First Sunday In Lent
The Gospel today recounts the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Through Lent, you may have committed to some kind of spiritual discipline to draw closer to God but you may have already been tempted to break your new routine. The following article by N T Wright, a Biblical scholar and Bishop of Durham in the UK, has an interesting perspective on temptation that is worth pondering over this week.
“These readings are not about ‘temptation’ so much as about true worship Jesus recognized his temptations as distractions from worshipping and trusting the one true God. To see temptation in terms of rules we would like to break, or impulses we must learn to tame, is to succumb to a second-order temptation; to see temptation itself in terms of negatives.
“The truth is very different. Every moment, God calls us to know, love and worship him, and thereby to find and celebrate our genuine humanity, and reflect his image in the world. Temptations lure us to turn away from that privilege and invitation, to lower our gaze, shorten our sights, and settle for second best or worse. The dictionary definition of the Greek word for ‘sin’ is ‘missing the mark’. Sin, like a misfired arrow, drops short of the call to true humanness, to bearing and reflecting God’s image.
“Jesus maintained a single-minded devotion. His allegiance to his Father overrode immediate bodily desires; it ruled out an easy but costly short cut to his vocation (to be the Lord of the world); it forbade him, by seeking a ‘proof’ to his status, to challenge the word spoken at his baptism. For him, worshipping the one he knew as Father was larger and richer than all these. The real answer to temptation is not ‘God will be cross if I do that’, but ‘if I do that, I will miss the best that my Father has for me’.
“That is why the Israelites, entering the land, were to worship God with their first crops. They could not take the land for granted as an automatic right. Their celebrations were a minder that it was theirs by God’s saving grace alone. And a sign, through their hospitality to resident aliens, that they were channels of grace as well as recipients. Of course, they failed; Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness was, among other things, a sign of corporate penitence for a thousand years of rebellion, and a prelude to the establishment of a new people whose sole identifying badge would be neither race, nor territory, but loyalty to God.
“Paul indicates that Jesus has indeed become Lord of the whole world, though not by the tempter’s route, His faithfulness to his strange vocation of suffering and death is now to be reflected by our faithfulness to him, summed up in our acknowledgement of his universal lordship and our belief in his resurrection from the dead. These striking claims, repeated in our own baptisms, are of course under regular attack. We are thereby regularly tempted, not merely to wrong belief, but to missing out on the best that God has for us, the genuine humanness that Jesus offers to all through the Paschal mystery. As we set out on the wilderness journey of Lent, we do well to reflect on true worship as the ground of true holiness, and true belief as its identifying mark.”
Taken from N T Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays, Reflections on Bible Readings Year C,