First Sunday in Lent, Year C

Sermon at Saint Margaret’s Anglican Church, Budapest (2025.03.09)

First Sunday in Lent, Year C

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

“When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.”

The first and last verses from our Gospel Reading are striking. In the opening sentence, Luke tells us that, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the [desert] wilderness, where [he ate nothing] for forty days [and] was tempted by the devil.”

Why was he returning from the Jordan? And why was he full of the Holy Spirit?

The last several weeks we have been bouncing around the Gospel of Luke and so the narrative thread might be difficult to follow. However, this morning we pick back up just after Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist – hence why he was returning from the Jordan. 

Additionally, as I mentioned in the sermon back in January, Jesus’ baptism was less about ritual washing and more about the Holy Spirit annointing him for his public ministry. While he was praying off to the side after what must have been a fairly extensive all-day baptismal service – compared to our beautiful, but only 70-minute baptismal service last week – suddenly “The heaven was opened… [and] the Holy Spirit descended upon [Jesus] in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This anointing by the Holy Spirit, marked the transition from the anticipation of Jesus’ divine vocation to its actualization; the moment when, after 30 years of patient waiting, and now empowered by the Holy Spirit, his public ministry finally begins.

In terms of identity, Jesus was always the Messiah, the Son of God, but in a sense, his anointing by the Holy Spirit is the point where he becomes the Messiah, when the abstract truth became a living reality.

Yet, instead of heading straight to the Temple in Jerusalem, Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit directs Christ to go the opposite direction – out into the Judean desert! I’ve been there and “wilderness” is quite the euphemism. It is a brutally hot landscape of completely barren hills and ravines – as far as the eye can see. 

Furthermore, Luke tells us that Jesus “ate nothing at all during those days”. The number 40 is used throughout the Bible to symbolise a long period of testing, such as Noah and 40 days of rain; Elijah’s one meal for 40 days; Moses’ 40 days on Mt Sinai; and the Israelites 40 years of wandering in the desert. 

But whether you take Luke’s comment as a literal 40-day fast or figuratively for a really long time, all I can say is that one day would be more than sufficient for most people. 

Jesus’ grand entrance to ministry certainly wasn’t on a red carpet…

The central question that people have been pondering for the past 2000 years is, “Why?”. Why did Jesus go out into the desert for 40 days where he was ultimately tempted by the devil?

In one of my favourite books, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky wrestles with this question in the section famously referred to as “The Grand Inquisitor”. In it, Jesus returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition, and because he gains a large following after performing some miracles, the Grand Inquisitor throws him into a dungeon and begins interrogating him. 

More a rant than an interrogation, the animus behind the Grand Inquisitor’s anger quickly becomes clear: the son of God is to blame for people’s suffering. 

Why? Because of freedom – the freedom of choice, the freedom of conscience. Instead of giving into the Devil’s temptation to prove beyond all doubt that he was the Son of God – by turning a stone into bread (feeding the hungry), becoming the literal king of the world, or providing a miracle that everyone could see with their own eyes, as he threw himself down from the most prominent place possible – Jesus steadfastly refused to overwhelm our doubts and unbelief by brute force. He refused to collapse the centrality of faith. 

And ever since, people have been happy to surrender their freedom at the feet of those who are strong enough to offer them real authority or physical bread, leaders and institutions that would tell them what exactly to believe and do. 

While Dostoyevsky powerfully captures part of the tension at the heart of the Devil’s temptation in the Judean wilderness, it doesn’t answer the “Why?”. Why did Jesus go there in the first place? And why did he engage such a severe period of fasting?

Various proposals have been offered over the centuries. Some emphasis the role fasting has in strengthening our will – being confronted over and over again with the choice to keep a fast or to break it, especially as our apetite grows for those things we are abstaining from. And that discipline – strengthening our wills to overcome our physical appetites – often has spill-over effects on other parts of our life, especially our spiritual lives. Thus, when Jesus encounters the series of temptations at the end of the 40 days, despite his weakened physical condition, ironically, spiritually he was much stronger and able to resist the Devil.

Other commentators note that the various tasks and challenges of daily life distract us from deeper self-reflection and the important but not urgent. Consequently, pilgrimage into the desert is not so much an escape from the temptations of the modern (or ancient) world, but rather an escape from the distractions of the world so that we can truly do battle with our inner demons. This was the insight of the so-called Desert Fathers of the Early Church.

While both capture something profoundly true, there is also the sense that here Jesus was flipping the script.

Every morning as we read through the Old Testament during Morning Prayer, we are constantly confronted with Israel’s inability to remain faithful to God. Sometimes that is even described in quite colourful language. 

Yet here, in response to each of the three temptations, Jesus quotes a passage from Scripture – Deut 6; Deut 8; and Psalm 91 – all three of which relate to God’s call for Israel to remain faithful to the covenantal framework God established with them. In other words, while Israel repeatedly failed to live up to their end of the bargain, Jesus is pictured as the Faithful Son, the one true Israelite who proved faithful in the time of testing. 

Consequently, not only did Christ reverse the faithlessness of Israel, but also the disobedience of Adam – in effect, the disobedience of all humanity. 

It’s not a coincidence that we have this Reading on the first Sunday of Lent, because you could equally ask why so many Christians observe the season of Lent. Isn’t asceticism something for medieval monks?

Perhaps. But the last line Luke leaves us with is a bit ominous: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.”

Satan, the Devil, the “accuser”, the “enemy”, the powers of darkness – does not simply vanish forever. Christ will have other periods of testing, not least in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

And the same is true in each of our lives. Each of us has – or will – go through periods of significant testing. That’s why we pray each day, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one...” 

In which case, perhaps a little bit of desert each year might not be such a bad thing. And hopefully, through God’s grace – in the power of the Holy Spirit – like Christ, we will grow a bit stronger to withstand the attack of the enemy of our souls the next time it comes.

Amen.