First Sunday in Lent
Mark 1:9-15
March 1, 2009Temptation
Unless you arrived very late or are purposely not paying attention, you will have cottoned onto the fact that we have entered the liturgical season of Lent. For many Presbyterians, this is still unfamiliar territory.
That’s because our spiritual antecedents, the Reformers of the 16th century, took a dim view of Lent. Also Advent. Also Christmastide. Also Eastertide. In fact, they disapproved of every season in the liturgical calendar on the grounds that none of them had clear scriptural warrant.
Those first Reformers did allow for a few special occasions: It was O.K. to mark the birth of Jesus (provided you didn’t let the celebrations get out of hand), his death, and of course, his resurrection. All these events are clearly attested in scripture. On this list they also included the occasion of Jesus’ circumcision – another event with clear scriptural attestation, but not something you and I are inclined to celebrate. (Imagine going to the Hallmark Store to pick out a Circumcision Card for your great aunt Lucy. The mind boggles.
I have a feeling, however, that even though they did reject the season of Lent, our forebears in the faith would approve of our focus today on the these verses from the opening chapter of the Gospel of Mark. The text opens on the banks of the Jordan River where Jesus, freshly arrived from Nazareth of Galilee, is baptized by John, and it leaves us with Jesus in Galilee again, proclaiming the good news of God: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.”
Sandwiched between Jesus’ baptism and his first public appearance is a forty-day sojourn in the wilderness. That’s when Jesus figures out what his baptism means and how he’s going to live it out.
This, more or less, is where the pre-Reformation church got the idea for Lent. Lent is a period of forty days (not counting Sundays) during which you and I spend some time with Jesus in the wilderness, figuring out what our baptism means, and how we are to live it out.
As Jesus is coming up out the water, gasping for air like a baby fresh from the womb, he hears a voice from heaven which tells him, “You are my Beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” The Spirit then drives Jesus into the wilderness, where, Mark says, he is “tempted by Satan.”
What, do you suppose, Mark means by that?
Forget for the moment how Matthew and Luke tell this story. They fill in the details with considerable flair. They have us salivating over fresh-baked bread, getting vertigo perched on the pinnacle of temple, and suffering altitude sickness as we survey all the kingdoms of the world. “You can have everything you could possibly want,” Satan tells us, “If only you will fall down and worship me.” (As if the we hadn’t heard that already from Wall Street bankers and the credit card companies.)
Colorful as Matthew and Luke’s accounts of temptation are, they all boil down to the same thing. Jesus has been told that God loves him, that God is delighted to call him God’s own. Now Satan tempts him to forget who he is, and to settle for something far less. To sell is birthright for a mess of pottage. To let the world define his identity, instead of God. To make his life a success in the eyes of others.
Michael Lindvall, preacher and novelist, writes: “The real temptation Jesus faced, the real temptation we face in a hundred subtle ways, is the temptation to be a success in the eyes of the world but at the cost of integrity. We are tempted to succeed at the price of our families, to succeed magnificently but lose our happiness, to succeed grandly and pay for it with our souls.” (TheThoughtfulChristian.com).
There is a sense in which Jesus faces that kind of temptation at every point in Mark’s gospel.
His ministry has barely begun before he gets a reputation as a miracle worker, when the point of his so-called miracles is not to call attention to himself, but to the kingdom of God which is springing up all around him.
A huge crowd gathers when Jesus enters Jerusalem, and the bigwigs in both the temple and the governor’s palace get nervous, thinking he’s hankering to unseat them. But he’s not campaigning for office. He’s challenging the foundations upon which both temple and empire rest.
Offered success, Jesus chose faithfulness instead. It cost him his life, and before he died even Jesus thought God had abandoned him. But the voice at his baptism spoke the truth. God loved his Son Jesus with a love that would not let him go. Even the cross and the tomb could not defeat that love.
The good news is, what is true for Jesus is true for all of the children of God. Our baptism is the sign of God’s love, and our call as baptized people is to live out that love in the world.
We do that by aligning our lives with the kingdom Jesus embodied. Jesus stood for justice. So can we. Jesus welcomed outcasts. So can we. Jesus pointed to signs of God’s kingdom breaking into ordinary lives. That’s our calling, too.
Those 16th century Reformers who took such a dim view of Lent also took a dim view of sin. Sin, they believed, meant breaking the law of God. They therefore frowned heavily upon murder, adultery, lying, stealing, and others in the Big Ten. But sin goes deeper than that, the Reformers taught. Sin is also falling short of God’s best hopes. It’s settling for lives that break God’s heart of love.
So the Reformers didn’t just make rules. They tried to shape their piece of the world to reflect God’s love for it. They established the first public schools, where not just boys, but girls as well, were taught to read and write. Public drunkenness was a huge problem in cities like Geneva, so they did their best to clean up the taverns. This met with considerable resistance, as you might imagine, but at least their hearts were in the right place.
The point is, there’s more to the Christian life than not breaking rules. To be Christian is to live both privately and publicly as a child of God. That’s hard, and the temptation is to settle for less.
Tom Long teaches preaching at Emory University. He’s one of the finest preachers and storytellers I know. He told a story once about the kind of temptation I’m talking about.
It’s a story about a play he was in, back in his high school days. This play was directed by a teacher new to Tom’s school, a young woman fresh out of college, full of energy and enthusiasm. (I had a drama and music teacher like that. Most of the guys in my class were in love with her. Picture Judy Arthur in her first teaching assignment.)
This teacher was determined to put on the very best play that school had ever seen. She worked with her thespians week after week. She made costumes. She helped build sets. She ran lines over and over so that everyone was sure to know his or her part.
By the time opening night arrived, the players were ready and excited. The whole cast believed in themselves. The auditorium was packed. The air crackled with anticipation.
All went well until the middle of the second act, when one of the players forgot a line. It was obvious what had happened to the young man, and the auditorium fell silent. Sitting in the pit, the young teacher/director whispered the forgotten words to the student, but either he didn’t hear or he was too stricken to pay attention.
The silence on the stage grew ever more awkward. Finally, in desperation, he just made up a line. Ad-libbed. Said the first thing that came into his head.
The audience was relieved, and because it was a pretty clever line, they broke out in laughter. It was a long laugh, and the young actor enjoyed it. So he made up another line. The audience laughed again, but not so loudly and not so long as before. After delivering his third made-up line, there was nothing in the auditorium but silence and embarrassment.
Tom remembers looking down into the pit where the young teacher was sitting, watching her play disintegrate. The tears were streaming down her cheeks.*
Sin is not just forgetting your lines. It’s forgetting who you are. It’s forgetting whose you are. It’s behaving as though life is all about the quest for affirmation from the audience – all about milking the crowd for applause.
Mark doesn’t tell us what Jesus said to Satan while he was being tempted in the wilderness. Perhaps Matthew and Luke are right. Perhaps he remembered his lines. Lines like:
“One does not live by bread alone,”
“Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.”
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
To be a Christian is to be given an identity that we neither earn nor deserve. It is to live into a life headed in the same direction as Jesus – toward justice, toward compassion, toward confrontation with the powers and principalities that would have us be less than human, less than God intends. It is to travel through Good Friday to the other side – toward Easter. It is to remember your baptism. It is to remember your lines, to remember who you are.
*Story told in roughly this form by Michael Lindvall, TheThoughtfulChristian.com
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