A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, Year B
Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows, East York
1 March AD 2009

Note: the response this morning was most gratifying, so much so that it seems that posting this sermon might be welcome. As always, the written text is a shadow of the sermon as it was spoken, in which many other ideas came to mind. There are also many other things in the readings for Lent I which deserve attention. Some of them, such as the fact that God's bow now hangs in the sky aimed upwards, towards God, are mentioned in the Lectionary Notes for today in "William Craig's Magazine". There are many others, such as the mention in the Epistle of the "eight persons" saved in the Ark which suggests consideration of the mystical meaning of the number eight. Have you ever wondered why baptismal fonts usually have eight sides? But one cannot mention everything in a sermon.

The Sundays in Lent are not fast days, but are nonetheless marked by a devotional tone fitting this season of penitence: the Gloria in Excelsis is not sung, nor is Alleluia; the Eucharistic Prayer has its proper Lenten prefaces; indeed the BAS provides a Penitential Order appropriate for beginning the eucharist on Sundays in Lent (you may find it on page 216).

Since ancient times the Gospel account of our Lord’s temptation has been read on the first Sunday in Lent, to give us the example we follow in our Lenten abstinence. However, We are now in Year B of the new revised lectionary, which centres each of its three years on one of the synoptic Gospels, and so the account of the Temptation we hear is that of St Mark, which gives somewhat less detail than do the accounts in Matthew and Luke: where they tell us of three attempts of the Adversary against our Lord, Mark simply says that after his baptism by John, the Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,

And he was in the desert forty days and was tempted by Satan and he was with the beasts and angels ministered to him.

We have only the barest of bare bones of a story here, certainly not the rich treasure that allowed Lancelot Andrewes to preach seven sermons on the temptation. But there is something else missing, and I wonder if you noticed it. Mark does not mention that our Lord fasted these forty days in the desert. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that if Jesus was in the desert forty days he was fasting; scarcity of food and water is a notable feature of deserts; but the fact that the fasting is not mentioned suggests that we should be attending to some other detail of the Gospel account. So what do we have in these twenty-four words? We have four statements

He was in the desert forty days and
He was tempted by Satan
He was with the wild beasts
Angels ministered to him

Terms like forty days and forty years are used in the Bible in a vague kind of way to mean a significant period of time; the period of forty days for Lent was modelled on Jesus’ time in the desert.

There are many things the desert calls to mind. The first one is probably the Exodus of Israel from Egypt: after the miraculous escape through the Red Sea, God’s people journeyed forty years in the desert of Sinai, and in that time they were both beset by temptation themselves and tempted the Lord. Without stretching the image too much, the desert can also remind us that when Adam and Eve were tempted and disobeyed God they were cast out of the garden into a harsh world; the ground was cursed, for it would only provide food in return for great labour. So the desert is the world, where the descendants of Adam eat bread in the sweat of their faces.
In the desert Jesus was tempted by Satan, whose name means “the Adversary” or the Accuser.* By the time of Jesus, the serpent who tempted Eve and Adam had been identified as Satan, or Satan’s instrument. Now he comes to tempt the Son of God; but where he had succeeded in tempting our first parents, he fails with Christ, the new Adam. But nothing is said of the details of this temptation, and we shall leave that to another year, when one of the other Gospel accounts is read.
Next we come to the one part of Mark’s account which is not found in the other two. This must be important, for, as the experts tell us, the evidence suggests that Mark was the first to be written, and both Matthew and Luke made use of it, and incorporated almost every bit of it in theirs. Here we read that he was with the wild beasts. Wild beasts can be interpreted in a number of ways. One commentary says

The Judean wilderness was the habitat of various wild animals. The link between these animals and ministering “angels” suggests an echo of Psalm 91:11-13: “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot”. [RCL, citing NJBC]

Thus, In the wilderness wild beasts may attack him, but angels protect him. But to say that he was with the beasts is not the same as to say they attacked him. Another possible interpretation is that the beasts are mentioned “to emphasize the loneliness and awfulness of the desert”. This is supported by such passages as Isaiah’s prediction of the fall of Babylon:

… wild beasts will lie down there, and its houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will dwell, and there satyrs will dance. Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces … Isa 13.21-22

But a more probable explanation is that the wild beasts are thought of as subject and friendly to our Lord. In his commentary on Mark, D. E. Nineham suggests that this passage

should be understood against the background of he common Jewish idea that the beasts are subject to the righteous man and do him no harm … and also that when Messiah comes, all animals will again be tame and live in harmony.

Nineham also applies the verses from Psalm 91, but as saying that “dominion over the wild beasts is coupled with the promise of service by angels,” and concludes that

St Mark probably means that by his victory over Satan Jesus has reversed Adam’s defeat and begun the process of restoring paradise. Thus the whole passage is illuminated by this remarkable quotation from the Testament of Naphtali, [a non-Biblical Jewish text]: “If you do good, my children, both men and angels shall bless you, and the Devil shall flee from you, and the wild beasts shall fear you and the Lord shall love you.”

The wild beasts, then, signify a return to that happy state when God brought all the birds and beasts to Adam to see what he would call them.; he brought them as companions.
Restoring paradise: just as human beings submitted to the temptation and as a result lost paradise and were sent into the desert, so our new champion, Jesus, enters into the desert to face our old tempter, and after his victory is seen in the state of paradise, with the wild beasts and served by angels. Marks account does not call us to ponder temptation in the same way that the others do but simply shows us the result. Like the others, this gives us confidence that the tempter has no power over us, but that one who trusts in Jesus can defeat it, but more importantly, it presents in stark simplicity the goal of Christ’s mission, which was the defeat of sin and the restoration of human beings to unity with God. This does not call us to think about the process of Lent, its disciplines, as much as it calls us to think about the goal of Lent. The purpose of all discipline is to seek this goal.
In closing, we may see that this question of the goal of Lent will be more clear to us if we think of all our discipline as leading not just to festivity, but to a concrete, particular action which will mark the end of Lent and the beginning of Easter. This action is one which demands careful preparation. It is the celebration of Baptism or the renewal of Baptismal vows.
Now here we need to consider the notion of covenant, which is the name the Bible uses for the relationship God establishes with his people. We hear the first mention of a covenant in the first reading for today, the covenant that God established with all humanity and all living creatures through Noah, when God promised never again to destroy all life in a flood. Over the next four weeks, the first readings tell us of the covenants God made with Abraham and Sarah and with Israel through Moses, and we will hear Jeremiah proclaim the promise of a new Covenant. Over the weeks of Lent, we are listening to a history that was constantly pointing to and which were fulfilled in the the Passover of Christ Jesus from death to new life, a covenant which is offered to all people, in which God will bring to fulfillment the restoration of paradise that we see in te temptation story. Through Baptism we have been made people of that covenant, and at Easter when we chiefly celebrate the Mighty Acts by which it was achieved, we are asked to renew the promised we made in Baptism (see BAS, pp. 330-332); it is no accident that in the liturgy of Baptism these vows are entitled: The Baptismal Covenant (p.158). If you read through these promises, it should become clear how our Lenten discipline leads us to renew them more carefully and thoughtfully, by calling us to consider whether we have kept them well or badly. I cannot take the time to go into this now. But I recommend as the heart of lenten discipline that we read through these promises carefully, and ask ourselves what we need to do to make sure that we keep these promises more faithfully.

*When the Hebrew Satan was translated into Greek it came out as Diabolos, from which our English Devil is derived.