The wiles of Satan: a homily for the First Sunday in Lent
At the early Eucharist on the First Sunday in Lent, 2022
Luke 4:1-12
When Christian artists in centuries past sought to depict today’s Gospel reading - Our Lord’s temptation by the evil one in the wilderness - they consistently portrayed Satan as a cloven-hoofed, winged demon.
We modern Christians, of course, smile at this.
And, in a rather patronising manner, we point out the supposed mistake of our forebears in the faith: Satan, we remind them, derives his power to tempt not from being a weird cloven-hoofed, winged demon but through an appearance that is deceptively ordinary and persuasive.
Our forebears in the faith, however, displayed much spiritual wisdom in their depictions of Satan.
It is precisely because Satan’s temptations often do not appear to us as dark, destructive, and demonic that they portrayed Satan as just that: to remind us that behind seemingly rational and reasonable suggestions were dark and destructive spiritual forces.
The temptations offered by Satan to Our Lord in the wilderness seem eminently reasonable and rational.
Our Lord is hungry after a forty day fast: so, yes, why not turn this stone into bread?
Our Lord has come to transfigure the world, to draw it into the kingdom of God: so, why not accept Satan’s offer of power and authority, and put it to good use?
Our Lord is the Son of God: so, why not heed Satan’s advice to use shock and awe to convince the world?
And note, too, how in this last temptation Satan uses words from Scripture - “for it is written” - to tempt Jesus: a religious justification offered in an attempt to convince Jesus to embrace the realm of darkness.
We are seeing this darkness today in Vladimir Putin's use of the rich and noble tradition of Russian Orthodoxy to justify the grave evil and profound injustice he is inflicting on the people of Ukraine.
It is the nature of temptation not to set before us the self-evidently Bad against the self-evidently Good.
No, the Tempter is much more subtle than this.
He sets before Our Lord, and before us, a disordered, distorted vision of what is good and true.
Jesus did indeed need to eat. He has come to draw the world into the Kingdom of God. He is the Son of God.
Satan’s temptations point to these - but do so in a way which disorders and distorts them.
The power of Jesus to perform signs and wonders, to feed the hungry multitude, is not a power to be used for selfish ends.
Jesus is to draw us into the Kingdom of God through the way of the Cross, the way of love, not a spiritual dictatorship bestowed by Satan.
Jesus is the Son of God, but this is to be revealed in a way which moves our hearts by love and grace, not by frightening us into submission.
Each of Satan’s temptations would have drawn Jesus away from life in God, from dwelling in the fullness of God’s truth, love, and light.
Away from the Cross and the Resurrection, where that fullness was to be manifested.
They would have drawn Jesus into the realm of darkness, where all is disordered and fragmented; and they would have condemned this world to be the realm of the evil one.
But Jesus refuted each of the temptations and their disordered, distorted vision of what is good.
Dwelling in the Father’s love, light, goodness, and truth He manifests the wisdom of God in discerning and following what is authentically good, true, and life-giving.
This points us to the reason for the Lenten disciplines of prayer, self-examination, and fasting.
These ground us more deeply in the love, light, goodness, and truth of God in Christ, so that when we are tempted, we may discern and reject the evil one’s disordered, distorted image of what is good and true; a disordered, distorted image that leads us into darkness and fragmentation.
May our Lenten disciplines, then, bring us to more truly follow Our Lord who overcame the temptations of Satan in the wilderness, so that we, dwelling in the fullness of life in God the Father, in the communion of the Holy Spirit, may know what is authentically true, good and life-giving, and thus have the spiritual discernment to recognise and reject the subtle, deceitful temptations placed before us by the evil one.
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