First Sunday in Lent: March 9, 2025

The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11 | Romans 10:8b-13 | Luke 4:1-13 | Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

Every year, on this first Sunday of Lent, we hear that Jesus was led into the wilderness where he stayed for 40 days. The scene is meant to recall other stories, to conjure within our memories the 40 days that Moses fasted before being given the Law on Mount Sinai and the 40 years the Israelites wondered in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land. In each of these recollections, we discover that the wilderness is a place of both divine presence and testing. It is a place in which we are stripped of convenience and pretense, a place of utter dependence upon the provision of God alone, a place of discovery and formation.

This is the place to which Jesus is led by the Spirit. For 40 days, Jesus fasted and when he was physically at his most vulnerable, Luke tells us he faced three very specific tests. If we’re honest, I suspect many of us are uncomfortable with this story for a number of reasons. We might question why Jesus, who in the story just prior to the one we heard this morning was claimed as God’s beloved child, would then be led by the very Spirit into this place of testing. Does God really test or tempt Jesus? Is this story about some sadistic need for God to discover if Jesus has what it takes to complete his mission? And if this is the case, does God also lead us into trials and tribulations as some kind of divine test to see whether we are worthy to also be called children of God?

For as much ink has been spilled over the centuries addressing questions like these, Luke doesn’t seem to have them anywhere in mind as he tells the story of Jesus’ wilderness testing. Nor is Luke concerned with litigating Jesus’ identity through this narrative. He has gone to great lengths already in his Gospel to identify Jesus as the promised Messiah, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, filled with the Spirit to be the Savior of God’s people, a light of revelation to the gentiles and the glory of Israel. What concerns Luke in this passage is the question of what kind of Messiah Jesus will be – how exactly will Jesus live into his Spirit-filled vocation to be the Savior?

With each temptation that he faces, Jesus rejects the diabolical grasping of power that is exercised through self-seeking, self-aggrandizement, and self-protection. He will not align himself with the kinds of power and authority that exploit. Nor will he seek fame and easy recognition, or rest in the privilege of immunity from harm. Jesus’ experience in the wilderness was an embodiment of the divine rejection of the world’s exercise of power-over. In the story that comes after the one we just heard, Luke tells us more positively what kind of power and authority Jesus will exercise as he embraces his mission to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberation and freedom to the oppressed, to restore the marginalized and declare the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus’ embrace of his identity and vocation will be from a posture of solidarity with those who bear the weight and violence of diabolical power.

We risk losing the significance of this passage if we hold a reductive interpretation that simply connects Jesus’ temptations with the temptations we face in our Lenten fasts.

What Jesus faced in the wilderness was uniquely about his vocation as the Chosen One, the beloved of God who is sent to preach good news to the poor. And yet, each of the temptations that Jesus faced offers us an invitation during this season of self-examination and repentance:

Do we exercise our power in ways that are bent on self-preservation, that seek to satisfy our own cravings and desires?

Do we bow down to diabolical powers in order to gain fame and recognition, to be liked and accepted?

Do we put God on trial by questioning why we suffer or why God allows bad things to happen to good people?

Lent is a season in which we are bid to pay attention to our hunger, to our longings and desires. We are bid to learn from them, to discover the ways that our hungers, longings, and desires drive us toward self-seeking, self-aggrandizement, and self-protection. To discover all the ways that our hungers, longings, and desires lead us to self-reliance. Preachers have long suggested that our 40 days of Lent are meant to draw us into solidarity with Christ in his 40 days of wilderness temptation. But Luke pushes us into a slightly different place, asking us not only to identify with Jesus’ rejection of diabolical power, but also with Jesus’ identity as God’s beloved who himself stands in solidarity with the outcast, the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed.

Whatever else our Lenten disciplines produce, they should draw us into solidarity with those to whom Jesus was sent to preach good news of liberation and restoration. This kind of solidarity is not theoretical or intellectual. It is embodied. It costs us something because it is, in the end, not even about ourselves but about those who are most vulnerable, who suffer the violence and indignity of oppression.

Last Wednesday, as we entered the season of Lent, we were marked with ash and reminded that we are but dust and to dust we shall return. At its most fundamental level, Ash Wednesday reminds us of our inherent connection to the earth, of our inherent likeness with one another, of our shared limits of finitude. We were invited to the observance of a Holy Lent through disciplines of giving, prayer, and fasting, of self-examination and repentance, of study and meditation on God’s word. This is a season in which we are bid to embrace our humanness, to cling to the God who enters fully into our human experience and suffers alongside us. And we do this in order to prepare for the story of resurrection, of new birth and new life.  So let us prepare for resurrection by rejecting the diabolical power of the world and making our stand with those who suffer under its weight.