I was recently in the company of an evangelical youth pastor who made a comment that is au courant in many Christian circles, but nevertheless wrong and destructive. The topic was the observance of Lent and other such “relics” from the past, and of course he was against it. “Where in the Bible,” he protested, “does it mention Lent?” At first glance, he’s got a point. If you construe “Biblical” as meaning “mentioned in the Bible,” then Lent is not Biblical. Then again, a lot of other things then are not Biblical, including you and me. If we were to think a little, which may be hard for evangelicals, we might learn that Lent and many other ancient traditions are actually in complete agreement with the thrust and purpose of the Holy Scriptures. Let me explain.
The continued relevance of the season of Lent can best be appreciated by reading the Gospel lection for the first Sunday in Lent, Year C, Luke 4:1-13. This is the story of Christ’s temptation in the desert, his first action after being baptized by John the Baptist. The devil attacks Jesus along three lines. First there is the physical: do what your body says demands, in this case eat food. Surely none of us is familiar with temptations of a physical nature. Then there’s the spiritual angle: worship amiss: deny God’s authority. Note that the devil says all the kingdoms of the earth have been given to him, and Jesus does not deny this. When Adam obeyed the devil instead of God, all the earthly property over which he was steward were given to the enemy. Finally, there’s the intellectual attack: the devil even quotes Scripture, but misconstrues the clear intent. Note that the devil knows his Bible, probably better than most Christians. For all these challenges, Jesus does the same thing; he quotes Scripture himself to refute the enemy. He cites the Bible to show that obedience to the devil is in every case contrary to God’s express will.
Now we have to ask ourselves, why was the devil interested in tempting Jesus? The clear answer is that if he could get him to do the his bidding, Jesus would be diverted from fulfilling his divine destiny. Jesus could experience comfort and success in every way imaginable; physical satisfaction, the adulation of the world, and he could justify it all by an errant reading of Scripture. But more importantly, he could avoid the Cross, with all its agony and shame. In other words, if the enemy could get Jesus to do any of these things, he would divert him from his divine mission of redeeming a sinful humanity. He could either obey the devil or his Father, but he could not do both.
Now you will say, I’m glad he knows his Bible, because he resisted temptation and was able to institute God’s plan of redemption. He has succeeded and with regard to our justification, there’s nothing left to be done. As Jesus said on the Cross, “It is finished.” And in fact many people operate as if Jesus has done it all, and there’s nothing left for us to do. There is no longer anything that is out of bounds morally. As Oswald Chambers says derisively, “Christ died for me, I go Scot free.” But the only problem with this very popular conclusion is that this Gospel lesson is accompanied by an Epistle lesson, Romans 10:8b-13. To be sure this lesson mentions justification, but it also mentions something else: salvation. Whereas most people tend to conflate and confuse these two terms, thinking that Paul is just repeating himself, he’s is in fact drawing a distinction between them, saying they’re not the same. If you examine the two accounts of the last judgment in Mt. 25 and Revelation 20 you notice something peculiar: they don’t mention our sins, the bad we did. They mention something else entirely, the good we either did or did not do. Thus we see that while being forgiven is essential, it’s not the end of the matter. In addition to being forgiven for doing wrong, we need to be empowered to do right. We are forgiven by the death of Christ, he is the Savior of all. But we also need to be empowered by his ongoing life, and clearly, he is NOT the Lord of all. Forgiveness is universal, there’s not limit to the power of the blood of Christ. But salvation is particular, we can refuse to have Jesus as our Lord. This is where the temptation of Christ comes in, and why we have this Gospel lesson at the beginning of Lent. The devil failed to deter Christ; He fulfilled his mission. So now the devil turns his attention to you and me, so that he can get us deterred from our mission. If he can derail us in fulfilling our part of the equation, it doesn’t matter that he failed in the desert. There is absolutely no difference if we are condemned for our sins, or condemned for doing nothing with our lives. So that’s why the devil, having failed with Jesus, comes after you and me. He wants us to cling to sin, not that we might be judged for having done wrong, but so that in clinging to it we grieve the Holy Spirit and end up an empty pod. He tells us to do what our body demands, he invites us to worship him instead of God, and he gets us to read Scripture with our desires in mind, instead of God’s clear intent. In other words, he does to us exactly what he did to Jesus, and unlike Jesus, many of us fail.
So what we see is that the temptation of Christ is not just relevant to Jesus in his role as the Son of God, it’s also relevant to us in his role as the Son of Man. It’s something he went through in history to be sure, but it’s also something we have to go through in our personal history. If churches abandon historically validated practices like the observance of Lent, they run the risk of producing Christians who will fail when tempted as Jesus was. Resistance to the enemy is not developed overnight. That’s why we must have an annual observance that develops our minds and character so we can prevail when attacked. Historical churches do these things because they have proven helpful across the millennia. They may not be Biblical in a superficial sense, but they are Biblical in that they make the Biblical story come alive in our day and age.
