FIGHTING TEMPTATION

 

Short Sermon delivered on the 1st Sunday in Lent the 10th February 2008 by Fr. Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England (Cayman Islands).

Scriptures: Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7     Romans 5: 12-19     Matthew 4: 1-11

Matthew 4: 1f  "Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And He fasted forty days and forty nights."

 

Our Gospel today shows us that temptations have to be fought. Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to fight the tempter. Being tempted, therefore, is not necessarily a sign to us that we are in the wrong place. As in Jesus' crucial case, the outcome of our testings may determine our future and that of people affected by us. The future is shaped by our success or failure in the tests of the present. The way He fought must instruct us in the way we must fight.

 

Jesus had received a fresh and definitive revelation of the truth of His Sonship at His Baptism just before He was led into the desert. "This is My Beloved Son", He had heard, "with whom I am well pleased." Now the test was upon Him whether this was as true in the dryness of the desert as it was in the waters of the Jordan. It was a test He often had to face in one form or another in His life on earth, and He had to face it too with parched lips and dehydration of body and poverty of spirit on the Cross of His last hours in this world. "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit" He finally says according to St. Luke's Gospel. He keeps the certainty of the responses He makes in the desert even through His most terrible hours, when He who knew no sin was made sin for us, to the very end. And in the desert as well as in the Jordan, in the dryness that was a foreshadowing of His last hours on the Cross as well as in the baptismal waters of a new beginning, what has been revealed to Him of His Sonship He holds inviolate.

 

St. Paul shows Christ to be the new focus for the new man, the cosmic Christ whose epic righteous act of filial steadfastness and dependence causes nothing less than the reversal of the effect of the primary trespass of Adam. Where we as individuals are found in Christ, we will be found also within the sphere of this act of righteousness that leads to acquittal and life for all. By the obedience of the One, the many will be constituted righteous. Under our testing temptations, each of us is to be found in Christ, fighting as our Baptism instructs and makes us, by the help of His grace the adopted son or daughter of God, a member of Christ Himself.

 

Thanks be to God!