This Week: Lent 1B
Gospel: Mark 1:9-15
First week in Lent means it is time to wrestle with Jesus’s time in the wilderness. This is straight forward in years A and C, when we have stories of Jesus’s temptation.
Our own temptation in Year B is that we might turn to those other stories rather than focus on Mark. Not that this is a problem exactly, but it also doesn’t reflect the gospel many of us will be reading aloud.
There’s also the long history of harmonizing Scripture—reading it all as a single, harmonious story. (Mel Gibson’s Passion movie was a perfect example of this—bringing all of the narratives into one big stew.) And while there is nothing explicitly wrong with the practice, it doesn’t value accuracy as highly as seamless themes.
What these other stories of the temptation do, however, is make explicit what is implicit in the very nature of temptation—power. It is at the root of all temptation. Though we give it different names. Control, security, safety, happiness, or simply “because I want it.”
Temptation itself is a power game.
And if Jesus is out there in the wilderness being tempted by the Tempter—what else are we talking about? Do we really need Matthew and Luke to tell us what we know to be true? That a newly-encouraged Jesus would be tempted with power over others, himself, and his environment? That one just called beloved by God might need some time in the wilderness?
Exploring temptation is certainly important. But the lectionary actually offers us something even more amazing.
We actually get context!
I’m always so desperate for our readings in the church to remind us what we’re reading and when. and this week, the church delivers!
In just six verses, we get the set up for Jesus’s ministry. From baptism, into the wilderness, to taking up John’s mission and message.
Regular readers know my love of context—primarily how it is often necessary for understanding what we’re reading in the moment. But it is also the wider need: that we learn the story itself (and the stories we read) better.
So we, at the start of the season of Lent, return to the beginning, as we heard, first of the birth, and then the baptism. And now, the temptation.
The rest of the season won’t tell the rest of story. But our need to tent-post this moment is no less significant.
What will we preach?
The theme of temptation is the most attractive possibility, I suspect. Far more than the historicity or the scriptural consistency. In other words, we are most likely to talk about the concept of temptation and how it relates to us than anything else.
This is probably for the best. Because we totally need it.
But I will caution against the temptation to complacency. And, similarly, to undue challenge.
Because there is something altogether too comforting to talking about human temptation in ways that minimize the calls each of us have to resistance and resurrection.
Temptation is the wheelhouse for much of Christianity. To talk about the temptation to addiction or to quarrel with those who are different from us. Many like to talk about depravity and many more to talk about intellectual or ideological temptations. Hate and division and injustice.
In short: talking about temptation is easy. And even talking about resisting temptation is easy. But wrestling with what is at the root of all temptation: power: is a different story.
Our fear of the future is an expression of power.
Not just a fear of the loss of control, but even in the present. We allow present fears to be expressions of present control: to reduce the prospect of change and transformation or slow its coming. And doing this, not based on its merits, but on speculation.
Fear of loss, loss of numbers or of control, of agency or health, of hope or permission, of dreams or expectations, and so many more things are the fruit of modern temptation as we move more fully into the postmodern age.
I suspect many who grace our pulpits this week will talk about easier temptations. We’ll talk about eating chocolate or drinking coffee. And we’ll say things about resisting them for forty days. This is one of the ways we approach discipline in Lent.
We might talk about the deeper temptations, too. About addictions to things that are killing us. Whether that be alcohol or public divisiveness or screen time and social media.
And we might even talk about power. Those willing to address that part of the story, anyway.
But will we resist the temptation to avoid what that really means now? That our fear of loss of power as the church tempts us to misbehave and distrust in the power of God. It tempts us to quit and shun hope.
Will we resist the temptation to think that we are responsible for the church and not God?
We are daily tempted by the thought that we “kill” the church and “fix” the church. That God is absent from the schools or present when we aren’t praying.
We fear the loss of buildings, finances, leadership. And with it, hope. But it isn’t true hope that’s gone; that’s the disguise. It’s loss of control, predictability, certainty. The measures of our own security.
There are temptations to micromanage our faith and God’s role in our lives. To claim responsibilities that aren’t ours to claim and forego those responsibilities we don’t care to claim. Like serving and loving and changing the world.
There’s a lot of temptation here. I hope we have enough courage and grace to enter into it.