Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Romans 5. 12–19; Matthew 4. 1–11
“…just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.”
The Temptation of Christ,©Eric Armusik (2017). In a private collection.
Where did it all go wrong?
Tuesday marks the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The 2020s have been a bumpy decade. The horrors of the 7 October attacks were followed by the horrors of the Israeli assault on Gaza, where the 75,000 dead include 18,000 children. These terrible figures are still much smaller than the number of those killed in Sudan’s largely ignored civil war, or in Burma’s entirely ignored civil war, or the terrible war fought in Northern Ethiopia between 2020 and 2022, which you probably haven’t even heard of and which looks in serious danger of flaring up again.
The story of the human race is glory interspersed with horror. Capable of great feats of technology, and art, and most profoundly of all of great self-sacrificing love, it nonetheless seems to be our lot to descend from time to time into the pit. On the grandest of scales, the golden ages of nations and civilisation are followed by spells of decline and even ruinous destruction. Meanwhile, in our own lives we find that time and again we fail to live up to the high ideals which we wish to live by. Time and again, we do selfish and stupid and self-destructive things in ways that often leave us horrified and mystified afterwards. Worst of all, it seems to be upon those we love most deeply that we are capable of inflicting the most grievous wounds. No matter how hard we try to live truly good lives, some force seems to drag us down into the worst version of ourselves.
Where did it all go wrong?
In our first reading, St Paul contrasts two figures, Adam and Christ. Sin and death came into the world through Adam. Adam is presented here as the figurehead and archetype of the whole human race. Adam stands for all of us, as we are all prone at times to selfishness, and hate, and to fiddling with the rules to suit ourselves. Interestingly, St Paul gives Eve a free pass in this passage!
Where did it all go wrong? At the dawn of mankind, long before history began, when we began to become something different from animals moved only by instinct. From the moment when human beings first developed the capacity to know right from wrong, we found ourselves too often doing wrong, and our best efforts to restrain that tendency to do wrong through laws and customs have always fallen short.
Yet that isn’t the end of St Paul’s argument. Adam, Paul writes, was a figure not only of all of us, but of Jesus Christ: truly human, yet also God; truly human, yet uniquely free from doing wrong. Through Adam, the Adam who stands for all of us, sin and death came into the world. But through Christ, everyone who accepts God’s Grace will be reborn to new life. More than that, the new life that came through the actions of Christ is far greater than the death that came into the world as a result of Adam’s actions – for life is stronger than death; the gift of God is stronger than the mistakes of humanity.
Here’s the odd thing: the victory of life is won through death – Christ’s death on the Cross. Conventional wisdom has it that the strong exercise power over the weak—but God upends those standards. It was precisely by putting Himself in the power of others, undergoing the gravest of human evil, without defending Himself, that Christ overpowered sin and death. That is the paradox at the heart of Christianity.
If it all went wrong in the very beginning, then it was put right on the Cross.
The road to the Cross starts in the wilderness. Christ’s forty days in the wilderness are the biblical model for the season of Lent, the Christian season of fasting and turning away from sin which began on Wednesday.
The story of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness is familiar to most of us, so it’s easy to miss the importance of some of the details. Two things that are particularly easy to miss are when it takes place, and the nature of the temptations.
Firstly, the story takes place immediately before the start of Jesus’ public ministry of teaching and healing. This year, we read this story from Matthew’s Gospel, but the story also appears in Mark and Luke, and it takes place at exactly the same moment in all three. Having lived until this point, as far as we know, a fairly private life, it seems that before Christ steps into the public gaze, He must resist the temptations that come with it.
Secondly, there are the three distinct temptations the Devil confronts Christ with in the wilderness. One is to turn stones into bread – in other words, the temptation to abuse His powers for material gain; a second is to throw Himself from the Temple and force the angels to catch Him – in other words, to take no responsibility for His own safety and abuse God’s care; and the last is to rule the whole world in return for worshipping Satan.
The last is most relevant to the moment we find ourselves in. It’s really a version of one of the oldest debates about God: if God made us, and loves us, and is all-powerful, why doesn’t He stop us treating one another so abominably and, most of all, why doesn’t He stop all these bloody wars?
The first thing to note is that God does intervene constantly in our lives and the affairs of the human race. We don’t know how much worse things would be without divine intervention. I can’t read the stories of the Cold War’s worst nuclear close calls without wondering if God hasn’t saved us from ourselves.
But Christ’s mission from God was to save us from the consequences of our sin, not to force us to be good. God made us in His own image and likeness, and we have the gift of free will which is fundamental to God’s own nature. That’s what Christ’s rejection of the Devil’s offer of the kingdoms of the world is about. Christ rejected the throne for the Cross—and so instead of establishing yet another earthly kingdom based on power, which corrupts and decays, He defeated sin and death by freely offering Himself in love.
But if Christ has defeated sin and death, why is the world still full of suffering? Because God’s gift of Grace is offered, not imposed. A Christ who forced us to be good would not be God made human: not the God who respects our free will, but the creature the Devil wanted Christ to become.
Adam was the figure of Christ, and of all of us. So we, like Christ, must embark on our own journeys through the wilderness, seeking to resist the temptations the Devil throws at us – to seek nothing more than material comfort, to shirk our responsibilities and blame God for our failures, and to seek to dominate others. And when you fail, and give in to these temptations, as I often do and I’m sure you do too; or when the state of the world makes you despair; remember what St Paul wrote – God’s grace is far stronger than our failures.
And remember that at the other side of the wilderness, we come to the Cross, and then through that to the empty tomb: for when the story ends, we learn that what was wrong for so long has indeed been made right, and that life is indeed far stronger than death.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
