Thought for the Week - 9 March 2024

I remember visiting the former East Germany when I was a lot younger, the cobbled motorways, the strange food, particularly dishes based on a perception of what Western food was made by people who had never eaten it, and the taste of disappointment and uncertainty about what the future would hold. In many ways, things have not changed so much, you can go to Stralsund near the Polish border and see a town beautifully restored but where there is little or no work to be had. The outside has changed, the inside is similar. John Le Carré’s novel, The Secret Pilgrim, tells of a young man, a member of the UK intelligence services, visiting the former East Germany to liaise with a spy. Against all proper procedure, acting from anxiety to do things right, he carries in his pocket some cards on which were written details of the spy network. The visit goes well, and it is only on his return that he notices that the cards are missing, that they must have fallen out of his pocket.

Shortly afterwards, the spy network is rolled up, resulting in torture and loss of life. This leads to the young man having a mental crisis and confessing to his superior in the intelligence services what he had done. The superior writes: “Then the appalling banality of what the young man had told me got through to me: that you could lose a [spy] network as easily as you could lose a bunch of keys.” That allegory holds true for church communities too, we can just lose what has been built up by accident.

Sin involves free choice and decision, and although world history is full of sins that are big and thought through and destructive, I wonder if there’s not an important part of the story of sin that is not unlike careless, unthinking banality, almost like losing a bunch of keys through lack of thought and care. We just forget the importance of keeping peace for a moment, and there is war. We forget the importance of our Christian pilgrimage, and there is the devil.

Jesus is revealed to us as ‘being full of the Holy Spirit,’ presumably a reference to his baptism, when the Holy Spirit ‘descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove.’ So we come to his self-disclosure: Jesus was ‘fed by the Holy Spirit and ate no human food’ but, being human, he was hungry. When the devil asked him to turn a stone into bread he was not asking Jesus to perform some cheap circus trick. He was tempting Jesus to break his fast, to suggest that he could only be sustained by human food.

The second tempting of Jesus becomes ‘cosmic.’ The Devil shows him all the kingdoms of the world and tells him that he may have their authority and glory if Jesus would only fall down and worship the devil. This is a blatant lie because they were not his to give. That is why Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy, dismisses his pretentions: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only will you serve.’

In the final temptation Jesus is asked to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, in the belief that God will protect him from harm. The devil, who himself quotes scripture, is then told: ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’

So then, what is disclosed to us for reflection during Lent? What do we have which we are not to lose? What do we carry which is of great value? Given the Spirit at baptism, which we carry, we are to reflect that it is our spiritual lives in God that will sustain us: ‘We cannot live by bread alone.’ A challenge to the materialist culture of our day which is easy to be sucked into. That is why the rich are condemned in St Luke’s Gospel; not because they are rich, but because they see in wealth a security that can only come from God. The final temptation continues the theme. It is not simply about the abuse of power and riches: it is a thundering denunciation of the descent into idolatry that their worship implies. This is personified by the devil, who is a liar – true worship is the worship of God and, according to John, the devil ‘is a murderer from the beginning.’

The point about idols is that ‘we know their names.’ We feel we can manipulate them and be in control of them. We feel that we can break the rules and it won’t matter, that we can drop the cards and if things unravel it won’t be our fault. So we must not turn God into an idol by putting him to the test and we must value the practices of a holy Lent. All this is surely why this passage is such a splendid opening for Lent, as it faces us with the truth about Jesus and how life is to be lived at the deepest level of our being – it is then about the self-disclosure of Jesus to us and our gift of the Spirit who will sustain us in all the ‘testing’ of our lives, and remind us not to lose the network of sacraments and devotions and salvation which has been entrusted to us and which, sometimes, we carry around a little too casually. There is a point to Lent, and it may be that we should remember the greatness of the faith which we hold.