Are you tough enough?

The first Sunday of Lent. The time of year when many of us have given things up – whether a particular food, or some other luxury, in the modern equivalent of the fast, or some bad habit that we’re trying to kick. If the particular discipline that you’ve chosen to focus on this Lent is a difficult one for you (as it was for me the one year I tried to give up chocolate – I’m never doing that again!) then forty days can seem like a long time indeed.

When it gets to this time of year I can’t help being reminded of a programme on TV a few years back called “SAS: are you tough enough?” In the programme a group of hardy, and to my mind completely bonkers, people volunteered to be sent into the middle of nowhere and undertake SAS-style endurance training. They marched for hours without food, they were deprived of sleep, and carried their own body weight around in a huge rucksack. Believe me, I have nothing but admiration for those people who survived the course intact, but the whole thing looked absolutely horrendous to me, and if anyone were to ask me ‘are you tough enough?’ I would have no hesitation at all in replying, ‘No, I’m not, so please don’t make me try!’ I’m sure I’m not alone in this, and that that’s partly why the programme made such compulsive viewing.

The wilderness, of course, puts us in mind not only of Jesus’ forty days of testing, but also of the Israelites’ forty years, between the Exodus from Egypt and the entry into the promised land – a story that will be familiar to most of us, and which is reflected in so many of the Lenten hymns that we'll be singing over the next few weeks.

I wonder, though, whether we’re in danger of making God like the fearsome SAS trainer, sending the Israelites into the wilderness for forty years, and his Son into the wilderness for forty days, to see if they were tough enough? To see how strong they were, whether they were robust enough and had the willpower that he was looking for in his chosen people, and in his Son? I don’t think that's what God was doing, and I certainly hope not.

Actually, if you read through the book of Deuteronomy, you'll see that God tells his chosen people straight off that he didn’t choose them because they were the strongest, toughest, biggest, people. He knew they were small in number, weak, and prone to temptation. And yet he still chose them. And the whole point of the incarnation really was that Jesus was God become vulnerable, human, frail and open to the dangers and temptations of the world just as we are. Not that he would be superman.

Perhaps the forty years in the wilderness were more about teaching the children of Israel that actually they were not tough enough. That they didn’t have what it took to survive in their own strength. That in order to become the people they were called to be, they must rely not on themselves, but on God. And perhaps Jesus’ own time in the wilderness was a chance for him to affirm the same things for himself.

Lent, particularly the discipline of giving things up, always opens us to the risk that it will become for us a matter of self-reliance, when instead it should be about realising that it’s in our weakness that we can find our strength in God. Remember that when Jesus went into the wilderness he was led there by the Holy Spirit, and he set out on his wilderness experience with the wonderful affirming words of God ringing in his ears: you are my son, my beloved, and I am pleased with you. When we undertake our own Lenten journey – whatever form our own wilderness takes – we can’t do it unless we approach it in the same way: secure in the knowledge that through it all God leads us by the hand, and that our strength comes from him alone.

If God left us on our own just at the moment of greatest suffering, hardship and temptation, none of us would stand a chance. But God doesn’t leave us on our own. And Jesus called on God the Father to help him: he drew on his knowledge of the scriptures - the story of God’s saving help throughout history - to remind himself that this was not a test of willpower or character but an opportunity to rest in the power and love of God. If Jesus’ temptations were highlighting the things that we might rely on: sustenance, status, safety and protection – if it’s all about those things being taken away, then it’s also about coming back to what will never be taken away: the faithful presence of God. As the hymn says, ‘When other helpers fail, when comforts flee, help of the helpless, O abide with me.’

But Jesus’ time in the wilderness was about more than that. It was also a demonstration that everything he would go on to do in the rest of his ministry was also absolutely dependent on God. It was a genuine period of preparation, a time away from everyone except God, to work out against all the tempting alternatives, what his mission and ministry would be like. In short, having heard the words ‘you are my beloved son’ Jesus had that time of retreat to take that wonderful affirmation and work out what it meant for the rest of his life and ministry. The forty days in the wilderness was a time for Jesus to show what he understood that sonship to mean. That Sonship wasn’t about power and status, but about obedience and trust.

Jesus would face temptation again – we might think in particular about his agony in Gethsemane, where he so desperately wanted there to be another way. But just as he refused the easy way out in the wilderness, so he would refuse it then in the garden. And just has he refused to prove God’s love by jumping off the temple roof, so he would refuse to claim God’s love for him by coming down from the cross and saving his own life.

For what Jesus understood so well, and what was acted out in the wilderness is that God’s sovereignty and love were best demonstrated not through cheap acts of power, but through the sustained loving relationship that God had always desired with his people right from the moment of creation, an endlessly patient and enduring relationship of love, and betrayal and forgiveness which is written on every page of scripture. This is what Jesus came to teach us. This was his mission and his ministry.

Temptation is not so much something external to us, it’s the insidious voice within ourselves that sounds so reasonable, that is so easy to listen to. For Jesus, temptation came in the form of thinking through the various other ways that he could have tried to fulfil his vocation, but were not God’s way.

Lent can also be a time for each of us to spend time alone with God, and in that time, to realise not only our own dependence on God, but also the ways in which we are called to live out our own calling as his children. What will being sons and daughters of God mean for us? How will the disciplines we’ve set ourselves in Lent help us to work out what God is calling us to be and to do?

That’s why, for me, what is at the heart of Lent is tucked away in the Lent Eucharistic prayer, and it is this:
“For in these forty days you lead us into the desert of repentance that through a pilgrimage of prayer and discipline we may grow in grace and learn to be your people once again.”

Through fasting, prayer, and immersing ourselves in the word of God – that’s how we learn to be God’s people once again according to today’s Eucharistic prayer. That’s what Jesus did in the wilderness, and in so doing, he showed that he really was God’s Son. And that’s what we need to do. Through our own wilderness of fasting, prayer, and immersion in God’s word, we learn again to be children of God, showing that God is our Father not by having strong wills, but by submitting our wills to his will, and living out all that he is calling us to be and do.

Now, in this time of testing, we train our hearts not to be tougher, but to be more reliant on God, so that in the rest of our lives we remember what it feels like to be children of God.
When Lent asks you the question, ‘are you tough enough?’ don’t be afraid to respond boldly: ‘No, but God is.’
Amen.