Back to the Centre

First Sunday of Lent. Fr Albert Robertson preaches about the scattering effect of sin.

In a creation where evil seems obvious, real, and tangible, our modern minds don’t much like the idea of the reality of the devil. We prefer to see him as merely symbolic. The difficulty is that we can see his footprints (or should that be hoofprints?) throughout the Scriptures. From his slithering in the Garden to the final cry as he is finally shut up in the underworld in Revelation, the devil is definitely present, and no mere figment of our imagination. Not only do the Scriptures testify to the reality not just of evil, but to the Evil One, but even the possibility of the Devil being a symbol is flawed: a symbol draws things together, but as Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters’ (Matthew 12:30).

Our fallen nature, which succumbed to the devil’s lie and temptation, tends towards this scattering. The waste and decay of ageing and sickness speak of this scattering. The sins of our lives isolate us into scattered individuals. The sins of our society seek to undermine our common humanity. And this sin of scattering can be tempting for sure. After all it has a certain allure to it, far from seeming isolating, we can set ourselves up in a kind of isolated splendour, looking after ourselves without another encroaching on our thoughts. We satisfy our wants, needs, and desires.

But ultimately all this does is push us, by centrifugal force, away from our true centre. We become disorientated, irritable, and stale. The scattering of the evil one leaves us as a legion of isolated individuals all longing for the true communion which our sins have led us to spurn. This surely is why Jesus encounters temptation not in the Garden of Paradise, but in the wilderness of sin. He is tempted not with fruit, but with nothing but stones. Jesus is tempted in the wilderness to which we have been scattered by our sin, thus revealing to us the horror of our condition, and that he is like us in all things, but without sin.

Our practice of Lent, then, is a return to the centre of our lives, to the communion with God which our sins throw us away from. We make that journey with Christ: our forty days are his forty days. Just as Christ is not shy in confronting the tempter, so we must confront our sins in these forty days. We must look closely at our lives to see where temptation wins, and this is a hard thing to do, in part because it is hard to look at our weakness. But it is only by honest examination that we can gain some mastery over these temptations.

This is the great opportunity of Lent for it is a season where we are reminded of our own incompleteness. We are not yet a finished work of art. Our choices can make and unmake us. And at the heart of the disciplines which we take on in Lent must be an honest attempt at overcoming those things in us which draw us away from the heart of communion. Our disciplines then are not about setting ourselves up for a fall, or creating some kind of obstacle course. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are searching ways of asking ourselves who we are, and being brought closer to a Christ shaped answer to that question.

But as well as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, our readings point us to something else: the power of remembrance. We have trodden this Lenten road before, and we can remember what it is that the Lord has done for us to bring us to this point. Moses tells the people in our First Reading to make a response, to tell what God has done for them, to confess the power of the God who has saved them with a mighty and outstretched arm. This people is by no means complete — they will make and unmake themselves through years of sin and repentance, exile and return. We do the same each Lent, remembering what God has done for us, and all of the ways that God has drawn us to Himself, despite all of the ways that our sins have worked for our scattering and undoing. It is in our incompleteness that we call on the name of the Lord, and from our incompleteness that we are saved.

Readings: Deuteronomy 26:4-10 | Romans 10:8-13 | Luke 4:1-13

Image: detail of a window in Exeter College chapel, Oxford, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP