+ ‘Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert’
It is the first Sunday in Lent and so we are with Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. It’s dangerous being a historian as your mind makes connections. The desert makes me think of the famous speech of the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus before fighting the Romans at the battle of Mons Graupius, a hill somewhere in NE Scotland. The speech is recorded by Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola was the Roman General at the battle, and so it is probably a literary fiction – but it has had more influence than any actual speech before the battle as Calgacus’s description of Roman policy has been quoted again and again: ‘they make a desert and they call it peace’.
Moscow claims to be the ‘third Rome’, after the Empires of Rome and Byzantium fell, and today we see again a military power killing and destroying but claiming it is liberating and keeping the peace. So two things to start with, the desert is not a cosy place for a retreat, it is a place of desolation, extreme weather and wild beasts – human or otherwise. Secondly the desert is a place of conflicted truth. Is it peace or is it a desolation? In a real desert there is no place to hide from the truth. I watched ‘Russia Today’ before it was shut down and it is remarkable how the Russian government shamelessly speaks lies. Not just a different perspective on the truth, which is always many-faceted, but claiming that things that can be proved to be false are actually true. Political life in Britain and America has also seen this in recent years and it always degrades humanity, Jesus said of the devil that he is a liar and the father of lies. That is a political statement as well as a theological one.
As well as a place of conflicted truth, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam the desert is also a place of primal honesty, of the golden age at the beginning. We see this in the first reading from Deuteronomy where Jews offering the first fruits of their harvest are commanded to say ‘My father was a wandering Aramean’. It’s a bit like a Jewish Creed, that’s who I am, not a farmer but the child of migrants and wanderers in the desert. Deuteronomy is from about the middle of the second millennium BC but these words ‘my father was a wandering Aramean’ are hundreds of years older. They are perhaps the oldest phrase in the Bible and they point us back to rootless nomads, and exiles in the desert. As we see the refugees leaving Ukraine, we should remember this.
The Bible is ancient, it needs interpretation, but it can also hold up a mirror to our sins. In this Creed, God gives the wandering Aramean the land of Israel. Western Liberals don’t get this, but Putin wants Ukraine not just for greed or security but because he sees it as the spiritual heartland of Russia. True religion stands with the wandering refugees but religion can breed evil. We need to discern. We need truth.
Lent is for us, if we take it seriously, a time in the desert. A time when we can pare things back and seek the truth. Check our what our priorities really are. That’s why the Church, for the last 1500 years, has read the story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness on this Sunday. That’s why we strip back the Church, unbleached vestments, no flowers, no gloria or alleluia. And when we cut things back we see the truth about ourselves and it is often not very flattering. That is why the Litany and Kyrie is sung today, to call on God to free us from sin, both our own and that of others. This is not the same as self-hatred, we can’t love God unless we love ourselves, but if we love ourselves we want the best for ourselves.
The same is true of the Church. Today we sung the classic psalm of Lent, psalm 91, a plea for protection from evil. But if you look at the gospel, you see the devil is quoting it – ‘he has given his angels charge over you’ – to encourage Jesus to jump off the top of the Temple. He also quotes Deuteronomy, ‘man does not live on bread alone’, but Jesus knows his Bible and quotes the Deuteronomy back to him: worship God alone and don’t test God. The Bible has been and is used to justify many evil things. Those churches that say ‘we are a Biblical church’ should reflect that the Church of Satan can say exactly the same thing.
But it is the very pages of the Bible that tell us this. Christianity can help us live well. We are not called to a ‘Biblical morality’, we are called to follow Jesus – and following Jesus involves doing just what he does in the desert. Discerning what is right and wrong using our God-given gift of human reason to interpret the revealed text of Scripture with the aid of the Holy Spirit. This is something it’s easier to do in a community, which is why we need the Church. Joining the Church is joining the argument, the discussion, the attempt to discern the truth in our world today. Lent is a good time to create our own desert in which to seek the truth, to find time to reflect on the Bible as we will be doing on Wednesdays here at our Lent Group and on Thursdays at EP on Zoom. In the desert of our reflection may our lives be shaped by the truth and be ready to call out evil wherever we see it, in the Church and in our society, as well as in the halls of the Kremlin.
