First Sunday in Lent

On Sunday, I was privileged to be able to worship at a baptismal service where a large number of new Christians confidently articulated their faith and made their baptismal vows.  One of these vows was a commitment to fight the devil.  In this first Sunday of Lent we have the amazing story of how Jesus did precisely this whilst in the wilderness for 40 days.  It is the most sacred of stories because it could only have been told by Jesus to his disciples who subsequently wrote it down.  The wilderness was between the inhabited plateau of Judea and the Dead Sea.  It was an area of over 500 square miles of barren land which was like a heat furnace during the day.  The ground was not dust or sand but rather bits of limestone, shaped like loaves.  Hence the devil says to Jesus, why don’t you turn these stones into bread?  These are the shapes that Jesus would have seen all around him as he walked along and, in his acute hunger, his brain would have dreamed of them as being loaves of bread.  The temptation for the church is to bribe people into faith by offering Christianity as a vehicle to material possessions.  Christianity makes you richer, but not in material possessions.  Humanity can never find fulness in material things.  In this season of Lent, we give up physical pleasures to remind ourselves of this fact.  Just like those new Christians who made their baptismal vows, following Jesus is fundamentally a spiritual transformation because “man does not live by bread alone.”