Lent 1 - Year C

How many times have you heard or read this Gospel scripture in your lifetime? Who knows.... a lot. God and the devil would both ask - how many times have you listened? what have you actually heard?

The devil would hope that you heard that he existed; that he was powerful; that it was reasonable for him to have a presence in your life. Luke certainly presents the tempter that way. Who am I to argue with Gospel scripture?

I am not here to argue that there is no such thing as the devil; as C S Lewis says the devil just loves it when you don't believe in him! For each of us though, there is a different understanding, just as there is for each of us a unique relationship with Jesus Christ.

However evil is personified in our own mindset, I would be pretty right in thinking noone denies the presence of evil in life. However the voice of tempting sin is embodied in our own minds, I would be confident in thinking that the majority of humanity recognise the dichotomy between good and bad, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral. That seems to me to be part of the human condition, whether of faith in a higher being or not.

Are we naturally good or naturally not good? That journey of life discovery is what the temptations of Christ story is about. It is not about the existence of evil; it's there. It's a given. How we work out our discernment of the right way to live life and the alternate is really at the heart of temptation. For Christ, the temptations were put to him to turn away from God. Amazing thing to think through, that there was a possibility that God could not be true to Godself. We are reassured that it is not possible; our reassurance is shaken when we hear "the devil departed from him until an opportune time." There it is, the continual presence of temptation, even in Christ's life. The garden of Gesthemene must have been another huge opportune time for the dichotomy to swing away from God. Christ's trueness to self is, of course, our salvation, and that gift was cemented forever in his action on the cross.
He conquered evil; he did not take away the temptation to make God absent in our life. That is our struggle, for ever and ever I am afraid. We turn to Christ; we turn away from Christ; we turn to Christ. But remember, it is only when we turn away from Christ that the devil has any kind of chance; with Christ as our companion, even as we struggle and fail in many things, there is no dialogue chance with that which is not God.

CS Lewis portrayed this dialogue dichotomy brilliantly with his "Screwtape Letters". This book is a series of teaching letters from Uncle Screwtape, a chief devil, to his nephew Wormwood, a trainee devil. When it was published in 1941, as with most of CS Lewis' writings, "The Screwtape Letters" were a turning point in the history of modern theology. Let me share with you Chapter 2, letter 2, as Screwtape unpacks to Wormwood what Christianity is like - could be like??? And remember, the "Enemy" in these writings is God...
pages 15 - 19

May your Lenten journey add to your life the disciplines and frameworks that daily remind you to turn to Christ. You will find that he has never left you, and has no intention of doing so.

We are the Body of Christ. His spirit is with us.