3rd February Trinity 2015, The Quiet Mystery

Blake

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.’”

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."

Botticelli

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.

3^rd February Trinity

(Sunday after Ash Wednesday)

Matthew 4: 1-11

Monreale

We are spiritual beings living in earthly human bodies. Over the course of the ages, these bodies have become ‘infected. ’ To use a computer analogy, it is as though adversarial beings have inserted various viruses into our human constitution. They have so-to-speak’ corrupted our files’. They are attempting to commandeer them in order to make us do things not originally intended by the Maker. Jesus is our security adviser. He helps us figure out how to work around the problems.

First we are not to pay attention solely to the earthly side of things. We are to recognize that we are nourished not only by bread, but also by all that we take in of the earthly. But most importantly we are nourished and sustained by the intangible creative Power behind all that is, the very Source of our existence.

By contrast we are also not to rely solely or foolishly on the heavenly either. We are to use our earthly judgment and sense of responsibility, our capacity of clear thinking. If we keep visiting those internal sites of infection, if we listen to the illusions of pride, we will fall. We are not to put the heavenly world to the test.

And furthermore, we are to recognize and distinguish clearly between God and the adversary’s infections. We are guard against illusion and delusion. We are to serve and follow the Original Source.

The poet Denise Levertov describes our human condition, our position between heaven and earth:

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

Problems insoluble and problems offering

their own ignored solutions

jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber

along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing

their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then

once more the quiet mystery

is present to me, the throng's clamor

recedes: the mystery

that there is anything, anything at all,

let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,

rather than void: and that, O Lord,

Creator, Hallowed One, You still,

hour by hour sustain it.[1]

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[1] Denise Levertov,  “Primary Wonder” in Selected Poems