Gen. 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Matthew 4.1-11
+ Ten years ago, when I was ordained to
the priesthood, I included a prayer on the booklet for my ordination service, which
I adapted from a prayer written by the great Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael
Ramsey. In that prayer, I prayed:
Break it not as I would like it to be broken, but as you would.
And because it is you who are breaking it, how can I be afraid,
for your hands are the hands I have felt all my life….
supporting me, comforting me and guiding me
to the places you wanted me to be.
Your hands are safety and in them, I am safe.
Some times, I realize, we need to be
careful what we pray for. Because our prayers might be answered in ways we
never thought they would. I can that, in these past ten years, I have been
broken in ways I never could’ve imagined.
I say that not as a complaint. I say
that simply as a fact. And I can say that, I am, somewhat thankful for the opportunity
to be broken in ways that God has seen fit.
Because, in being broken, I have felt a
weird connection with Jesus that I might not have had otherwise. After all, he too was broken. He too knew what brokeness was in his very
Body.
That concept of the broken ones of God
having a connection with the broken body of Christ that we experience in a very
physical way during our celebration of the Eucharist has spoken to me and it is
this theme that I am going to return to again and again during this season.
Being broken—and we all are broken in various
ways—is just a reality for us. But it is not a time to despair. Our brokenness, especially when we place it
alongside the broken Body of Christ that is lifted up and shown at the
Eucharist, has more meaning than we can fully fathom at times.
In that moment, we realize we can no
longer feel separated from Christ by our brokenness. It is a moment in which we are, in fact,
uniquely and wonderfully joined TO Christ in our shared brokenness.
And what we glimpse today in our
scripture readings is, on one hand brokenness, and on the other hand,
wholeness.
In our readings from the Hebrew Bible and from the Gospel,
we get two stories with one common character. In our reading from Genesis, we find Satan in
the form of a serpent, tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden.
In our Gospel, we have Satan yet again
doing what he does best—tempting. But
this time he is tempting Jesus.
What we have here is essentially the
same story, retold. We have the tempter.
We have the tempted. We have the
temptations. But we have two very
different results. In fact, we have
exactly opposite results.
But ultimately these stories tell us this: anytime we find something broken, somehow God
fixes it in the end. When it comes to
God, what seems like a failure—the fall of Adam and Eve—eventually becomes the
greatest success of all—the refusal of Jesus to be tempted. And whatever is broken, is somehow always
fixed and restored.
Still, we must deal with this issue of temptation. It is the hinge event in both of the stories
we hear this morning from scripture.
Alexander Schmemann, the great Eastern
Orthodox theologian, once said that there are two roots to all sin—pride and
the flesh. If we look at what Satan
offers both Adam and Jesus in today’s readings, we see that all the temptations
can find their root mostly in the sin of pride. Adam and Eve, as they partake of the fruit,
have forgotten about God and have placed themselves first. The eating of that fruit is all about them. They have placed themselves before God in
their own existence. And that’s what
pride really is. It is the putting of
ourselves before God. It is the
misguided belief that everything is all about us. The world revolves around us. The universe exists to serve us. And the only humility we have is a false one.
When one allows one’s self to think
along those lines, the fall that comes after it is a painful one. When Adam and
Eve eat of the forbidden fruit, they are ashamed because they realize they are
naked. They realize they have nothing. They realize that, by themselves and of
themselves, they are nothing. This
realization is that it is not all about them, after all. They have failed themselves and they have
failed God in their pride.
But the amazing thing, if you notice,
is that Adam and Eve still have not really learned their lesson. They leave the Garden in shame, but there is
still a certain level of pride there. As
they go, we don’t hear them wailing before God. We don’t see them turning to God in sorrow for
what they have done. We don’t see them
presenting themselves before God, broken and humbled, by what they have done. They never ask God for forgiveness. Instead,
they leave in shame, but they leave to continue on in their pride.
From this story, we see that Satan knows perfectly how to
appeal to humans. The doorway for Satan
to enter into one’s life is through pride. Of course, in scripture, we find that Satan’s
downfall came through pride as well. Lucifer wanted to be like God. And when he knew he couldn’t, he rebelled and
fell. We see him trying to use pride
again in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.
When Satan tempts Jesus in the
wilderness, he tries to appeal to Jesus’ pride. He knows that Jesus knows he is exactly who
is. Satan knows that Jesus truly does
have the power to reign and rule, that he has all the power in the world. And Satan further knows that if he could
harness that power for himself—for evil—then he will have that power as well. Because Jesus was fully human, Satan knew that
he could appeal to the pride all humans carry with them.
But Jesus, because he, in addition to
being fully human, was also fully God as well, refused to succumb to the sin of
pride. In fact, because Jesus, fully
God, came to us and became human like us, the ultimate sign of humility came
among us.
So, these two stories speak in many ways to us, who are
struggling in our own lives. As we hear
these stories, we no doubt find ourselves relating fully to Adam and Eve. After all, like Adam and Eve, we find
ourselves constantly tempted and constantly failing as they did. And also like them, we find that when we fail,
when we fall, we oftentimes don’t turn again to God, asking God’s forgiveness
in our lives. We almost never are able
to be, like Jesus, able to resist the temptations of pride and sin, especially
when we are in a vulnerable state.
Jesus, after forty days of fasting, was
certainly in a vulnerable place to be tempted. As we all enter the forty days of fasting in
this season of Lent, we too need to be on guard. We too need to keep our eyes on Jesus—who, in
addition to being our God, is also our companion in this earthly adventure we
are having. We need to look to Jesus,
the new Adam, the one who shows us that Adam’s fall—Adam’s brokenness—and
Adam’s fall and brokenness is essentially our fall and brokenness as well—is
not the end of the story.
Whatever failings Adam had were made right with Jesus. And,
in the same way, whatever failings we make are ultimately made right in Jesus
as well. Jesus has come among us to show up the right pathway. Jesus has come
to us to lead us through our failings and our brokenness to a place in which we
will succeed, in which we will be whole.
So, let us follow Jesus in the path of our lives, allowing
him to lead us back to the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve were forced to
abandoned. Because it is only when we
have abandoned pride in our lives—when we have shed concern for ourselves, when
we have denied ourselves and disciplined ourselves to the point in which we
realize it is not all about us at all—only then will we discover that the
temptations that come to us will have no effect on us.
Humility, which we should be
cultivating and practicing during this season of Lent, should be what we are
cultivating and practicing all the time in our lives. Humility is the best safeguard against
temptation. Humility is the remedy to
help us back on the road to piecing ourselves back together from our shattered
brokenness.
So, as we move through the wasteland of Lent and throughout
the rest of our lives, let us be firm and faithful in keeping Jesus as the goal
of our life. Let us not let those
temptations of pride rule out in our life. In these days of Lent, let us practice
personal humility and spiritual fasting. Let Jesus set the standard in our lives.
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