Ash Wednesday - 1st March 2006
The Gift
My imagination was fired by a phrase Jane Williams used the other week when reflecting on the events contained in this reading. Jane Williams is the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a New Testament scholar in her own right. Her observation is obvious when you become aware of it, but somehow we have lost sight of it and I think that is because of how we tend to regard Lent. We’ve got rather gloomy about Lent and emphasise its penitential character, so we give things up and make everything churchy sombre. There are valid reasons for this, but in the process we miss something very important, something that rather makes the whole point of what Lent is really about, indeed what the Christian life is about.
The observation Jane Williams made was that Jesus goes into the wilderness to work something out. He goes there in response to something he has been given - the Spirit that descends upon him at his baptism. The wilderness experience is a response to a gift that he has received. She draws attention to the gift at the heart of this.
The gift Jesus receives is the Spirit identifying him as the beloved of God, as the one who is to come. So if we are going to imitate Jesus, and particularly if we are going to imitate him through the next 40 days and 40 nights, then we need to take a close look at this gift and how it relates to us. We too receive this gift: the gift of God’s presence in and through his Spirit. Lent then becomes a time when we take stock of what this gift means and how we live in its light.
The gift changes the way we see everything. It changes the way we approach penitence. Rather than just beating ourselves over the head with guilt and blame, we can ask more fruitfully how we have responded to the gift of God’s presence that his Spirit brings. Interestingly Matthew’s gospel ends with these words:
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of time.” (Matt 28:20b)
How do we display our confidence in this redeeming, sanctifying presence? Do we live and act as people who give the impression God is with us to the end of time? Do we rather give the impression that we have been abandoned, that we are ‘home alone’? Is everything getting worse, there is no hope and things are just falling apart? Where are you on this scale between everything being doom and gloom and there being a profound hope that holds us in which we can have more confidence than words can tell?
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Time for a bit of honesty and a confession. I am a bit Jekyll-and-Hyde-like over this and something tells me that I am not alone. I have a deep faith and trust in God. There is no other in whom we can place any ultimate trust and all our hope is founded on God. However long we have been on this earth or in this church or any other church or place, there were people before us and there will be people after us. Time moves on and in all of it there is the unseen hand of God holding creation, redeeming and bringing about his purposes. “All things”, as St Paul put it, “work together for good” (Rom 8:28). The purposes of God are written into the title deeds of creation and there is nothing at all that can separate us from that hope and reality. Dr Jekyll is on top.
Then, I look down. It is as if I am with Jesus at the top of the temple and it is such a long way to fall. Everything becomes frightening and I fear. The gloomy outlook starts to cloud in. The Dementors, those who just have a way of sucking out the joy of living, begin to circle and I am overwhelmed by the darkness they bring. The Church of England as I have known it is under severe threat from changes I am powerless to control. The money is tight, the role of clergy is changing dramatically, the future is unknown - we don’t even know where we are heading so can’t plan it! We have to go with it and that is a nightmare for certain personality types so they get cross and grumpy. Actually it is a nightmare for everyone, because we like to know where we are; we need fixed points on the horizon to give us our bearings and when that seems to be changing with the rapid social changes around us it is very hard to pin point. We haven’t yet heard the words “land ahoy”, so are mid ocean feeling just a little sea sick! Mr Hyde has leapt out of the shadows and is tormenting me.
Given the right conditions I can work myself up into quite a lather here. Every day I need to hear the words that refresh my grip on the deep hope and confidence in God. There is an opening prayer in the office of Morning Prayer that is just brilliant and so necessary.
“The night is passed, and the day lies open before us; let us pray with one heart and mind. As we rejoice in the gift of this new day, so may the light of your presence, O God, set our hearts on fire with love for you; now and for ever.” It is about being refreshed in the light of God’s presence, by the gift.
If Dr Jekyll is not going to be overwhelmed by Mr Hyde, we need the light of God’s presence to be refreshed within us every day. This was one of the spin-off benefits I found while writing my book of intercessions. Through focussing on the calendar of saints and holy days it took me to the heart of the faith that inspires and fires us and away from the churchy and other concerns that can so grind us down. This is not because it distracted me from them, or provided a place to hide from them, but as we look at how the transforming presence of God has worked in the lives of those we commemorate and in the celebration of the key events around the life and gospel of Jesus, which our major festivals are all about, then we find ourselves looking at the presence of God among us and find our hope and confidence is renewed. It is refreshing and enlivening.
The Temptations
So to look at how we open ourselves to the refreshing of the light of God’s presence, to retune ourselves to the gift that lies at the heart of Lent, let us look at Jesus and his confrontation with the temptations that we heard about in Matthew’s Gospel. One way of looking at the temptations is to see them as an attack on the gift. Jesus’ responses equally reaffirm the gift’s dominance and our confidence in it.
Stones and Bread
So first of all Jesus is enticed to turn stones into bread. Now what could be more understandable than to sort out hunger? What could be better than to rearrange the atoms of the world so that stuff you don’t need so much of, like stone in a rocky wilderness, becomes something you do need, like bread? And why stop there. Why not move on to stop the mud that slipped down the hillside and buried all those people, including children in Pakistan? Why not do a bit of magic with the cancer cells and the effects of aging that diminish what we once were? In short, why not change the way the world is because it is clearly faulty. That is the hidden charge of the temptation to turn stones into bread. God has messed up and so Jesus should use his power to put it right. This is the underlying philosophy of Christian Science and the Kabbalah school of Jewish mysticism beloved of Madonna: God made a mistake in creating the world.
