Guilsborough: Second Sunday in 7 March, 2004
Call me a chicken, but I won’t be rushing off to see Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of Christ”.  I have always had a bit of an aversion to violence on the screen, except in those B movies where Indians are shot off horses by cowboys firing from beneath covered wagons.  One knows that those guys falling about are all extras doing a bit of a circus act, on Southport sands or in Arizona, and somehow it does not look like a massacre.  
However, when we embark on the six-week season of Lent we know where we are going along the road and we know that it will reach Calvary and  the passion of Our Lord.  Personally, I don’t  need to see that on the wide screen in surround sound.
Rather, I prefer to forget what lies at the end of the tunnel until reminded by Holy Week, and as we run round the circuit of the Christian year, to see Lent as a fixed point that makes us think about the meaning temptation in our own lives. 
It’s re-assuring to have recurring themes. We all need fixed points creating some sense of order in our lives. These days, however, such points are – to coin a phrase - going down like ninepins, bowled out by those buzzwords,  modernisation and reform.  Even if he was at times bit of a Gilbert & Sullivan character, I’m sorry that the Lord Chancellor will disappear.  I feel uneasy that the Crown Prosecution Service is to drop its Crown, or that the pound may finally go in favour of the euro.  
The good old Church of England now has a Revision Committee reporting to the General Synod that we need to re-think the story of the Wise Men, dropping that term in favour of the more neutral Magi. And the reason?  Because  “they were not necessarily wise and not necessarily men “.  With any luck, they will drop Satan next as being too masculine.  I agree with Lord Salisbury, “Reform, reform, why make things worse”. 
Oops, now there’s a temptation I must avoid, aversion to change, an over conservative view of life
This week my regret is for the end of Alistair Cook’s Letters from America, fixed points in the weekly calendar for almost as long as I can remember – small milestones of intellectual pleasure.  In one of the first letters that I heard, he told a story about Churchill and Roosevelt in World War II agreeing to speak to their respective people’s after an historic meeting.  Roosevelt generouly allowed Churchill time to get home and then assembled his speechwriters. Suddenly, before a sentence had been written, word came that Churchill was on the radio. There he was describing in his inimitable way the Anglo-American alliance and its great war aims.  “What happened?” , said Roosevelt.  Came the reply,  “I’m afraid, Mr President, he rolls his own”   
That inspired me as a student to do my thing. . So here’s my roll up 

The message of Lent is about dealing with temptation.  And there are two stories of temptation in the Bible that I’d like to look at this morning, first that of Adam and Eve in the Garden and second the temptation of Christ in the Desert.  
The two stories have important contrasts. Take the geographical setting of each.  The writer of Genesis thought of the Garden of Eden as somewhere in the fertile region of Mesopotamia, in what is now known as Iran at the confluence of four great rivers.  Our picture is, then, of a luxuriant garden full of fruit bearing trees.  In Hebrew I gather Eden means delight, or enjoyment. This was Paradise Garden, with no hunger or thirst, no suffering – and because the Tree of Life was there, no aging and no death. 
One can almost hear Adam saying it in Andrew Marvell’s words:
What wondrous life is this I lead !
…………………….
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnar’d with flowers, I fall on grass. 
Such a setting could not be more different from St. Matthew’s depiction  in his gospel of the scene of Christ’s temptations, the arid  baking desert with piercing heat - a challenge to one’s very survival. Having driven into Death Valley California, one of the hottest and most barren places on earth, to the accompaniment  on tape of John Geilgud reading Genesis Chapter I,  I feel that I have tasted something of the flavour of that Judean desert. 
Yet despite the contrasting setting, there are similarities in the stories.  An interesting one is the way that God seems absent at the time of temptation.  In the story of the paradise garden in which God walked in the cool of the evening, his absence in Adam and Eve’s time of need is somewhat paradoxical.  And God’s absence from the story of the temptation of Christ is equally paradoxical because it immediately follows the description of his baptism when we are told of the close relationship between Father and Son (“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”). 
What can this mean?  Perhaps it is meant to convey the idea that God does not force his creatures or His Son; he respects our freedom to choose temptation or not. We are free to surrender or resist.
Another characteristic of both temptation stories is the symbolic personification of evil. That raises problems.  If the Garden of Eden is perfect paradise, why is the serpent there?  
The figure of the Devil appearing in the wilderness to Christ is less problematic. Apparently the Jews had long believed that the desert contained terrifying and demonic creatures.  But what, commentators have asked, does this personification of evil convey? Perhaps it is that a temptation to turn against God comes initially from outside us, rather than from within. It catches us unawares. 
The serpent cajoles and wheedles: “Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” 
Yet the Devil in the wilderness challenges Christ directly, almost impudently. “If thou be the Son of God, command these stones be made bread”.  Christ resists. It is not that he does not feel hunger, it is that he knows it is not the time nor place to act on impulse, and certainly not for self-gratification.  
Unlike Adam & Eve, Christ remembers God’s earlier warning and quotes words from the Jewish scripture :  ”Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God”. 
These two stories show how easy it is to abuse our God given freedom. I imagine more of us share an affinity with Adam and Eve than with Christ. That is why we tend to excuse them. They were curious, they could not resist.  The serpent was a confidence trickster. We see ourselves in them. 
The moral of these two stories seems to be that although we may share the nature of Adam & Eve, Christ undoubtedly gives us a new ideal.  And Lent, that fixed point, is about the annual possibility of establishing a pattern of living through self-discipline, which is more about God-dependency than self-sufficiency.  
But I’m not sure that this means we have to advocate a kind of “desert spirituality”, idolising abstinence and mortification of the flesh and demoting what one might call the “garden spirituality”.  The way of the desert is not necessarily a superior spirituality.  We can still have a good lunch to day.  Anyway, it is impossible these days to maintain it in practice.  Even in Lent, to put it crudely, life in the garden must go on. 
The key issue of Lent is, I think, about learning to use our freedom to be dependent upon God and to live as if everything – abundance as well as want - is in God’s gift in whatever circumstances we may find ourselves – desert or garden.  Perhaps one way of knowing if we have made some headway would if at the end of Lent we are able to understand more profoundly what it means, as that collect says,  “ to pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal.”
Thus, this can make Lent our own journey, as it were, living somewhere between the Garden and the Desert.  We can give up alcohol, biscuits or chocolate or perhaps do some voluntary work that is not all that gratifying, join a Grace Group, spend more time on our Bible or in prayer.  Let each of us makes our own decision and try to move in our own way from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained. 
 
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