Sermon for March 9, 2025 - The First Sunday of Lent
The Word is Near You
Sermon by Ryan Turnbull, Diocesan Discipleship Developer
This past Wednesday, Christians around the world gathered to receive ashes in the form of the cross upon our brows and be reminded of our sin and our mortality as we enter into this solemn and Holy season of Lent. Here at All Saints, your minister welcomed you into this season with this exhortation:
“I invite you therefore, in the name of the Lord, to observe a holy Lent by self examination, penitence, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and by reading and meditating on the word of God.”
Lent is one of those thick times where the stories of Scripture seem to stack up heavily upon us. Lent is a season of preparation and fasting before Easter, and many of us may have committed to making small penitential sacrifices or giving additional alms during this time. But this is also the time in the life of the church where many parishes rededicate themselves to serious study of theology and scripture. We don’t study the stories we find in scripture simply because they’re good for us, but because, especially in seasons like Lent, we experience the uncanny realization that the stories we find about Jesus in the gospel is the same story that we find ourselves in still.
Our season of Lent is very consciously modeled on Jesus 40 days of wandering in the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil. Why would Jesus do such on odd thing though? Why must the Messiah of Israel undertake this wilderness wandering, facing satanic temptations of gluttony, pride, vainglory, and idolatry?
As a way in to understanding what Jesus is up to in our gospel lesson today, I want to introduce you to a relatively unacknowledged doctrine known as the doctrine of substituted love. I say “unacknowledged” because for Anglicans at least, this doctrine is rehearsed every week in the Agnus Dei - “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” You may not have paused recently to contemplate the full implications of this confession but the English novelist, poet, and theologian, Charles Williams, thought that in the Agnus Dei was found the most remarkable confession of Christianity - that our burdens are not ours alone to bear. Williams taught that within the Church, we who are bound together in Christ’s mystical body have the ability to bear one another’s burdens in love. We are not alone in our suffering. We are not alone in our pain. We are not alone in the sorrow and dread of our existence. For we are held, by one another, to be sure, but more fundamentally, by Jesus - the Messiah who takes away the sins of the world.
Some versions of Christianity have hyperfocused on the cross as the moment in which this great exchange occurs, but our gospel passage today bids take a broader view. For to be human is to be tempted. We are tempted with power, with our appetites. We get worn down, hungry, tired, and lost and in these moments - I know I at least am not at my best. Jesus, here near the very beginning of his public ministry, goes right to this frail-point in human existence, where wilderness exhaustion awaits and devils prowl to destroy and he says to all of humanity, “So too with me.”
From the very beginning, Jesus’s life and ministry is carried forward in God’s radical pro-nobity, God’s for us-ness. Jesus bears our burdens, and does this so completely, with such perfect love for the whole world, that in our coherence with the Body of Christ, we are invited, as St Paul says, to bear one another’s burdens in this same love. For Charles Williams, this isn’t just a vague solidarity, but a glimpse inside the internal structure of Messias love. We are able to really and truly suffer with those who suffer, cry with those who cry, mourn with those who mourn, and rejoice with those who rejoice. Because Christ has taken our burdens in love, so too in love can we approach one another and offer a real solidarity of love that holds each others’ burdens as we pass through this vale of tears.
I must stress, this invitation into the coinherence of bearing one another’s burdens in love is not just a matter of imitation, this is a deep metaphysical reality that Jesus has revealed, not just through what he has done for us all, but in what he did specifically for Israel. For just as our 40 days of Lent are based on Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, his own time in the wilderness is based upon a recapitulation of Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness of Sin. Luke’s gospel makes this explicit by locating Jesus’ temptations at the hands of the Devil within the stories of Israel’s own temptations. You may notice, in your gospel reading that each time the Devil tempts Jesus, Jesus responds by quoting scriptures back at him. But this is no mere exercise in proof-texting. Every response Jesus gives to the Devil in this passage comes out of Israel’s own experience confronting temptation in the wilderness wandering. Specifically, they all come from the book of Deuteronomy. The conceit of the book of Deuteronomy is that it is a sermon delivered by Moses to Israel right as they leave the wilderness to enter the land of Promise. Moses rehearses for the people all that they have been through, and the God who has brought them through it and exhorts them to remember this story and not depart from it as they enter the land. It is this story that Jesus leans on in his responses to the Devil in his own wilderness wanderings. Let’s take a closer look.
