Temptation

1989 (Year C), 12 March /
Lent 5

St Peter de Beauvoir Town 

Before Sue and I and the children came to live here I was offered a job back home in Yorkshire. It was the one job I wanted, above all others, in the Wakefield Diocese, and if it had been offered before we left Wakefield I would never have come to London. I went back to look at it, to see if I wanted to go back. The vicar I would replace had not yet left so he showed me round. He walked the village with me ( it’s just the one in The Last of the Summer Wine except it’s much prettier) he showed me the church and introduced me to some of the parishioners .Then he took me up the church tower to look at the view of the Pennines. The hills for as far as you could see were still in the parish and it was such a beautiful day. Then he said, ‘All this will be yours, if you will only come and work here.’

It’s a good story, and it’s perfectly true and I knew at that moment, even though I had no job to go to down here at that time, I would never return to the job I’d dreamed of for so long. What happened inside me to convince me so clearly that I would never go back I don’t know. I just knew. And what I do know is that it very seldom happens like that.

For once in my life it was possible to put the temptation held out to me behind me and I left Yorkshire feeling extremely self-righteous certain in the knowledge that I had done the right thing.

The choices we normally seem to have to make are the lesser of two evils and we, unlike Jesus, find it so very very hard to discern what God might want of us in a given situation. What’s more I think probably for the most part we’re not aware that we are being tempted at all. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we realise what has been going on.

Now if you were listening to a sermon on temptation 50 years ago then the preacher would probably have said that the fact that you were not aware of the temptation just shows how crafty the devil really is, and how careful we have to be all the time.

Temptation was a barrier that had to be overcome and we did this best by denying what on the surface might appear to be our best interests and always plumping for what God wanted. The preacher, 50 years ago, would have had a great advantage over me because he would have known exactly what God wanted of you in all situations.

We would have left church feeling chastised, for we would’ve been told that Jesus was tempted and yet never did sin, us lot, on the other hand, give in at the slightest opportunity. We would’ve been convinced of our own weakness and frailty and scared half to death by the power and strength of God.

It seems so complicated, ‘Leave family ties for the sake of the gospel,’ we are told, yet surely it’s not always right to forsake family and the responsibilities we have there. Those who are tempted to stick with the family and even give in to that temptation maybe are fulfilling the will of God rather than committing an evil action.

What we must realise is that temptation stories are simply used to express a division between us and the divine. They express an example of our limitations contrasted with the limitlessness glory of God.

There is though, in all this a tendency to see our temptations and our subsequent failures purely in negative ways. We end up seeing ourselves as nothing more than miserable sinners, good for nothing, rather than as examples of humanity created uniquely for the glory of God.

The choices which we have to make in everyday life maybe aren’t as simple as the one which I had to make about that job in Yorkshire, but they do offer us opportunities to choose to do the will of the divine, to put ourselves on the side of the angels as Jesus did in the Gospel story read this morning.

Because none of us are Gods we will never get things exactly as God wills, but it is the joy of Christians to spend time and effort trying to do so secure in the knowledge that we worship one who loves us so that he was prepared to give himself up to die for us. AMEN