Conformed to the Image of Christ: The First Sunday in Lent (February 18, 2024)

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Yesterday, we hosted a small group from the Eliot Society, a local organization that supports Christians in the arts, as they did a workshop on an art technique called kintsugi. Kintsugi is a Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery but putting together the broken parts with a lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. Part of the beauty of kintsugi is that it allows breakage to be an opportunity for re-formation. This had me thinking a lot about this season of Lent, a season in which we are confronted with our brokenness, our sins, our imperfections, but ultimately in which we offer ourselves to a Master Artist who can make even these cracks and disfigurements into something beautiful. All of Lent points us to Christ crucified, culminating in the events of Good Friday. And so in this season, we are invited into practices that imitate Christ—fasting, prayer, and almsgiving—so that we who do them will come to look like him. And today, at the outset of our Lenten journey, we see the new humanity being created, a new humanity that we are invited to participate in.

In our Gospel reading: Our Lord is led into the wilderness where he fasts for 40 days, the basis for the 40 day fast of Lent. After these 40 days, we are told he is hungry (a reminder that Jesus has a real human nature that was capable of suffering like we suffer). It’s precisely at this moment when he hungers that he is tempted by the Devil. In the first temptation, Satan tries to get Jesus to turn stones into bread. This takes us back to the Garden of Eden and the temptation of Adam Eve. The devil tempts an archetypal figure to eat. To this temptation, Our Lord replies, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. For the second temptation, the Devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and challenges him to throw himself down because of the Scriptures which promise that the Messiah will be protected by angels. To this temptation, Jesus answers, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God." At the third and final temptation, Satan brings Christ to the top of a mountain and promises him all the kingdoms and glory in the world if Jesus would only bow down and worship him. Christ responds emphatically, “Begone, Satan! You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” So the devil leaves him alone, having been defeated by the Son of God, and the angels come to minister to Christ.

So what is going on here? It’s an odd story. To understand, we have to go all the way back to Deuteronomy 8:2, while Israel was wandering in the wilderness before they were brought into the Promise Land. There, they are charged, “And you shall remember all the ways which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.” So, in the wilderness, Israel is tested. Of course, if you read the Old Testament, Israel is constantly failing these tests. Further, Israel, as a nation is repeatedly called God’s Son. One important reference containing this is Jeremiah 31:9, “For I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my first-born.” Another important element of the Israel story is the fact that they wandered in the wilderness for forty years. So, Israel, God’s Son, wanders in the wilderness 40 years where they are tested by God. Similarly, Jesus is God’s Son, something we not only confess in the Creed but is thoroughly biblical. In the chapter right before the Temptation of Christ, at his baptism, the voice of the Father is heard from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." This account of these three temptations is a “testing”: “If you are the Son of God”; “If you are the Son of God”; “If you are the Son of God.” It’s important to note that Jesus undergoes similar testing at the crucifixion where the crowds issues similar temptations that echo of the Devil’s: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” And when Peter discourages Jesus from going to the cross, Christ issues him the same rebuke he gives Satan: “Get behind me Satan!” The difference between the testing of Israel and the testing of Jesus is that Jesus passed. Scholar M.D. Goulder says, “Where Israel of old stumbled and fell, Christ, the new Israel stood firm.” In passing the test, Jesus proves himself to be the true Israel and the Son of God.

Because Christ is the true Israel, then, it follows that when we were baptized, we were brought into Christ. Dr. Hans Boersma says, “For Jesus to insist that he is the true vine is to say nothing less than that he is the true Israel. By abiding or participating in Christ, then, we are joining the true Israel. To join Christ and to join the Church are one and the same thing." Jesus does what humans could not do because he is very God of very God and he unites our fallen human nature to his own divinity, purifying it, and creating a new kind of order of humanity. So, we, as sinful humans only find ourselves “in Christ,” the second Adam by virtue of our baptism, where we die to sin and are raised to newness of life. When we’re baptized, we’re translated out of the line of the first Adam, a line characterized by sin and death, and placed into the line of the Second Adam who brings us life. There is no neutrality in the Christian life, then. We are either servants to sin or God. Paul summarizes it saying, “When you slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life” (6:20-22).

Because we have this new life available to us in Christ, Paul urges his audience to “not accept the grace of God in vain” because God says “At the acceptable time I have listened to you, and helped you on the day of salvation.” When is this day of salvation? According to the Apostle, it is now. The fact that salvation is available to us in the present via the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ creates a sense of urgency in St. Paul and so in his ministry, he is careful to “put no obstacle in any one’s way.”

How is that evident? Verses 4-10 explain that it is “through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger; by purity, knowledge, forbearance, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Why this list? To emphasize the fact that it is through degradation and humility that St. Paul is truly an Apostle. Paul’s ministry is authentic precisely because it is cruciform. He pours out his sufferings for the sake of others, uniting his sufferings to the suffering of our Lord. The great spiritual writer St. Teresa of Avila says, “Let nothing disturb thee; let nothing dismay thee; all things pass; God never changes; patience attains all that it strives for. He who has God finds he lacks nothing: God alone suffices.” To follow Christ means to unite our lives, and all the sufferings that inevitably come with it, to the Passion of our lord. To undergo that suffering is to receive the promise: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”

And that brings us to Lent: a season in the Church calendar where we go out of our way to practice fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, disciplines designed to conform us to the image of Christ. We fast as he fasted, for 40 days. We pray as he prayed, showing ourselves completely dependent on God. We give of ourselves for others as he gave of himself for us. In using his life, and in particular, his death, as a template for our own lives, we become transformed into who we ought to be. According to St. Chrysostom, in our Gospel reading this morning, our Lord “points out to us the medicines of our own salvation” because in fasting, we are denying ourselves, picking up our cross, and following him. This is what we prayed in our collect this morning: “O Lord, who for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights; Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness, and true holiness, to thy honor and glory.” May it be so.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.