Luke, in an exercise in stating the obvious, points out that after 40 days of fasting, Jesus was famished. Enter temptation number one. The Devil says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus refuses, saying “man shall not live by bread alone.” On the one hand, fair enough, I’d love a bit of cheese and meat with that bread, thank-you very much… But in all seriousness, Jesus is here referencing Deuteronomy 8:3. Moses is reminding the Israelites of God’s provision for them in the wilderness. Their hunger, and God’s rationed provision of Manna as a source of daily bread was to teach them that it was not the bread alone that was their source of life, but rather it is God who provides the bread who is the source of life. The Devil’s snare is defeated by Jesus by his refusal to confuse the means of life with the source of life. But importantly, Jesus is defeating this temptation by relying on the stories of Israel.
Jesus’ second temptation is to acknowledge the Devil’s authority as Prince of this world and in so doing, gain power and authority over every earthly kingdom. Now, we might expect Jesus to point out, “duh, I already have this authority” but that’s not how the Prince of Peace rules - instead we once again get a quotation from Deuteronomy, this time from chapter 6 verse 13, “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” The context in Deuteronomy is Moses’ exhortation to Israel to remember, when things are good in the land of promise, that it is not the petty gods of the Canaanites that did this mighty deed for them, but rather the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are to worship him and serve him only, even if it might be expedient for the sake of politics to start worshipping some other local deities. Again, Jesus resists temptation by declaring that the story of the God who is mighty to deliver Israel is the same story that he himself continues.
Finally, the Devil, that old master of lies, decides to try and turn Jesus’ own defense back against him. He says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here” and then he turns to Psalm 91, a psalm all about how God provides safety and refuge for his people and he says, “for it is written, ‘he will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” Oh, the Devil is a crafty one, for he has said nothing untrue, and yet this is his biggest lie of all. For God is the source of security and deliverance. God does command angel armies, myriad upon myriad, to deliver his chosen people. But Jesus knows the old stories. Jesus knows that God’s ways are just and abundantly merciful, but this does not render God a genie at our disposal. Jesus’ answer reaches once more to the story of Israel’s time wandering in the wilderness and he quotes Deuteronomy 6:16 - do not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massah. If you don’t remember, Massah literally means “the place of testing” because it was there that Israel, having just been delivered out of the Land of Egypt, crossing through the Sea of Reeds in one of the great miracles of the Exodus, decides to cry out against God because they are thirsty. They are thirsty and tell Moses that it would have been better to die in Egypt. They had just seen the mighty acts of God, but well, THEY’RE THIRSTY! So God, again, always merciful, always the God of provision and security, instructs Moses to tap the rock with his rod and provide water for the people to drink. But at the end of Moses’ life, as he is preaching this sermon which we now know as Deuteronomy, he reminds us that the people should not test God as they did at Massah, for God is the God, as our prayerbook says, whose property is always to have mercy. This does not need extra testing; the mercy will be there when needed. And so Jesus is able to resist the Devil one final time, even though the Devil comes at him with true things about God from Scripture, Jesus knows the stories better. He knows that that God will tolerate being tested. God will be merciful. But we do not need to do so. For God provides and is merciful in spite of our sinful waywardness, not because of it.
Jesus is held secure against all attacks of the Devil because he knows that he is part of the same story of the same God who rescued Israel from Egypt and led them up through the wilderness in safety. Yet there is an even more radical teaching here for us. In Jesus’ recapitulation of Israel’s temptation through his own wilderness wandering, he takes on their burden and their subsequent failure in the land of promise and he bears it in love on their behalf. The temptations that the Devil offers Jesus in our gospel today are the same idolatrous temptations that Israel failed to resist on its own power. But God is the God whose property is always to have mercy. And it is the same God who bore Israel through the consequences of their failure that is the same God we see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.
In our New Testament lesson this morning, St Paul reminds us that the “Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” This too is a reference to Deuteronomy, where Moses instructed the people of Israel to bind the words of these stories to their bodies, to their homes, and to tell them and re-tell them over and over. In Lent, we’re offered an opportunity to dig deep into these old stories again. It’s worth doing. Not just because they are good stories to know, but because in them we find ourselves confronted again and again with the God who bears our burdens in love. We study these stories, we read them over and over again, because every so often we catch a glimpse of one of the most radical truths of Christianity, these stories that we read from so long ago and so far away is our story still. In the coinherence of God’s great love for us, we do not simply bear one another’s burdens in love here in this parish today. We hold, and are held by, all those who through the ever-merciful love of God, have been made part of this grand story. And so, we have confidence as we enter this penitential season of lent, not trusting in our own righteousness, but rather knowing that our burdens are held by a love that continues to define the story of our existence.
Amen
