Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for the 1st Sunday of Lent
Understanding how to read the Bible can be tricky, and something we moderns find especially difficult as we live in a ‘flat’ world in which we take everything literally. This was not however the way ancient people thought and acted, so that our bible can be a magnificent compilation of facts, parts of ‘Kings’, poetry, metaphor as where vineyards always stand for Israel, or Prophets, political commentators and reformers at odds with the elite; and then there was story telling which illustrates fundamental messages about humanity in relation to God. It’s this latter we shall look at today, both with our Genesis passage and the temptations of Christ. Ancient writers and ‘painters of ideas’ did not go in for our ten bullet point presentations on the origin of sin amongst human beings, but wove complex mythologies, stories of creation and Fall so as to enter into the devastating mystery of the corruption of humanity created ‘good’ by God. By so doing they enabled these stories to fix in the minds and hearts of generations of peoples so as to be passed on, carrying with them folk memories and eternal truths about humankind, just as we know indigenous peoples in Australia both paint and tell myths of their extraordinarily early journey from the Asian continent to their new homeland. Biblical myth is neither fantasy nor untruthful. It in its turn enables us to enter the prehistoric story of Israel, dealing with the same dilemmas early humans had to encounter as they discovered their relationship with their creator.
Our Genesis (2:7-9,3:1-7) account of the Fall is this sort of document, and back in 1943 the Vatican issued a decree recognising different writing genres and pointing out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis did not need to be taken literally but could be read in this way This account is amongst the earliest Hebrew writing, from the Yahwistic writers, going back around a thousand years BCE who were perplexed by the idea that we are created in God’s image and yet behave so atrociously. The story begins with their innocence and the harmony they lived in with God, communicating freely with God until as it were, they stretched their wings and branched out on their own thereby entering into deceit, disobedience and blame-calling and ultimately death. Their self-awareness caused embarrassment and shame and ultimately their idyllic life in the Garden is lost, as indeed their harmony with God the creator is too.
St Paul, as we know from his Letters, was consistent in his attack on Jewish law as the only avenue to God, and here in Romans (5:12-19) we find his final and most developed teaching. He picks up on both the myth of the Fall with his references to Adam - where it all went wrong - and also by way of reference to Moses, to another story, that of the Exodus, in which Israel consistently failed to respond correctly to their saviour and turned away from God time and time again. By pointing out that acts of sin long predate the giving of the law, he argues that it is irrelevant in human relations with the divine and that we find this supremely revealed in the free gift (Charisma in Greek) of God in Jesus Christ. Grace, he points out, is not the result of some imagined ‘contractual’ or law abiding two-way affair in which we get rewards for good behaviour; but quite simply divine fiat which wipes out human sin. It is the staggering superabundance of the gift which quite simply makes the slate clean. ‘Now after many falls comes grace with its verdict of acquittal.’ In Greek the term is ‘justification’ - set righteous with God by Christ - not the same as ‘acquittal’ at all. Paul wants us to recognise the enormous chasm separating us from God which is closed, as now grace is made available for all human beings by the life and death of Christ. He has simply overcome the Fall, that separation of which we are all daily so aware in our own lives of the things which cut us off from the divine. Seemingly he also, with his description of ‘many falls’, casts doubt on the notion of one unique historical act of treachery by one human, more, seeing our condition as something generic, what we are all stuck with. In comparison then, the saving gift of Christ stands as monumentally other, different in kind. ‘One man, Jesus Christ, will cause everyone to reign in life who receives the free gift (charisma) that he does not deserve, of being made righteous.’ By now those who follow Paul will see that he has gone way beyond cursing those who dogged his ministry, trying to insist that this could only be achieved by following the Jewish law, and has become swept up in the mystery of Christ in God and his superabundant grace and generosity – the kindness of God the creator and eternal sustainer of his creation.
In our Gospel, (Matthew 4:1-11) we meet Jesus immediately after his baptism and with his ‘temptations’. Lest we fall into the literalism of seeing Jesus whisked off by the devil to various unlikely venues, I suspect we have once more entered the dimension of dream or story telling of which Jesus was of course a past master, and that he recounted these ‘visions’ or experiences of the satanic to his followers. If we think about them, all three are about personal power offered or simply available to Jesus, something for his personal gratification or glorification. After all he lived in a Palestine, redolent with would be messiahs. It was not that Jesus did not have those powers – we see he did from his miracles performed for those in need -but his actions as obedient and perfect Son of the Father are always about his gift of himself to the world, never about earthly advantage, otherwise he would not have stayed around to be crucified! So this account of the temptations seems to be about Jesus searching and finding himself as he prepares for his mission, and the fact that Jesus passes on this ‘dream’ or ‘nightmare’ to the disciples (it is in all three synoptics) suggests it was significant, and that Jesus wanted the incident preserved (here in this terrifying vision) to get us to realise what was at stake. The point is that Jesus resists each temptation and emerges at the end of this trial clear sighted and ready for his mission and the cross that will save the world. Thanks be to God.
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