3rd, 4th 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.
4th February Trinity
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]
