4th February Trinity 2009, The True Shape

3^rd, 4^th February Trinity

(Sunday after Ash Wednesday)

Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the loneliness of the desert to experience the tempting power of the adversary.

After fasting forty days and nights, He felt for the first time hunger for earthly nourishment. Then the tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, let these stones become bread through the power of your word.”

Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘The human being shall not live on bread alone; he lives by the creative power of every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

  

Carl Bloch

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the parapet of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Again a third time, the devil took him to a very elevated place, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give to you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me  as your Lord. “

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship [pray to] God your Lord who guides you and serve him only.’”

Then the adversary left him, and he beheld again the angels as they came to bring him nourishment. 

4^th February Trinity

March 1, 2009

Matthew 4:1-11

The story of Christ’s temptation is the archetype of the three areas in which all human beings are tempted.

The first temptation is to concentrate on the material aspects of life. The devil tries to tempt Christ into magic-ing stones into bread. Christ’s answer points to the fact that the magic is already there, in the food; it is God’s creative power that bids what we eat, and thus we ourselves, to live. It is the divine life that nourishes us, not the mineral.

Vasily Surikov

The second temptation is to believe that we can do anything we want and that God will save us. Christ’s answer: No arrogance: God’s love is unconditional; nevertheless, we human beings will ourselves have to bear the consequences of our own deeds.

The third temptation is to misunderstand where true power comes from. True power comes from freely and voluntarily letting ourselves be guided by the divine. Divine guidance will ultimately lead us toward the kind of sacrificing of personal power out of love of others. This is something that the devil, the prince of this world, cannot comprehend—the power of sacrifice.

Christ’s answers to these three temptations are all linked by one theme: to remember the divine world from which you come; to volunteer in humility to take the creative guidance and sacrificial power of God’s realm into our thinking. This has become all the more urgent in our time, since we Westerners have essentially been nourishing ourselves on the stones of usury, worshipping our own prowess and testing the limits for far too long.

The poet David Whyte says:

We shape our self 

to fit this world

and by the world 

are shaped again.

The visible 

and the invisible

work[ing] together 

in common cause,

to produce 

the miraculous….

So may we, in this life 

trust

to those elements 

we have yet to see

or imagine, 

and look for the true

shape of our own self 

by forming it well

to the great 

intangibles about us.[1]

 www.thechristiancommunity.org

---

[1] David Whyte, “Working Together”, in House of Belonging