Lent 1.

One of the problems with being in School for so long is that I can no longer bring myself to write without a prompt, so as a practice of getting myself back in the habit of writing regularly (we can call it a lenten practice) I'm going to be offering reflections on the weekly lectionary. I'll post either on Saturday or Sunday if you care to follow along. I'll include links to the week's lectionary so you're not lost.

This is the RCL selection for the first week of Lent:

http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=24

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Lent 1.

I was driving home one night listening to “Story Corps” on NPR and there was a man telling a story about his relationship with his therapist. He was a writer by trade and spoke eloquently enough to make me keep listening until I heard him say “I tend to think about the people closest to me dying a lot. I think that’s how I know I care about them. I think about them dying, and how sad that would make me.” It was an A-Ha moment for me. I do the exact same thing, and it’s pretty morbid. The story culminated in the death of his Therapist, and how meaningful that relationship had been. How they had moved together through the human condition, through the highs and lows of emotional exploration to what could be considered a deep caring, and finally a friendship cut short by death. It was one of the more moving stories that I’ve heard in quite some time, and it greatly resonated with me.

That is most likely because I’m a pretty morbid person. I remember sitting in Humanities class learning about the genre of the Memento Mori, the reminder of death, and being absolutely fascinated. Chapels everywhere in our history greeted you with a reminder of death. It absolutely permeates the imagery of the Western Church. Maybe that’s why I like the Church so much. It could be the whole Jesus thing. I’m not sure.

I am, however, certain that this is why Lent is one of my favorite seasons of the Church year. I should phrase that better… The whole progression of Lent into Easter capped off at Pentecost is my favorite time of the Church calendar. We start Lent off with a reminder that we are dust, and we’re going to be dust again. It’s morbid. It clicks with me. I think it clicks with most of us, even if we don’t want it to. It’s unsettling because it is an indictment of our humanity. Lent is the Church’s way of striking at the heart of the human condition, and this is why I find the lectionary choices for this week to be outstandingly appropriate.

It’s hard not to let Paul do all the heavy lifting in interpreting Genesis, and I think Paul’s right. Adam and Christ are the bookends of our humanity. (I’m not implying a literal reading of Genesis here. Just a healthy theology of original sin.) We have death in Adam and life in Christ. An entrance and end to the reign of sin and death, and in Paul’s reading of Genesis I believe we can find a good analogy for the flow of the life of the Church from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost. Church life reflects the life of faith. Its almost like they did that on purpose…

The way Christ lives out the human condition in Matthew gives us further insight into another theme running through the Lectionary for the week, and that is that of temptation and struggle. The life between the bookends. I would hope, that at least in a small degree we are dealing with temptation in our own Lenten walks, and can then, in some way, be spoken to in the story of Christ’s temptation.

Jesus was led into the desert by the spirit, and it’s interesting to look at the following purpose clause. “to be tempted by the devil.” That passive infinitive is telling us a lot. Matthew is presenting this as the spirit leading Jesus into the desert for the purpose of being tempted.

Speaking of temptation there is a great one present here that many interpreters succumb to. That is the temptation of believing that Jesus walked out into that desert with the inability to give into temptation, and therefore, quite often in my experience, the claim is made that this passage is proof that God never gives us more than we can handle. While that may, and I heavily emphasize may be true, it is not helpful to us in the moment. God may not give us more than we can handle, but it is certainly hard to know that at the time. Anyone in crisis can attest to this. Anyone facing extreme circumstances knows that there are times where you’re fairly certain you can’t handle it. Sometime’s you’re Job.

We need to read this severity into Jesus’ time in the desert. Matthew is explicit in telling us that this was not a leisurely walk into the wilderness. Jesus was famished. Not just hungry. Famished. In physical pain. Suffering from Dehydration. This was dire, and Jesus could feel it.

Enter the tempter.

Everything that was offered to Jesus in the desert was something that he would eventually come to possess. Food, Angelic intervention, Rule of the World. I would go so far as to say that he knew this too. I believe that Christ knew the end of his life and his ministry. (It’s part of that Fully Human/Fully Divine thing that our Catholic friends would rightly call “a mystery.”) So what the tempter was offering him was nothing he would never obtain. All these and more would be his, eventually. After a lot of struggle, and a lot of hurt Christ would be seated at the right hand of the Father again, and his Kingdom will have no end. The temptation lies in the fact that he could get that now, and more importantly he could get all of those things without the Cross. “If you are the son of God…” I’m quite certain that Jesus knew who he was, and therefore what he could do.

Too often we frame temptation as the choice between the right thing and the wrong thing. The wrong thing is usually remarkably attractive, but still remarkably wrong. Temptation like that happens. There are wrong things. I don’t have a list of them on hand, but there are wrong choices. Though this frame is valid, I don’t think it’s what Jesus was experiencing here, nor do I think that this frame is the most troublesome type of temptation. In searching the scripture there’s not a lot I can find that is marked as out and out wrong. There’s a lot of fluidity. You can call it Christian liberty, if you want to be sufficiently Lutheran about it. Jesus’ temptation was to avoid the struggle, and the pain, and the cross, and get to the good stuff the wrong way. As Christians this idea of the “way” should be a huge buzzword for us. Jesus said some things about that.

The cliché “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” may not be too off the mark here. We’re trying to get to the good stuff. Things that are honestly and undeniably good, things like Peace, Justice, Love, and Reconciliation; Things that we know to be the things of the Kingdom. The temptation here is to go about this in the way that Jesus chose not to go. Christ could have flexed his authority as the Messiah and brought the Kingdom down there in that desert, right atop the Devil’s head. But he didn’t. He became a servant, and our Passover. This is the chief temptation, to seek the Kingdom in a way that isn’t Christlike, that is to say, sacrificial and servant-minded. But the Gospel gives us the assurance that if we stay faithful to God’s vision, If we model our story on Christ’s, Angels will wait on us.