First Sunday of Lent, 1997 (#1)

First Sunday of Lent, 1997 (#1)

A time to recover our depths

Last Sunday I suggested that one way of getting hold of Lent and trying to build a structure for ourselves to live in during Lent is to think of it as a time to recover our depths and look at those things that are most central, most significant, and most real for us as human beings. The first Sunday of Lent always has as its Gospel one of the Temptation Narratives, and this year we’re in the Markan Cycle so we have what must strike us as a very brief account compared to the accounts that most of us remember in Matthew and Luke where you have the three-fold Temptation of Jesus jumping off of buildings, and turning rocks into bread, and all that other business. Mark is very laconic when he simply says, "Jesus went out and got tempted." We’ll come back and look at how that got amplified in the tradition that Matthew and Luke took up, but maybe it’s useful not to get all the specifics of this seemingly fanciful notion of turning rocks into bread and all that business.

Lets look at the notion of temptation itself: I think it’s possible to use that to come closer to what this depth business is all about because I think it is true that, to the extent that one searches one’s own depth before God, the discoveries we come up with are not unambiguously wonderful. That is to say that at our depths there are some very strong, and unhappy, and very de-humanizing tendencies, so if we’re going to think about temptation we cannot think in terms of, "well, I’m going to rob the bank of Montreal at Richmond and University this afternoon, or I’m going to be tempted to rape and pillage my neighborhood this evening..."--No, temptation, if we’re going to take this business seriously, has to do with stuff that is really important and central to us as human beings, as we can assume it was with Jesus. I mean, what would Jesus be tempted to?--To go fornicate or masturbate in the desert?--I doubt it. I think that whatever Jesus was tempted to would have had to have been central to his understanding of himself as a human being before God.

Let me take again one theme that comes up over and over again in the Bible which is a source of temptation and which is one of the discoveries that one makes, I think, at least it is true for me and I think it is true for everybody else, when one tries to settle down into one’s depths. One of the great discoveries down there is the power of fear in one’s life. Most of us get by on massive quantities of bravado: "by God, I can do it, I can do anything, I’m not afraid of anybody."--I don’t think so... because it seems to me that it is precisely when looking for one’s depths that one discovers the pervasiveness of fear. Let me at this point make a really important distinction. I don’t know, maybe it’s the resurgence of the Star Wars Trilogy and the fact that people are still willing to spend $36 million to see the updated version that put me in mind of the "Dark Force." To put it another way, since a lot of people have been impressed by the psycho-therapeutic notions of Carl Jung, is the Gospel "crypto-Jungian," as the whole Star Wars business is? --I don’t think so. In so far as I can make sense of this stuff, Jung, who was an atheist, sees people clearly conflicted between opposing and equal forces of good and bad, and thus the Star Wars analogy. That is not the Biblical understanding; the Biblical understanding is that the evil is always parasitic on the good. Evil is not a counter-weight to good; it is a distorted form of good. In Augustine’s famous formulation, evil is always the absence of being, and being, in the metaphysical notion of things, is always good. Let me try to make that clearer by taking up the notion that pervades the first two readings: namely, the notion of covenant.

What is a covenant? Well, the notion of covenant comes out of the Exodus Narrative: a covenant was basically a political arrangement that was popular in the Ancient Near East whereby a fief pledged fidelity to a master who had acted benevolently to them, so it is very much like a feudal arrangement. In other words, a covenant was a way of talking about a relationship between two unequal partners which was based on gratitude for what the superior partner had done for the inferior partner. Thus the Jews said, "that sounds just like God who saw us as oppressed people and wanted to do something for us, and that’s a useful way, it is not the only way, of trying to conceptualize how we relate to God." So we get covenant talk all through the Hebrew Bible: we get a covenant with Adam, we get a covenant with Abraham, we get a covenant with David, and we get covenants all over the place... because the Jews thought that was really a useful way to understand that life is to be lived in gratitude to God, and that spelled itself out in radical openness to God and to everybody else. Again, the heart of the Jews’ understanding of the Covenant was that this was the arrangement that they had wanted to make with the god who favored the oppressed, and it was held with a view to removing oppression from our relationships as human beings.

Now, let’s go back. What does everybody really want?--I would love to be able to be intimate with everybody, maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think so because I think that that’s what the whole Gospel is about. To put it in the terms of Genesis, "to be naked and unashamed, to be able to stand naked and unashamed in front of every other human being, with every other human being, as people of God" is the Covenant to understanding... So the Jews saw that that was not in fact the way human relations worked out, but that they basically worked out in patterns of oppression, as a universal fact. Therefore, to even attempt to stand naked and unashamed before anybody else is to open one’s self up to the very real possibility of being violated. So, over and over, we erect all these defenses because the best defense, as we all know, is a good offense. To be tempted in one’s depths therefore, is to precisely be tempted to let the fear of being violated inhibit one’s own living. The notion of depth is really useful at this point, at least it is for me, because I am so accustomed to it that I wear my fear just as comfortably as I wear my skin, and I automatically tailor what I say, how I say it, how I look... to an extraordinary extent in the terms of some kind of strategy of wanting to be intimate and yet ultimately protecting myself at all costs. So, I hope that this is a useful start at least.

What we are tempted to is to betray this covenantal understanding of my place in the world, and with God, because God is dangerous too. As the Jews new, it is a horrifying thing to fall into the hands of God because God is the one who does not let us screw around. God is the one who will not let us fake our way through life, and that’s hazardous, if you want to talk about fear... If that redoubt, the redoubt of deception and of hiding were taken away, not just before other people but before God as well, then I really do have something to worry about. So, I think the temptation for me, and maybe for all of us, is the very central temptation that we discover at our depth, and that is to betray the Covenant.

That finally lays open the three-fold temptation that we get in Matthew and Luke because it is very clear, according to the scriptural scholars, and I think they are right, that all of those temptations are the temptations that the Jews suffered while they were wandering through the desert in the process of the exodus: they wanted food, they wanted some kind of magical deliverance, they wanted an idol that they could see..., they wanted a god like a golden calf that they could put their hands on and that they could rely on..., and those are precisely the temptations that the traditions had created. Jesus, this arch-Jew, who refused in the desert to give in to any of those temptations to break the covenant. So, at first blush, I must confess that I just came to this during this week, "ahh yeah, I’m going to discover my depths... That’s good, it’s like a rock settling on the bottom of a pond...That sounds really good..."--No, it’s scary, but that is the way to anticipate Easter. Only if I do that can I begin to create life out of death.

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