First Sunday of Lent 1997 (#2)

First Sunday of Lent 1997 (#2)

A Time of Deepening Ourselves

I proposed last Sunday and on Ash Wednesday that one way of organizing Lent so that it doesn’t just dribble away without our noticing it is to see it as a time of deepening ourselves, and as a time to examine what is most fundamental and most profound in us, with a view to living more fully from our own depths rather than bouncing along the surface, which is what, I think, most of us do most of the time. So it’s under that rubric that I’d like to look at this week’s readings.

The first Sunday of Lent always has the Temptation Narrative, either from Matthew, Mark, or Luke, but, interestingly enough, the Jesus in John’s Gospel never gets tempted. So in Matthew and Luke it’s the familiar Temptation that we all know: "change these stones into bread, or jump off this building and everybody will go nuts and follow you..." You don’t have any of that in John, and later on I’d like to propose that those particular kinds of temptations developed in the tradition of another issue that is also going to come up in these readings, particularly in the first two: namely, that of the Covenant. Going back to this business of the Temptation and depth, presumably these were real temptations: Jesus was a human being like us in all things but sin, therefore He was able to be tempted, and a temptation is strongest when it operates at the level of our depths. This is one of the things that occurred to me this week: when you think about depth you think, "oh, this is going to be a wonderful week of discovery and I’m going to find out all kinds of nifty things that I hadn’t paid attention to, and if I just pay attention to them, and if I operate from them, then I’m going to be all... splendid. Well, the Temptation Narrative says, "wait, slow down a minute," so that when we start looking at the depth there’s a whole bunch of stuff swimming around down there beside all these nice things.

We might well begin by asking what Jesus was likely to be tempted by, really. I mean, was he tempted to find a lady and go into the desert and fornicate, or masturbate, or rob a bank, or something like that?--Not ruddy likely. We’re talking about something that is a temptation of real sin, which is the deformity of one’s own humanity. That’s what sin is all through the Bible, a kind of deformity. There is a theme that goes through the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament about a power, Paul even personalized it when he talked about the power of sin, and it’s given a quite specific identification in a bunch of places in the Bible, and that is: the power of fear. Fear to do what?--It is the fear to precisely tell the truth about one’s self; it’s the fear to look at one’s own inclination to pettiness, shallowness, and triviality; and, above all, it’s the fear, according to the First Letter of John, that inhibits that thing that is deepest in us, and I would like to propose that the deepest thing in us, on the basis of the Biblical narrative, is intimacy with everybody else.

According to the Creation Story, the thing that people are made for is to be able to stand naked before God, and before everybody else so that nothing about one’s self is held back, from anybody, or from God, yet I think the fear to do that is so permanent and so pervasive a feature of ourselves that we barely know that we are operating under its power. Fear is like my skin because I know that when I attempt to lay myself out to somebody else I’m in real trouble because someone is going to try to use that against me and get a leg up on me somehow and violate me in one way or another. Well, I don’t want to make up a little fairy-tale about what Jesus was tempted to, but I would not be surprised if it was something very much like that because that’s the thing, of course, that really deforms us as human beings. To the extent that we operate under that power, we are deformed, and the problem is that most of us aren’t even aware of it, which means that when we do start looking at our depth we see all kinds of stuff floating around down there. Of course it is something that works before God too; it is not just a fear that keeps me from other people. The Jews had a saying: "It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God." Why is that? On the surface that sounds kind of weird, is God some kind of monstrous figure that is going to jump out at you and beat you on the head?--No, I don’t think so. I think that what they are getting at is that God doesn’t tolerate the nonsense of the regular disguising and bravado that go along with so much of our so-called living with each other. God made us to be truthful, and, therefore, the prospect of falling into the hands of such a God is scary, and so fear works there too.

What holds this stuff together is this notion of the Covenant. Covenant is a word that goes all through the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, and in the Canon of the Mass we say that Jesus is the blood of the New Covenant. What is that all about? Well, the Covenant is simply a political term that was derived from the third millennium before the common era as a regular arrangement between a vassal and a lord. The lord said, "I have done all this good stuff for you, and I will do all this good stuff for you, and so this is how you are to operate." It was just a standard political practice that was in place in most of the ancient Near East. So the Jews, out of their experience of the Exodus, and we will have to come back to that in a minute, thought, "gee, that’s a good way to talk about our relationship to God. We believe that God saw us being oppressed, and we believe above all that this God is opposed to humans oppressing each other." That’s the crucial thing, but all that stuff I said about fear comes in to play too at this point because one of the greatest ways to oppress somebody is to make them afraid of you. The Jews thought that they would use covenant as one way, and they used a bunch of other metaphors too, of describing our relationship with God. "We have a covenant with God" is another way of saying that we will live out our lives in gratitude to this god who loves us and calls us to himself, and to all others, and that’s the connection between Covenant and this Genesis narrative of standing naked and ashamed before, not just my family, but before everybody. So the Covenant comes into play very much in terms of this business of depth and fear. And, of course, that’s exactly the way that this tradition goes back to the Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke where you get three different temptations...

What is going on in the Temptation Narratives? Some bright soul in the early Jesus Movement said, "Well, here we’ve got Jesus, the Jew who was absolutely faithful to God, and we want to contrast that Jew with the historical Judaism of the people who got out of Egypt and were wandering about the desert. What were they doing out there?--They were bitching and moaning: "we don’t have anything to eat out here, we want a God that we can see and touch, or we want some miraculous deliverance from here, like in the form of someone who can jump off a building and float down like a feather, that’s the kind of cat we need to get us out of this wretched place." So they made up this little story where that’s exactly what Jesus was tempted to do, and that was his struggle. Historically, is that what happened?--I don’t think so, but you can see how this stuff fits together. Was Jesus afraid of being faithful to God, or the implications of that?--Sure he was. The difference between Jesus and me is not that I have to fight temptation and he doesn’t. The difference is that He fought and won, and I fight and call it a draw, if not a dead loss, because of the power of fear in my life.

So, I’m hoping that as I think about this stuff during Lent, and as I try to spend time everyday searching those depths, that these readings can give us the advantage of not being too surprised when we find some pretty unpleasant things floating around down there. That also precisely gives us someplace to grow: it calls us from that kind of slavery and that kind of fear to that God who really does want to have a covenant with us and who is constantly calling us to somewhere beyond ourselves, or more profoundly to ourselves, and to each other of course.

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