God Alone Shall One Worship | a sermon

A sermon by Andrew Colman on 1 Peter 3:18-22 and Mark I:9-15

The temptation account in the Gospel of Mark is the shortest in all of the Gospels. There is a chance that if you let your mind drift for only a second or, if on the live stream, you got up to get half a glass of water, you'll have missed it. The whole of the temptation scene, beginning to end, goes as follows, "And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him."

It continues to say that Jesus went preaching in Galilee after John was arrested. We don't get any account whatsoever of what his 40 days in the wilderness were like other than there were wild beasts and angels present. As for the wild beasts, it's wondered whether they were friendly or hostile. Some folks think they were friendly because this was the moment in time when Jesus himself started putting everything back to right. So, befriending the animals was the first step along that journey.

Other folks think that the wild beasts are hostile; after all, they were wild, and the wilderness is always depicted as a place of loneliness and hostility, a place of testing.

And both groups have pretty solid scriptural references to back up their claim, so at this point, it's anyone's guess. What this does is it gives us a little bit of liberty to imagine what might have happened out in the desert for those forty days. What the temptations were, and how the conversations might have gone.

Because we will all have our own conversations while in the wilderness that will surely relate, in one way or another, to the ones we find recorded in the other Gospels, but they will all have their own particular flavour. Mark gives us a chance to insert our own conversation into the scene and then have Jesus come up with the answer for us. Which will end up sounding like "time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near." Through me, you are free from sin.

This is what Mechthild [Matidla] of Magdeburg did in her retelling/ account of the temptations in the wilderness. Matilda was a mystic from the 13th century, a Saxon or noble birth, but at the age of 23, she renounced all of her worldly possessions and joined a lay religious movement called the Beguine. In her book The Flowing Light of the Godhead, she wrote down one of her visions that took the shape of the temptations in the wilderness.

"When the soul [Matilda refers to herself as The Soul] looked upon the hideous devils, she shivered a little, commended herself to our Lord, and quite freely accepted them. The one devil is a deceiver with beautiful angelic garments. Oh, what a lot of false cunning he presented to me at first! [saying] "I am so beautiful; don't you want to worship me?" The soul replied: "God alone shall one worship." He said: "Don't you want to look up and see who I am?" Then, in the lower air, he displayed a beautifully radiant sham [kind of a large extravagant decorative pillow], which has seduced many a heretic, and said: "In the throne room upon this seat, you alone shall be the most exalted virgin, with me the fairest youth next to you." But she replied: "A person would not be wise to take the worst when she could easily achieve the best." He said: "Since you do not want to surrender yourself to me, you are so holy and so humble-then I shall worship you." She said: "No grace shall be given to you because you worship me."

The exchange continues for a while until she finally writes,

"...his idle talk annoyed her greatly; nevertheless, she listened to it freely to become more shrewd. "You are telling me that you are God. Well then, tell me, who is the Son of the living God?" He then wanted to depart, and she said: "By the almighty God, I admonish you that you now listen to me:

I well know your intentions. If I were to tell everyone the secrets of my heart, things would be quite lovely for me in the short term. But then you would intently strive to make the fun end badly. You would do this so that I might fall into doubt, sadness, unbelief, impurity, and after that into everlasting anguish. Another reason you are doing this is so that I might imagine that you come to me thus because I am so holy. Ha! You old archdeceiver, as long as God stands by me, all your efforts are for naught."

This retelling seems quite different from the recorded conversations of Jesus in the wilderness. But in the end, it's not so different. Matilda is deep in the wildness. Two devils are working to draw her away from the Love of God by both the temptations of the flesh with the beautiful clothing and of the spirit with places of honour and adoration.

And in the end, she stops them from leaving after they realize they have failed so she can admonish them. Not only is she standing in and exercising the power against Satan that Jesus won for us - beginning on that day in the wilderness - and finally as he left the tomb empty…

She echoes the way that Jesus taught in the other Gospels. Turning down the beautiful garments (instead of bread made from rocks) for the clothes of a servant and a place of honour and worship (instead of political rule) for a place at Jesus' feet.

Would it have been that easy for her to rebuke temptation all the time? No, no, of course not. Matilda says it herself that she is not Holy; she understands her brokenness and her faults -

but she also understands the power against sin she has been given through Christ. As we move into this wilderness time of Lent, we are sure to come up against our particular challenges of sin in the wilderness.

By God's Grace, Mark gives us, because of the complete lack of detail, the space to locate our challenges in the desert with Jesus. Matthew and the other Gospel writers tell us how Jesus overcame, through faith in God alone and living by the scriptures, how he overcame the devil and the temptations of the wilderness. And Matilda gives a fiery witness of what it looks like to put those two together.

Again, this does not mean that she did not have to wrestle through her wilderness - she speaks of that elsewhere in the book. But it does mean that she, like us, can enter into the wilderness to wrestle with our sin and temptation, confident that Jesus has tread that path before us, defeated every foe and will carry us through the darkness into the hope and light of the resurrection.