren wilderness that serves as a place of isolation, intense spiritual testing, and preparation. Full of Hostility: It is described as rough, dangerous, and "outside the bounds of society," often associated with wild animals and symbolic of spiritual battlefields.
Full of Silence: The initial deafening silence of the desert serves to silence the "noise and hyperactivity" of everyday life, compelling the individual to listen only to the voice of God.
A lack of essential needs: By removing all provision, the desert forces the core question of what is truly essential highlighting the struggle between physical appetites (bread) and spiritual sustenance (the Word of God).
Jesus is famished—he’s exhausted, worn out, beat up from the weather and the loneliness and the effort it takes to just stay alive in such barrenness.
He’s not at his best; he’s not bursting with physical or spiritual or any other sort of strength.
And this is when the temptations hit Jesus.
Now, I suspect that if the tempter had caught him on a good day, Jesus would have had all sorts of answers of his own to the devil’s three challenges—to the temptations—he was given. He might have told wonderful parables or asked clever and insightful questions right back at him—and put the devil on the spot. But strength and energy and ideas were all gone.
However we think of the devil, the figure’s presence in the Gospel personifies the vulnerability of human life and life in relation to God.
No one, not even God’s anointed agent, is free from having their identity and loyalty tested.’
The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.’
Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”’
The first temptation is for Jesus to use his authority as the Son of God to meet his personal needs and desires. Later in his ministry, the same test of self-preservation comes up during the crucifixion as he is tempted to come down from the cross.
The implication, which Jesus rejects, is that he has been abandoned by God and needs to take care of himself.
The second temptation appears at first glance to be a strange challenge.
Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the highest point of the temple. If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down. For it is written:
‘“He will command his angels concerning you,
and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’
Jesus answered him, ‘It is also written: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’
On the surface, jumping from the pinnacle of the temple is merely an awe-inducing spectacle but it would require God to act to save Jesus. The angels are not some celestial rescue squad to prove God’s presence.
The location of this temptation matters. To set it at the Temple is to try to corrupt the place where human frailty comes for forgiveness and redemption. It is to test God ... to break the trust that brought the Son of God to earth in the first place.
Remember that each temptation is predicated on the unsettling premise that Jesus didn’t truly believe he was who God had told him he was.
When did he do that? Well, at his baptism, of course. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he came up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened. Jesus saw the Spirit of God coming down on him like a dove. A voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, and I love him. I am very pleased with him.”
Each temptation carries with it the continued undercurrent: are you sure you know who you are?
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. 9 ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”’
This third temptation would require the Son of God to publicly acknowledge the devil as the holder of all power and the ruler of the earth. None of this was in the devil’s gift - the temptation, like the others, was built on a lie.
What kind of a Saviour could Jesus have been if he had given way at this point. In truth, the only authority Jesus would recognise was God’s.
As Douglas Hare says in his commentary on Matthew, in all three temptations Jesus is challenged to treat God as less than God.
He says: “We may not be tempted to turn stones into bread, but we are constantly tempted to mistrust God’s readiness to empower us to face our trials. None of us is likely to put God to the test by leaping from a cliff, but we are frequently tempted to question God when things go wrong.
We forget the sure promise, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”.
Pagan idolatry is no more a temptation for us than it was for Jesus, but compromise with the ways of the world is a continuing seduction. It is indeed difficult for us to worship and serve God only.”
The truth of the story is that Jesus resisted temptation because he knew who he truly was. We can have the same confidence.
Look at what happens: Jesus does not say one word of his own. Instead, he quotes scripture in a simple and straightforward way that is quite unlike how he uses the Bible almost everywhere else in the Gospels.
Jesus has no words, no resistance, no strength of his own—he’s simply holding on to the Father, and letting the Father’s words, and the Father’s mind, come through him.
Jesus’ response to the tempter is not a victory of personal, spiritual strength in some sort of holy temptation-lifting Olympics. Instead, his victory is the gift of grace that comes from surrender.
Doubtless his time in the wilderness gave Jesus a stronger and more disciplined relationship with the Father. But it also gave him something else, something more, something we see emerging in this story of his temptations.
His time in the wilderness gave Jesus the insight and the courage to surrender, and so to depend not on his own best efforts, but on an emptiness that can only be filled by the Father.
Someone once wrote “If every copy of the Bible were destroyed, and we had only the single page which tells the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, it would be enough.”
This is our hope and prayer. That this story is always enough. And that it gives us the courage to face our own temptations, to spend time in our own wildernesses, knowing that Jesus is at our side, trusting that he will never leave us or forsake us. And in hard times may angels attend to us.
So may God give us grace to observe Lent faithfully.
