Sermon for 2004 February 29, Parish Communion, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

Bible readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13

Today is the first Sunday in Lent, when we remember the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert, his time of testing at the beginning of his ministry. And as Lent takes its course we will set our face toward Jerusalem – as Jesus did – and think about his suffering and his death at the end of his ministry.

Our culture is pretty confused about the devil. On one side we have the notion of temptation which is almost a joke; seems to be associated mostly with cream cakes, chocolate and sex. And on the other hand, as we struggle to find rational explanations for everything, whenever our media encounters someone really bad, Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane, Harold Shipman, the headlines proclaim in bold letters "evil in our midst", a kind of devil-of-the-gaps idea, when the explanations run out and we throw up our hands in horror.

Jesus and those living in his time did not seem to have that confusion. The devil was the tempter, a real living being to be fought against. We don’t know what the tempter of Jesus looked or sounded like, what kind of being or spirit Jesus talked with, but we do know that he was real. And what was he up to?

Place that question to one side for a moment, because I can’t resist the temptation to say something about today’s date. Now I enjoy astronomy and anything to do with times and seasons and the calendar, and to the likes of me today is quite a special day. Leap Year Day, Feb 29, the day we have to have so that our time keeps in step with God’s creation. It’s even more special that it occurs on a Sunday, which means that it’s the fifth Sunday in February, and that only happens once every 28 years. Feb 29 is also the opportunity traditionally for a woman to make a proposal of marriage. You have to seize your moment, the opportune time. Time is on our minds as we count the forty days of Lent. But what has time got to do with the temptations of Jesus in our Gospel reading? Well, I’m going to suggest a new way of looking at the devil’s evil aims. He is trying to steal time from God, to bend and warp time, to make time go wrong, to run the world by his agenda, his timetable, and to stop God from doing things in his own perfect time.

We read that at the end of forty days of eating nothing, in the desert, Jesus was hungry! I bet that has to be one of the biggest understatements in the Bible. Why did Luke bother to tell us this obvious thing? I guess it was to reinforce that Jesus was truly human, he didn’t put himself on another plane of being and suspend his normal human needs. The letter to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus was tempted as we are. He was tempted to use his powers to turn stones into bread. This is not a power we might consider we have, but I don’t think doing a miracle is the point of this temptation. And funnily enough I don’t think it’s really much to do with food either. Why? Because this was at the end of his forty days – in a little while Jesus would be breaking his fast and eating again anyway. So could it be that what the devil was up to was trying to destroy Jesus’ time with God, to turn his mind away from his period of fasting and prayer. The Spirit led him into the desert at the right time and Jesus was going to be led by the Spirit through this time and back into normal life, in God’s time. Man does not live on bread alone. And we too do not have to have our agenda dictated by what the world thinks we need.

And then Jesus was taken to a high place and was tempted to worship the devil in return for gaining the authority over the kingdoms of the world. The devil thought it all belonged to him and in a sense it did – for a while. Worshipping the devil – what Jesus was tempted as we are to do, was not just a matter of Satanism, the spooky stuff you see on the telly. Worshipping the devil is when you embrace the evil ways people use for their personal gain and gratification – deceit, fraud, violence. This kind of worship may bring a quick fix but at what terrible expense. Worship the Lord your God and serve him only – and Jesus could have gone on to say "and all these things will be added". In the fullness of time.

The Bible has a great sense of history, past, present and future. In our Old Testament reading we hear about the celebration of the great event in history when Israel was saved with mighty hand and outstretched arm, and the people say I declare today that I have come to the land; Now I bring you the firstfruits. Moses gives God’s promise that the people will be made holy. And we read elsewhere in Romans that creation is groaning, we who have the first fruits of the Spirit are waiting eagerly for our full adoption as children of God. We do not need to give into temptation to get what we want by deception and manipulation; we only need to wait.

And then Jesus is standing there on the top of the temple, and the temptation is to go right to the brink, to jump and to make God save him, to force God’s hand. We don’t know what would have happened if he had jumped. My guess is that he would have fallen and been killed. Surely not? surely God would have saved Jesus? But if that man had jumped, he would not have been Jesus. Or he might have been saved and been instantly worshipped by thousands after a miracle that would have been much more visible than the compassionate signs that Jesus actually did perform. But it was not the time for such a display. And we too should trust God, never force his hand – that would be no way for us to show our love for him.

And God’s timetable is the best. 26 years ago a young surgeon called Ian Gordon-Smith, trained in Cambridge, had felt God’s call to take his skill to Thailand as a hospital missionary. He used to keep a tape diary and in his last entry, at the end of a period away from his family, he said "I just hope that my life, which I don’t want to wish away, can be galvanized and remade into something worthwhile. With the passage of time so swift and so fleeting that 17 weeks seem like one, one must surely take a grip of oneself and, with God’s help, achieve something for him IN HIS TIME." A few months later his wife and children were visiting him in Thailand. They were on a special outing, their minibus crashed and they all died instantly. A tragedy, but everything that man said and wrote and the reactions of his fellow Christians and doctors all strengthen the difficult thought that God was working in his own time. His diaries are left in a book called "In His Time" – he was my mother’s cousin and quite an inspiration.

The devil tried to steal God’s timing. The kinds of temptations that Jesus endured do and will come our way too. When we are vulnerable and weak, as Jesus would have been physically after those forty days; but also when we are strong. Jesus had great powers and he was tempted to misuse them, to mess up God’s plan for saving the world through love.

What can we do about temptation? Is the answer to do as Jesus did and to quote from Scripture? Yes – but we have to remember that the Bible can be misused, as the devil tried to do. What we have been given is far more than a set of verses to quote. In fact, we have been given something amazing to help us. Our reading says that when the devil had finished all this tempting, he left [Jesus] until an opportune time. Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, and that "opportune time" came three years later when Satan entered Judas Iscariot and he looked for an opportunity to betray Jesus and send him to his death. When he was arrested, Jesus said to the evil people who came for him, This is your hour – when darkness reigns. On the cross Jesus was tempted once again, taunted to come down from the cross. But he did not. Love kept him there, love for us. Because of that, as we heard in our reading in Romans, anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. We can truthfully say whenever the tempter comes our way that he has now had his hour of darkness. His time has been and gone. His alarm clock went off and nobody woke up. He missed his train. He’s had his hour, love has defeated him and his evil ways; and we now have eternity, all of God’s time, to enjoy his love for us.

© Mike Knee, 2004