Jesus’ response is to reaffirm faith and trust in the creator. We live because of God therefore food and everything else are not the final issue. There is a deeper dimension and we can have trust in that. It sounds fine on a bright sunny afternoon but the devil’s suggestion is a cry that all of us have made at some point, possibly even now. The problem of suffering is a major question for faith and there is no easy answer to it. It is just how it is and we trust that God knows what God was doing when the world was made this way. The tempter has gone straight to the heart of it with this challenge. There is no softening up here, starting with the easy stuff and getting harder!
Turning stones to bread is perhaps one of the hardest temptations to resist and the one that has a guidance system on board to hit its target with breath-taking accuracy. We trust that ‘one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God’ is true. Creation was made by God speaking it at the beginning of Genesis, so Jesus takes us to the confidence that there is purpose and how it is, is how it is. God can be trusted and praised.
Reckless jump
Tummy still rumbling and having had to deal with the battering that comes from that kind of assault, those with vertigo would not enjoy being taken to edge of the ledge at the top of the temple. “Just throw yourself over there and let God catch you.” Are you mad!
This is a temptation to recklessness. It is the temptation to easy solutions. It is the temptation to be glib and not take sufficient account of what is needed. It is not about faith, though it looks like it is a test of faith. ‘Do you really believe that God can do anything, well if you are really special try being Peter Pan for a day and fly off the wall. It will be a great experience - bungee jumping without a bungee; hang gliding without the glider.’
The recklessness means that we are not honouring the gift we have been given. The temptation is to squander the gift and not work with it. There are though contradictory passages that can be piled up against one another here. If we have the faith of a mustard seed we can say to this mountain be uprooted and throw yourself into the sea. It is a faithless generation that asks for signs and it is because the disciples’ faith was lacking that they couldn’t heal or cast out demons. On the other side, no king goes to war without first sizing up the opposition to decide if his army is big enough to do the job. We are not to put God to the test. You can probably add your own.
What is the difference between stepping out in faith, with no purse or staff, and being reckless? It is how we honour the gift. What is our motivation for trying what we dare risk? Is it to seek the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness or are we looking for our own glory? Are we acting out of the murky drives and frustrations that bubble away inside us or genuinely feeling that we are being called to some new and potentially wild adventure?
This temptation is tricky because we never really know where we stand with it. All we can do is examine our heart and our motivation and hope that it really does come out of a deep faith and confidence in God’s call. If it doesn’t we will fall flat on our nose! Jesus merely answers this with the Commandment about not putting God to the test. Amazing things do happen but they are not to be conjured up for our purposes. Rather they happen when we work in harmony with God’s purposes and that is something we find ourselves in when the tide is unstoppable. It is about discernment and this is a corporate exercise. It works on the basis that one person may be deranged, two may be strange, but the more facts that can be drawn on the more it rises in the credibility stakes. Time is the judge or at least reveals the verdict.
Worshipping the Tempter
The third temptation is about worshipping the very thing that threatens us and that may sound particularly weird. Why would we possibly want to worship the tempter? We get caught up in this by becoming over concerned by it and through the way it starts to obsess our every thought. We lose our grip on the reality of God’s presence, on the light of God’s presence and our confidence in God becomes diminished in the process.
The Church is going through all sorts of obsessions at the moment. One is with its own survival. We are obsessed by numbers and there are good reasons for this. Without a viable and vibrant congregation there is no church. We get obsessed by the presence of young people because without them there is no church of the future. We become obsessed by what shape it is going to take in the future, with the fresh expressions that may or may not be sustainable or just a passing phase. We get obsessed by the fantastic buildings we have and get drawn too much into the whole heritage industry. I was once involved with closing a church and one spin-off from this was that it focussed my thoughts on what churches are actually for. How much do we actually worship the building, its ritual and the familiar?
What might be the personal threats and concerns that can so occupy our minds that we start worshipping them rather than God? There is a deep psychology to this and it is about how we try to make deals - imaginary or otherwise - with the very things that oppress us. It is a psychology of being so ground down that we have lost our sense of our true dignity and the gift of life in all its fullness.
Jesus’ response to this is to shout ‘Away with you Satan’. There may be assertiveness courses that tell you to do this. You name the thing oppressing you and then gain mastery over it by telling it to go away. It is a way of externalising your concern and summoning up inner energy to drive it away. It is about making a conscious rejection of it and focussing on the presence of God, on the hope and confidence in him.
Lent - Taking stock of the gift
So it is Lent. It is a time to remember that Jesus went into the wilderness to work out what the gift he had received meant. If we are to imitate him through these days and nights we would do well to think through how we honour the gift within us, the gift of God’s presence. How do we affirm and attest to our confidence in God’s presence and his hold on creation? (Stones and bread.) How do we decide when to be cautious and when to risk it? (Bungee jumping from the temple!) How do we keep a proper perspective on the things that wind us up? (Worshipping the tempter.) In short how do we deal with the challenges that come to the confidence we have in God and the hope we have in him. To do this we can look at the temptations of Jesus and see in how he deals with them the model to help us in our trials and temptations. As we do this we will make Lent a time to take stock of how we live in the light of God’s gift in and through Jesus.
© Ian Black 2006