Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Lent 1, 9th of March, 2025
Lead us not into temptation. Save us from the time of trial. Over the past few weeks I have been pondering on how incredibly lucky we are not to have great political power. We in the Western world are watching people nakedly succumb to the temptations of power in ways that we last saw in the nineteen-thirties. Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Elon Musk seem to have surrendered to the sins of pride, wrath, and greed, and the pleasure that comes from being able to mistreat others. This giving into temptation has flown from the Oval Office outwards and downwards, as Trump’s followers justify his every ridiculous thought bubble, and the leaders of other countries flatter him. We are so lucky that we are not in those positions. We are not facing that particular time of trial.
Undoubtedly, foreign leaders normalising Trump’s actions are lying for the sake of their countries. Maybe Trump does believe that supporting Russia rather than Ukraine will bring peace to Eastern Europe. It is even possible that Musk and his DOGE minions believe that by shutting down government services and firing essential workers, they are attacking ‘fraud, waste, and abuse’. The most potent temptations are not temptations to do evil, but temptations to do good, or at least to do what the tempter assures us is good – like lying to get one’s grandfather work.[1] C. S. Lewis wrote that he used Psalm 137, which ends with the awful imprecation: ‘Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!’ as an allegory for the way we should respond to little temptations:
I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become [alcoholism] or settled hatred, but which woo us and wheedle us with special pleadings and seem so tiny, so helpless that in resisting them we feel we are being cruel to animals. They begin whimpering to us “I don’t ask much, but”, or “I had at least hoped”, or “you owe yourself some consideration”. Against all such pretty infants (the dears have such winning ways) the advice of the Psalms is best. Knock the little bastards’ brains out. And “blessed” he who can, for it’s easier said than done.[2]
This first Sunday of Lent reminds us that despite our praying of the Lord’s Prayer, none of us can escape the time of trial. Not even Jesus escaped a time of testing. Every year we begin our Lenten journey to Jerusalem with Jesus by reading about his testing in the wilderness, initiated by the Spirit. Jesus has just been baptised by John in the Jordan and heard a voice from heaven say, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:22) Now he is tempted by the devil. It is important that the devil does not suggest that Jesus do anything obviously evil. Temptation to do evil would be easy to resist. But in a world of hunger, why not turn stones to bread? Jesus is famished after eating nothing for forty days; in the words of one of C. S. Lewis’ pretty infants, doesn’t he owe himself some consideration? In a world of violence and slavery and oppression, why not take over? Centuries of Jewish teaching said that the Messiah would come as a warrior to rule his people and destroy their enemies. Why not be that sort of Messiah? Jesus has just been told by a voice that he is the Son, the Beloved. Why not reassure himself that it is true? There would be nothing obviously wrong with Jesus doing any of these things. Every point the devil makes is true; Jesus is the Son of God, and he can do all this. He is being tempted by legitimate, if distorted, popular expectations of what the Messiah would look like. Why not fulfil them?
The answer is that this is not God’s way of salvation. The journey that Jesus is just beginning leads to the scandal of the Messiah being executed as a criminal. When Jesus is next in Jerusalem, he will be enthroned on a cross. God’s way, the way Jesus chooses in today’s reading to walk, is the way of humility and weakness, not power and wonder. But resisting the devil’s testing in the wilderness does not mean that Jesus never again experiences the time of trial. At the end of today’s story we are told that the devil, ‘departed from him until an opportune time’. At the Passover ‘Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve,’ (Luke 22:3) and when Jesus goes to pray on the Mount of Olives he twice tells his sleepy disciples ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial,’ and himself prays, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ (Luke 22:39-46) As the Letter to the Hebrews reassures us, ‘we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin’. (Hebrews 4:15)
I suspect that the greatest difficulty we have with the story of Jesus’ testing is the role the devil plays in it. We are too modern to believe in a personification of evil. In fact, according to one of my favourite pieces of fiction, not even demons believe in the devil:
There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm. It wasn’t just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. They’d come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout “The Devil Made Me Do It” and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to.[3]
I tend to agree with the fictional demon Crowley; humans are more than capable of ‘dark and mindless unpleasantness’ all by ourselves.
This does not mean that there do not exist what the Apostle Paul calls ‘spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,’ powers that go beyond individual humans, societal and global forces that dehumanise people: things like racism, sexism, materialism, militarism. We need more than human help to resist them. Jesus shows us one aid to resistance in today’s reading: a deep knowledge of and dependence on Scripture. Three times Jesus responds to the devil with quotes from Deuteronomy.[4] Jesus has so loved and studied the Jewish Scriptures that they have become part of him, and so he can draw on them as defensive weapons. This is something each of us can do, too. There are, of course, wrong ways to read the Scriptures. In today’s story the devil himself quotes them. But read humbly and with an open mind, the Bible enables us to encounter God, and provides us with answers to C. S. Lewis’ winning little dears.
In today’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul is also drawing upon the Hebrew Scriptures. The church in Rome included both Jewish followers of Jesus who observed Jewish holidays and food laws and Gentile followers of Jesus who did not. Paul draws on the Jewish Scriptures, on Moses’ final speech to the people of Israel in Deuteronomy (30:12-14) and the prophecies of Isaiah (28:16) and Joel (2:32) to call on both groups to live together in peace, because ‘there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him’. Christians can sometimes get caught up in what it means to ‘confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.’ Too many churches provide long lists of what people must believe to be considered truly Christian. That is not what Paul intends. Paul is reassuring those he knows already believe in Jesus that ‘no one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ We Gentile Christians, freed from the requirements to follow the Jewish law, should not impose new laws on each other.
We all face times of trial. We are all tested. The forty days of Lent, spent in self-examination and repentance, by prayer and fasting, by self-denial and acts of generosity, and by reading and meditating on the word of God, provide us in practice not giving in to temptation. Lent trains us to resist temptation’s wheedling ways. But when we fail to resist, we can ‘approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need,’ (Hebrews 4:16) certain that Jesus who himself faced the time of trial is ‘generous to all who call on him’. Amen.
[1] Eve Bunting, A Day’s Work, illustrated by Ronald Himler (New York: Clarion Books, 1994).
[2] C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958), p. 136.
[3] Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Corgi Books, 1991).
[4] Deuteronomy 8:3, 6:13, 6:16.
Rev Doc Geek 