1 March 2020
On Wednesday night about 17 of us gathered for a reflective Ash Wednesday service. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, that time which is often set aside to prepare our hearts and minds for Easter, and this is the first Sunday that we will begin to explore some Lenten themes in our corporate worship.
But a quick reminder about Lent. While we are called to times of reflection during this season, Lent is not the time of “bad news” which precedes the “good news” of Easter. It is a time of grace when we reflect on our mortality and where we have gone wrong, as well as on the creative and re-creative power of God which is restorative. And where have we gone wrong? Mostly in forgetting that we were created for relationship with God.
Lent can be a time of self-denial when we give up something, or a time of focus when we might take up or practice a new spiritual discipline. Lent is also the time when we can learn some important things about ourselves.
I think we often hear today’s old testament lesson and gospel lesson as being in opposition to each other. Adam and Eve are tempted and eat the forbidden fruit. Jesus is tempted in the wilderness but does not succumb to temptation. So then, Adam and Eve were bad and got it all wrong and Jesus was good and got it all right. While I wouldn’t say that was wrong, I think there is a deeper meaning to be gleaned from these two texts which are both stories about self-knowledge.
Let’s start with Adam and Eve. This story narrates the most foundational memory that we have of life with God. God has created the garden and connected the first creatures to this place in a delicate and intentional relation. The human creatures are to care for the garden, and the garden is to sustain the human creatures. There is only one tree that is out of bounds … like a loving parent God sets limits for his children. What parent has not done this … “don’t touch the oven, it’s hot and will burn”.
Like many of us, Adam and Eve are captivated by the voice of the serpent, a voice that distorts the truth through speech which is cunning, calculated and powerfully manipulative – “Did God say …” (Genesis 3:1) and “You will not die.” (Genesis 3:4).
Adam and Eve eat. And what happens next? Their eyes are opened. This would suggest that before they were seeing with partially closed eyes. Somehow eating the fruit gave them a new level of awareness, they were awakened to a new level of consciousness. Maybe they didn’t fall into sin as much as they fell into consciousness. They experienced something of themselves and the world in the same way God does. For the first time they knew good and evil. They saw it all. Life and their world just got a whole lot more complicated, a whole lot more real.
Think about the times in your life when that’s happened for you, when there has been a new awareness, a new consciousness, a new way that you see the world. With this new vision we might see beauty and goodness, but we can also see pain and disfigurement, places of wholeness and integrity, but also places of brokenness.
In 2014 Tony’s cousin took her own life. At the time Elizabeth was only seven and we told her that cousin Kerry had fallen asleep and that the doctors couldn’t wake her. Some years later Elizabeth became aware that Kerry committed suicide and this realisation brought new questions and she suddenly saw things differently.
Not only do we see the world differently, but we begin to see the reality and truth of life which can be full of contradictions and complications.
If we look beyond the failure of Adam and Eve to say ‘no’, we can see that this experience in the garden helped them understand more about who they were … people created for relationship with God who had lost sight of that relationship. By the same token, if we look beyond Jesus saying ‘no’, we can see that his wilderness experience was also something that helped him understand more about himself.
Again, we have a situation where God has set the scene and is ultimately in control. Matthew tells us that Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.” (Matthew 4:1) Immediately before this we have the account of Jesus’ baptism when we learn something of the kind of person Jesus is. The voice from heaven declared Jesus to be the beloved Son (Matthew 3:17). Jesus hears this too.
Jesus goes into the wilderness having been told that he is God’s son, that he is beloved of God and that God is pleased with him. All of this is known by Jesus before he ever faces the first temptation. He is God’s son, beloved of God and God is pleased with him not because he has passed the temptation test, but because of grace, the grace that always precedes us.
Before Jesus has called his first disciples, before he has preached in the synagogue, before he has performed his first miracle, before he is starting to become known, Jesus engages in an internal spiritual struggle. He needs to be ready for whatever may lie ahead, and that involves spiritual preparation as intense as any athlete’s or warrior’s training.
First Jesus is tempted with bread, secondly with proving himself and finally with power, but through it all he is able to rely on divine grace and remain faithful.
Jesus’ time in the wilderness has a lot to do with Jesus learning and experiencing something about himself … it is one thing to be told you are something and another thing entirely to really know it. The time Jesus spent in the wilderness shaped his public ministry of healing, teaching and preaching.
If the garden and the wilderness were places of self-knowledge for Adam and Eve and Jesus, might they not be places we should visit?
In this Lent if we let go of questions about good and bad and right and wrong, and spend time with God learning about ourselves in a deep, profound way, this self-knowledge could turn out gaze back to God – the One we are created to be in relationship with.
Choosing this path means we would need to observe ourselves, be watchful and ask the difficult questions. It would mean looking at the painful and wounded places that cause us to act in ways that are not good for us or others. It would mean thinking about how we react or respond and thinking about the ways we have brought pain or healing to the world. It would mean thinking about the patterns and behaviours that direct our lives.
It will mean asking “Do I truly believe I am God’s beloved child?” and the follow up questions “If I am, how do I live like I am?” and “If not, why not?”
I pray that this Lent might be a time when all of our eyes are opened to the truth about who we are and what we do. May it be a Lent in which we rediscover, or perhaps hear for the first time, that we are God’s beloved children. May it be a Lent in which we let go of judgements and score keeping, and embrace a fuller life in which we discover that we are God’s glory. Today, tomorrow, and the day after. Now and forever.
Amen. © Heather Hon, February 2020.