I've been thinking about coming face to face with the devil.
Christ in the Wilderness (1872), Ivan Kramskoi, oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery
I grew up in a conservative evangelical church suspicious of Roman Catholic hierarchy and rituals that, we believed, stood between ordinary believers and God. In our personal and community prayer lives, we spoke directly with God and found his answers back to us in our prayerful silences, in our conversations with fellow believers, and in our sacred scriptures.
We had neither priests in confessionals nor a Pope to intervene; we certainly didn’t observe saints’ days, and since there is no biblical injunction to observe Lent (we were very big on quoting specific verses to guide us) it was yet another foreign ritual we didn’t need.
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Then a funny thing happened to me. In the mid-1970s I was an associate pastor in a Presbyterian church in San Marino, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. One of the programs I shared in was a Tuesday morning Bible study and conversation group in which I’d read the following Sunday’s Gospel text and then twenty-five of us would spend the remainder of two hours talking around the circle about the text and our faith and, over time, our personal lives.
During our second year together, a woman in the group noticed that Ash Wednesday – another ritual day I’d never observed – was two weeks away and wondered if it might be a good experience for us to dive together into Lent to see if we could find meaningful experiences in this ancient observance.
What a surprise! We made a six-week covenant to read a chapter of Luke’s Gospel every day, to write two pages in our daily journals, and to pray daily on our knees for one another, our families, and what we thought God should attend to in our broken world. For one day a week, we fasted. Each Tuesday we shared our discoveries in conversations filled with surprises, our difficulties in keeping the disciplines, and the delight of doing this together, each of us for the first time.
Hooked, we continued this practice through several subsequent Lents, and to this day I remember those sacred seasons as the most disciplined, spirit-sensitive experiences of my long Christian life.
After I moved on from that church and that group of spiritual companions, I never mustered the spiritual discipline to plunge into Lent again. I wondered if I had the energy to create such an intimate spiritual experience one more time and never found or created the opportunity to try.
The Temptations of Christ (1480-1482), Sandro Botticelli, Sistine Chapel. The three temptations of Jesus appear far in the background - there is an awful lot going on in this fresco, mostly focused on a young man whom Jesus had healed of leprosy presenting himself to the high priest of the temple in the foreground.
Half a century later, Lent for me had become that season before Good Friday and Easter signaled when a few devout therapy clients and three or four friends show up with smudged Ash Wednesday crosses on their foreheads and deprivations they’re practicing to mimic Jesus’ desert suffering.
Rather than sleeping in some Sundays, these folks faithfully get to church every week during Lent. Others give up desserts for forty days, or drinking, or eating meat. Our Episcopal church’s wonderful head priest admitted on the first Sunday of Lent this year that he is giving up watching his beloved sports teams on television although, he said with a twinkle in his eye, he hasn’t given up chocolate.
But as I think about it now, somehow these deprivations feel hollow to me, nothing like what Jesus suffered in the wilderness. Even though I had had a series of meaningful Lenten experiences earlier in my life, I've wondered in recent years if by focusing on Jesus' fasting and hunger, I may have missed the fiercer temptations he faced.
In his weakened and vulnerable state, he took on Satan face to face, a confrontation that prefigures his later suffering during Holy Week. The story of Lent begins with Jesus hearing from God at his baptism, You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased, granting him a position of unique power. Then, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
Both in the wilderness and again at his trial and on the cross, it seems to me that the central question Jesus faced was: What does it mean for me to be God’s beloved child? What shall I do with this power?
Twelfth century mosaic depicting the three temptations in the wilderness, Basilica San Marco, Venice
Satan's three temptations were meant to convince Jesus to use his power to feed himself, to save himself, to dominate, each of which Jesus might have chosen. His choice, instead, was to use his power in a way that was not self-satisfying, self-protective, or self-aggrandizing, but rather was exercised on behalf of the common good, often for the benefit of those who had the least power or status in society.
Through these early weeks of Lent, I’ve been reading these Gospel stories again and again and looking simultaneously at the rising tide of human suffering around me. I find myself in an ongoing reflection, as if I’m in my own wilderness face to face with whomever this devil is, who wants me to focus on self-centeredness rather than about what it means to be a child of God. Who am I? Why am I here?
I think these same questions must have been couched in the temptations Jesus faced at the end of those forty hungry days.
It seems to me that relinquishing pleasure – fasting, avoiding common delights, going to church every week – is not the same as suffering. Suffering will come to each of us because we are bound for mortality, and death’s predecessors creep in from season to season to remind us of this unavoidable fact. I’m also convinced now that there is no innate merit to illness or physical pain, no built-in virtue to poverty or enslavement or torture, no positive purpose in physical abuse.
Suffering itself has no intrinsic value - it will come again, and I will have to deal with it. In the meantime, I choose not to pantomime it with manageable deprivations.
Elective suffering, like Jesus' in the wilderness, is a different thing. Soldiers volunteer for deadly battle, parents endure danger and pain to keep their children from suffering, fire fighters run into burning buildings, our friend Zelda gave up a kidney to keep her brother alive, people with rare empathy give their time and comfort to work with the least of these – in these moments we choose our suffering because we believe it is worth the pain.
We have a higher purpose in mind: love of country, love of children, love of siblings, love of our fellow citizens, love of the human family. We endow suffering with meaning and therefore find ways to lean into it rather than away from it.
Here is a more serious model of what Lent could mean: not giving up drinking or favorite sports or even chocolate, but rather coming face to face with how we choose to use our power. We may not be able to turn a stone into bread, but we can - like Jesus - exercise the power we do have on behalf of the least of these to enhance the common good.
Perhaps reminding ourselves of this is the purpose of Lent; perhaps doing this is what it means to be a beloved child of our Creator.