Lit up for Lent
Canon Kathryn | Deuteronomy 26.1-11, Luke 4.1-13
You might have seen that every evening, our Cathedral tower is lit up in blue and yellow – the colours of the Ukrainian flag – and it is often joined by the Spinnaker Tower – a united front of solidarity across the skyline. The beauty of the light in our night-time darkness contrasts with the horrors of the invasion – of the darkness into which millions of people have been plunged by the evil in their midst. Every Lent is familiar and yet different, and this year, the task of orienting ourselves towards Jesus’s light in the world’s wilderness seems particularly, horribly relevant to the world’s suffering and injustice. But, as we lament these things, Lent still remains personal: as we express our outrage at what is happening, we cannot shy away from the darkness we also carry.
Last Sunday, we heard of Jesus being transfigured up the mountain, in front of Peter, John and James – of his face and clothes dazzling the bystanders, shining with his glory. This is a beautiful and amazing image. But it is also an image which carries us in to the wilderness with him today. The dazzling light of Jesus is healing and cleansing, but in order to be those things, it is also deeply challenging. It searches us out, brings into view the things that are hidden, makes us account for ourselves. And the purpose of this season of Lent is to strip away all the comfortable things we use to get in the way of this light, and to let it do its work.
The extraordinary thing about the religion of the incarnation is that we recognise that the Light himself has walked this way before us. We don’t worship a Saviour who is aloof and a stranger to world. He knows intimately the things that bedevil humanity. This is no sham – the pull in the wilderness was real.
And it is three-fold. First of all, the devil tempts Jesus in a way which becomes familiar later on: ‘If you are the Son of God, come down from the Cross,’ say the soldiers at the crucifixion. ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread,’ says Satan here. Then the devil leads Jesus to a high place, shows him all the kingdoms of the world and says he will give Jesus power over all of them if he worships him. And finally, Jesus is led to Jerusalem, to the top of the temple. Throw yourself down and you’ll be unharmed, says the devil, quoting Scripture at Jesus before Jesus turns the tables with a quote back at him.
St. Augustine summarises these temptations in three words: appetite, ambition, and pride. The first one concerns genuine hunger – Jesus was famished, and is tempted by food. The second temptation preys on the human desire to get ahead, to advance oneself, to grab power. And the third is about pride – the temptation of believing and behaving as if you’re untouchable because you’re so great. Each of them is dressed up with ego-massaging blandishments to make them even more obvious, even more attractive. And Jesus, fully human as he is, is tempted by all three of them. Fully God as he is, he gives as good as he gets and
more – the whole armour of God is deployed against Satan, and in the wilderness, the Light triumphs.
Appetite, ambition, and pride. Three ways of temptation. Last Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we heard Jesus in Matthew’s gospel talking about three ways of drawing close to God – three ways which we view as central to the way we keep Lent: fasting, giving alms, and praying. These three are in direct contrast to the three temptations, and they are all ways in which we can turn to the light.
Fasting contrasts with the temptation to eat which Jesus faces among the stones. Instead of being governed by the body’s desires, one who fasts gains control over them. Instead of drawing one’s strength from worldly comfort, one who fasts recognises that our strength comes first from God. This is not to suggest that desire is by definition bad – far from it. There are surely as many good desires as dark ones. This isn’t so much about the desire, as about the nature of its hold over you. If it has knocked God away from the centre of your life, and muscled in to the most important position – something which can happen without our even noticing – then fasting will bring that into the Light, strip away the false ideas of importance that you’ve constructed round it, and enable it to sink back into its proper place, while your focus returns to God. This might not be about food, of course. You might find it most helpful to fast from alcohol, or the internet, or rushing to judgment, or one I had a stab at once – grumbling. (My family were dreading Easter morning that year.) Any desire which takes you away from that light which is longing for the real you to be revealed, is a desire worth fasting from.
Giving alms contrasts with ambition. Ambition centres on oneself. It might not be the obvious sort of ambition, like clawing your way up a greasy pole of employment, but it can come out in all sorts of ways. Any time we feel drawn, even in a small way, to get one over on someone else, or simply to turn inwards and luxuriate smugly in the comfort of our lives, we are drifting away from the Light. Many people at the moment are moved to give alms in the traditional sense – to those who are less fortunate than we are - but almsgiving can be understood in a much broader sense than that – the sense of giving oneself to others. Instead of being focused inwards, on ourselves and the things that advance us, almsgiving calls us to turn outwards and think of others. As well as giving gifts, this might include things like consciously acting in a kinder way towards other people, thinking before you gossip or say an unkind or critical word, and trying to replace it with something neutral or positive, visiting or picking up the phone to someone – loving others as you love yourself. The right thing for each one of us might not be immediately obvious – but this is the time for you to allow the light of Christ to search out the thing that you need to do.
Finally, Jesus talks of prayer. This provides the structure, the container, within which all our other Lenten disciplines can work. Prayer contrasts with the pride of the third temptation. Instead of the pride which says, I can do all this myself – I can jump off this pinnacle because I am invincible – prayer brings us back to
the source of our strength again, allows us to recognise our place in God’s Kingdom and frees us from the tyranny of believing that we can do anything in our own strength. Prayer is that space in which the dazzling light of Jesus can really do its work, as we bring ourselves and our efforts to love him into his searching gaze. It is as we take all that we are into prayer that we can honestly say, in the words of today’s Collect, ‘…as thou knowest our weakness, so may we know thy power to save.’
Fasting, almsgiving, prayer – all ways in which we can place ourselves in front of that bright Light which searches us and knows us and loves us. All ways in which we can come back to life in all its fullness as we journey through the wilderness to the Cross and beyond. All ways in which, strange as it may seem in such dark times, we can enter into the joy of Lent, as we draw closer to Jesus.
A few days ago, I asked someone how their Lent was going. The response was, ‘I don’t know yet – I’m still working it out’. This seems an entirely authentic way of walking these 40 days through the wilderness, in which we become more aware than ever that we are works in progress. In the words of the poet RS Thomas [The Bright Field]
Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future,
nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Amen.