ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by the Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at High Mass on the First Sunday of Lent, 10th February 2008

Readings: Genesis 2. 15-17 & 3. 1-7; Romans 5. 12-19; Matthew 4. 1-11

So now Christ is in the desert for forty days and in Lent we're invited to spend the time with him.

There's a tradition of using this time imaginatively. It begins with the gospels themselves. Mark's Gospel was probably written first. All Mark says is that Jesus was driven into the wilderness and tempted in the company of wild beasts and ministered to by angels. It's Matthew and Luke who supply the details of the temptations. Satan tempts Jesus to turn stones into bread, to leap from the pinnacle of the temple, to rule over the nations.

John Milton in his sequel to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained portrays Jesus as the moral hero who says 'No' to Satan. More recently the author, Jim Crace has written a novel called Quarantine which explores some of the dark recesses of the desert experience.

If ever we've tried to imagine Jesus in the wilderness I suspect that we've thought of him completely alone. But Jim Crace uses current research to portray the wilderness as a 'busy' place. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavations around where they were found at Qumran near Jericho it's evident that many people went to the desert.

The settlement at Qumran was inhabited for over two hundred years from around the year 150 BC until the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. No one knows how many people were there at any one time - anything between 25 and 150. It's also possible that there were other settlements like Qumran elsewhere in the desert that have now disappeared; covered by the sands of time.

So in Jim Crace's novel alongside Jesus there are a number of other desert-dwellers or what he calls 'quarantiners'. Some quarantiners are there to purge their guilt; others are seeking healing. One of these is a character called Musa. Musa is a crook. He's a sort of Rackman figure. He collects rents from the cave-dwellers. He exploits fake piety. With him is his pregnant wife whom he treats despicably. Musa has a strange encounter with Jesus and he recognizes instantly who he is.

Here Jim Crace spots something that is key to the gospels. The disciples rarely understand who Jesus is but the demons always recognize him. In the story of the Gadarene swine the two men possessed cry out 'What have you to do with us, Son of God? (Mt 8. 31); and in the synagogue at Capernaum a madman yells at Jesus 'Let us alone! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.' (Lk 4. 34).

Lent is the time to look at Jesus with our dark eye. Most of us are capable of fake piety. Our 'Sunday Best' can be a cloak for the Prince of Darkness. Lent is the time to expose our troubled side to the light of Christ. This morning's first two readings (from Genesis and Paul's Letter to the Church in Rome) offer us insights into the Christian understanding of fallen humanity.

The relationship of God and man is not only about individuals; we're all in this together. We're in solidarity with Adam and the murkiest parts of ourselves can spot Christ a mile off. These forty days invite us to take a long hard look at who we are and write what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called the dark book of beginning (in his poem The angels). It's time to review the past and squarely face our motives.

If we do that there'll be surprises just as the temptations of Christ are full of surprises.

Was Jesus tempted to sin? Well, not exactly. Turn stones into bread? Hardly a bad thing in a hungry world. Jump off the temple? Nothing wrong with being a stuntman. Rule the kingdoms of the world? Somebody has to do it. They're called politicians. Jesus is tempted to do nothing 'bad'. He's not temped to slander someone, steel or murder. But what Jesus is tempted to do is to destroy the foundation of true human life - the worship of God.

Alongside our dark side is that worthy side of us. Worship (lit 'worth-ship') is fundamental to our natures. Before Genesis goes into what Adam and Eve got up to in the Garden of Eden we're told the story of creation itself. There's an almost liturgical repetition that God sees what he has made and it was good. Original Sin only comes after Original Goodness.

Humanity bears the image of God and this image is evident in our free will and the things that make us worthy - our capacity to love, our ability to create and sustain families, intimacies and friendships and our desire for God. In the old marriage service when the groom placed the ring on the bride's finger he said With my body I thee worship.

True worship, like true love always takes us out of ourselves. It never places things within our grasp. Satan's great work is not to make us break the rules but to limit us, to turn us in on ourselves, to prevent us reaching our full stature as human beings made in the image of God.

Working out what that means for each of us requires regular self-examination. The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living (Apologia 38a). So this Lent let's not just give up something but let's take up something : take up some time - go for a long and prayerful walk, have a retreat, spend time with Christ in the wilderness; allow ourselves to be quarantined, cleansed, enlightened, so that the darkness and the sin that clings so closely is sloughed off.

This is the great season for making our Confession (it's something by which this parish sets great store) so that come Easter we are absolved, delivered, set free, to worship and live lives that are truly worthy God, the One who draws us through the darkness and the barren places into his glorious Easter light. Our divine image is restored. Imagine that!