Into Lent we go…
A Lenten sermon by Jamie Howison on Matthew 4:1-11
To view Si Smith’s cartoon series “40” which is cited in this sermon, click here.
In all three years of the lectionary cycle of readings, this first Sunday in Lent has us read the story of Jesus’ forty-day sojourn in the wilderness. It is much briefer in the Gospel according to Mark—just two verses as opposed to the eleven we read from Matthew this evening—with very little detail:
And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:12-13)
Probably the most notable thing in Mark’s brief account is the word “drove.” “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness,” whereas in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus is led up by the Spirit. Both understandings come from the same original story which all three of these gospel writers would have inherited in an oral tradition going back to Jesus himself, but you have a sense here in Matthew that this is something Jesus knows he needs to do, rather than something he is driven to do.
Jesus has just undergone the baptism of John in the River Jordan—something that in Matthew’s gospel John isn’t even sure he should be doing, but Jesus insists—and he has heard that affirmation that he is the Son, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased. Now he turns his face toward the wilderness for this long time of fasting. Forty days seems an extraordinarily long time, but medically it is quite possible to do so as long as one has water. More significant is that number forty, which occurs time and again in the scriptures. The rains fall for forty days in the story of Noah and his ark, Moses is on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, waiting for God’s message (Exodus 24.18), the Israelites are in the desert for forty years, both David and Solomon reigned over Israel for forty years, Jonah proclaimed in the streets of Nineveh that “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And what is the meaning of that number?
Well, in his book The Fingerprints of God, Robert Farrar Capon insists that images don’t mean anything, but instead they point. Each time that number forty appears, it is pointing forward to the next image and the next and the next. In the case of this number forty, all of those earlier images point to this story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness. We are meant to hear in this story the echoes of all of those earlier images. Jesus is not coming out of nowhere, in other words, but is rather a part of a much longer, much deeper story. That it is here that the number forty seems to reach its culmination is significant, in that all of those earlier appearances of the number now reach the point to which they’ve been pointing all along.
Forty days is a long time to be alone and fasting, and I think that the extraordinary forty panel cartoon series by the English artist Si Smith catches the force of it all in a remarkable way. I’ve referred to this at various times over the past years, and I’ve again posted it on the church website for you to revisit. The drawings are not particularly detailed or sophisticated, but they do catch something of how Jesus might have experienced this time. The forty days begin with a panel reading, “For my thirtieth birthday I gave myself some time away from it all,” followed by a picture of a very clear-eyed Jesus heading off into the desert. As the forty panels progress, he goes from watching the sunset, noticing the animals and desert flowers, and looking altogether engaged with his world to becoming more and more worn, tired, and bedraggled. In the thirty-second panel, two angels come to hover by him as he sleeps, exhausted, in a cave, looks of deep concern written on their faces. Then in the thirty-fourth panel a reddish hued figure appears on the horizon of the cartoon series that is otherwise entirely in black and white. This is the tempter, yet he doesn’t look like a demon or spirit, but instead looks exactly like Jesus himself, only without the exhaustion and dirt from all those days in the desert.
This is one of Si Smith’s most poignant images, and as the tempter comes close the contrast between the two is striking. A stone is held in the hand of the tempter, signifying “command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Next the two figures are pictured on the roof of the temple, with those worried angels floating below: throw yourself down, Jesus. God’s angels will surely save you. After this comes a panel with that exhausted Jesus being show a vast panorama: bow down to me, Jesus, and all of it will be yours.
But no. No! In the thirty-eighth panel the tempter is rebuked, and in the thirty-ninth we see him fleeing away, leaving the exhausted Jesus laying on the bare earth, with the angels hovering close to care for him. The fortieth panel shows the two angels helping Jesus make his way back to the town, which is then followed by one last panel that says simply, “And now I am back.”
This series of simple cartoon drawings catches the force of the story in quite a remarkable way; the long sojourn, the exhaustion, the lure of the tempter, the defining “no” that is uttered by Jesus. Given it is all done in images, it doesn’t, though, get at a piece of the story that we cannot let slip by.
When the tempter comes to the exhausted Jesus, he comes with three temptations: stones to bread, prove that God’s angels will save you, and worship me and I will give you all the power and honour you could possibly want. The tempter even cites scripture in that second temptation, saying, “for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you’,
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’
Jesus, on the other hand, makes a more fulsome use of the scriptures, refusing to get into any back-and-forth debate with the tempter, instead responding each time by citing from the Hebrew scriptures. He clearly knows he has a foundation in those texts, and so no matter how tired and worn he is from this long time in the desert, it is this that he will lean upon. It is his best response, and his strongest defense in fact, to not start into debating, but rather just speaking aloud the texts that have been shaping and forming him all along.
And so if Robert Capon was correct in saying that what images do is to point—and I think Capon was fundamentally correct—then this set of temptations and responses—scriptural responses, no less—that come at the end of those forty days is meant to point us in a very particular direction. We are meant to see this story set against the backdrop of all of those other stories from the Hebrew scriptures, and remember all of those significant “forties”; the flood, the time Moses spent waiting for God on Mount Sinai, the years of wilderness wanderings of the freed Hebrew slaves, the years of David and Solomon, and that message the cranky prophet Jonah uttered in the streets of Nineveh. Maybe especially the message of cranky old Jonah, because ultimately that story is one of God’s profound grace, in which even that corrupt arch-enemy Nineveh isn’t beyond forgiveness and redemption.
Because ultimately Jonah and the Ninevites point forward to Jesus in the wilderness confronting the tempter and Jesus the healer restoring people and Jesus the teacher bringing new ways of looking at things and Jesus the story-teller turning people upside-down with his parables and Jesus the Christ confronting the very power of death for the sake of all of us.
And so, into the season of Lent we go…
