A Homily for the First Sunday of Lent
Readings: Deuteronomy 26:4-10 Romans 10:8-13 Luke 4:1-13
Do you notice anything different—indeed quite distinctive—in St. Luke’s account of Christ’s temptation?
Following his baptism, our Lord has been led into the desert by the Holy Spirit. He is quite alone. There is no crowd; there are no disciples. We only enter the scene through the voice of the narrator.
St. Luke’s story exemplifies and makes prominent a feature of all Gospel accounts. They are proclamations, manuals of discipleship. The Gospels were not produced by diligent scribes who somehow knew to record everything Jesus said and did. No, they come to us from a second generation of disciples who received the witness of the first and deeply pondered its meaning.
No disciple records this scene from memory. Yet somehow, we have been invited into the desert, to be alone with Jesus as he faces the Tempter. Why? Because his trials reveal the meaning of our own temptations.
What is temptation—all temptations, any temptation?
Ultimately, it is a refusal to trust the goodness of God.
Temptation is embedded in our very existence. It lies in the link between what is and what will be. We live in the present, but our eyes are always on the future. At any given moment, we are moving forward, pursuing some goal or purpose. Take away the future, which always imbues the present, and life itself would be listless.
The present has already been determined by the past. It is the future that lies in the hands of God. So the great issue, as we constantly traverse the boundary between present and future, is whether we will give ourselves into the hands of God. Do we trust God? Do we believe that, come what may, what will come conforms to his loving will for our lives?
There are as many temptations as there are desires: prosperity, power, pleasure. But the fundamental trial is whether we will entrust our future to God. Satan, the adversary, always presents an alternative future, one in which we can grasp what God has not given.
The church has been pondering the meaning of Christ’s testing for two millennia. Obviously, alone in the desert, Jesus would be quite hungry, but the Egyptian father of the church, Origen, sees some greater significance in Christ being tempted by hunger.
How did Adam disobey his creator? By eating. Origen writes of Satan:
Since there was no food anywhere, because the whole region was a desert, he knew that bread would satisfy Christ’s hunger.
But the church’s greatest theological exegete draws our attention to what we may have overlooked. Satan does not directly tempt Our Lord with bread.
He himself does not produce bread, because Christ was not going to take it from the enemy. But he commands him to make bread from the stones that he points to. Look at Satan’s wiles and great wickedness—he tried to keep Christ from knowing his plot. He did not simply say, “Turn the stones into loaves of bread,” but he prefixed it with, “If you are a son of God.” He did this to show that he wanted this act done to prove that Christ is a son of God. For he was thinking that Christ would be provoked by his words and offended by the suggestion that he was not a “son of God.” He thought that Christ would not recognize the deception and, as a man who has power from God, turn the stones into bread (Fragments on Luke, No. 96).
Remember that string of temptations? Prosperity, power, pleasure? They all come down to pride, the sin that first felled Satan. We simply cannot rest in being beloved creatures. In our desire to seize good for ourselves, we strike against the creator.
We must continually ponder why Jesus refused to do such a simple thing, to use his God-given power to bring about what was an obvious good. But that is the nature of every temptation. It promises to produce something of a good, until that paltry gain is compared to God’s will, God’s goodness.
Here, as in all temptations, bread is only a means to an end. The question, the great issue upon which the future depends, is one of pride. Will the Son rest in his Father’s will or will he act according to his own God-given powers?
Jesus stands in our place, alone before his Father and the Tempter, deciding the fate of our humanity. We were once expelled from the garden of God’s will by Adam’s twisted choice of futures. Now, what happens in this Judean desert determines if we are ever to return to paradise.
In the narrative, St. Luke brings each of us into the desert to be alone with Jesus because each of us must make the same decision as Adam and Christ. Does the future—our future—belong to us or to God?
Origen says that Christ “did not perform the sign the devil sought, because he worked his signs to help those who saw them.” Here the absence of a sign is itself the greatest signal. Refusing the sin of pride, Christ entrusts his future to his Father. Will we?
