Lent 1: Beloved and Bedevilled

Paolo Veronese – Baptism & Temptation of Christ (Milan)

Lent 1
9/3/25
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Romans 10:8-13
Luke 4:1-13


Welcome to Lent. I wish you all a holy one. As a reminder of what this season should and could look like, I start with the words from the Introduction to the Ash Wednesday service and invite you to observe it faithfully.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting.

By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.

I invite you, therefore, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.


Lent is not about being miserable or forsaking the delicacies of life in and of themselves. It is meant to bring us closer to God, to build up our relationships with Jesus and to deepen our understanding of our Christian faith. Take the opportunity; we all need to.

The Gospel reading on the first Sunday of Lent is always the temptation of Jesus. This event happened immediately after Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. The focus is often on the temptation by the devil, however in our study group on Wednesday, it was pointed out that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. God the Spirit was with Jesus in his temptation.

God was also with Moses and the Israelites as they stood on the cusp of the land that was being given as their inheritance to possess. It was not going to be easy, the travelling had been long; punishment for disobedience had made the journey even longer. Temptation to go their own way had plagued the travellers; Moses kept them going and was the bridge between the people and God. The land would flow with milk and honey because God had promised and is faithful.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we are told with great passion that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. God is generous to those who confess with their lips and believe with the heart. We will be saved for all eternity to be with God. God is faithful. This is what we need to hang on to every moment of every day; Lent is an opportunity to deepen our understanding of God’s faithfulness.

This is how Jesus was able to resist temptation and Moses got those rebellious Israelites into the promised land. It is how we will be saved and spared from an eternity apart from God (also known as hell).

Whatever our attitude towards Lent might be, I strongly encourage all of us to invest, pay attention, do some work, and do things differently over these next few weeks. I suspect you will surprise yourselves. We are to set our minds on things above. The idea behind fasting for Lent is rooted in this Gospel story; Jesus was able to resist temptation at his weakest points. We give up things in Lent to remind ourselves of the sacrifices that Jesus made

At his baptism, the bottom-line truth of Jesus is revealed: He is God’s son, precious and beloved. When Jesus is led into the wilderness, he is faced with various assaults on this truth. Jesus has to work out God’s presence in a harsh and lonely world. The lesson is that he and we have to learn that we can be beloved and go without, precious and vulnerable.

I want to briefly look at the temptations that Jesus faced and what they might say to us today.

Tell This Stone to Become Bread


This temptation suggests that God’s beloved should not hunger. There should not be any doubt that Jesus could not have done that. He was, after all, hungry. He had been fasting for forty days! Taking a stone and turning it into something it was not meant to be would be cheating, denying the reality of Jesus’ humanity. By paying attention to hunger, we are to lean into God for our lasting fulfilment. The devil wanted Jesus and us to disrespect and manipulate creation for our own satisfaction.

Many of us have the power to look after ourselves, provide for ourselves to a standard that we see fit. I can do it myself, thank you very much!

By doing things for ourselves all the time, we too can stop exercising trust in God to provide for us. His provision is always better, remember we too are his beloved and precious children. Lent should teach us that we can be loved and hungry at the same time.

If You Worship Me, It Will All Be Yours

The second temptation targets the ego. Power is the root of many evils. People crave power and Satan knows this. We want to be in control of our own lives, destinies, plans. It started with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; they were tempted by the prospect of power. They believed, with no proof at all, that eating the apple would make them like God.

The temptation suggests God’s beloved do not need to labour in obscurity; we can do it all on stage with the applause and admiration we desire. Surely God does not want us to live in modesty and insignificance by the world’s standards or Charlwoods/Sidlow Bridge standards?!

Do we trust God sees us when those with power do not? Are we able to live as God’s beloved in quiet places in humble service?

Throw Yourself Down From Here

The third temptation targets Jesus’ vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked. This is the language used around safeguarding vulnerable adults and children. The suggestion of this temptation is that God’s beloved will be kept safe by God. Safe from all physical and emotional harm, frailty and disease, accidents and ultimately death.

This is an attractive lie as it targets our deepest fears about what it is to be human in a dangerous world. We can get God to guarantee a perfect rescue if we believe hard enough.

Jesus’ reply is that we are not to put God to the test. The cross teaches us that God’s beloved ones still bleed and ache and die. We are loved in our vulnerable states, not out of them. God accompanies us, as he did Moses and the Israelites, in our suffering.

This is good news because we are the beloved of a God who resurrects. There is no suffering that God will not redeem. Our story is not one that ends in despair; it ends with an empty tomb, in a kingdom of hope and love, consolation and joy.

Jesus does not choose to enter the wilderness; the Spirit led him there. The time of temptation was to establish that Jesus had choices and desires of his own, like all humans do. We do not voluntarily choose to enter the wilderness but it still happens; maybe in a hospital waiting room, a difficult relationship, a troubled child or sudden death. Does this mean that God wants us to suffer? I do not believe that.

It does mean that by following the example of Jesus, we must choose to make God’s will our own will. We choose through our temptations and wilderness times what kind of Christian, what kind of person we will be. The wilderness can be redeemed and become holy if we stay and pay attention.

There is hope in the wilderness; God does not abandon Jesus there. Jesus was ministered to by the angels. When we find ourselves in the wilderness we are not abandoned as it is Jesus who tends to us.

Lent can be a wilderness season of sorts as we make time (or should make time) to examine where we are at with God. Jesus was able to answer Satan at each turn with scripture from Deuteronomy. Maybe we need to brush up on what the bible says (or doesn’t)!

A wilderness season, however challenging, will never be wasted if we believe and know that God is with us. Those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. Our identity lies in being His beloved son or daughter. If we can hang on to that, then whatever the wilderness throws at us, we can make it through.

Sunday Before Lent: Transfiguration


Exodus 24:12-18
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9

We are about to enter the last week of the short season of Epiphany. This coming Wednesday we begin forty days of Lent. Over the past few weeks at various services I have talked about epiphany. As a reminder, the Greek word for “epiphany” means disclosure, manifestation, unveiling or appearance.
Matthew 17 for this week describes one of the greatest “epiphanies” ever; the Transfiguration of Jesus before Peter, James, and John. It is complete with blinding light, a heavenly voice, and visions of Moses and Elijah.
The event was so mind-boggling that the New Testament reading this week in 2 Peter 1 admits that some people dismissed the story as a “cleverly invented tale.” The Transfiguration account is in Matthew, Mark & Luke so we know it is an important event.

Close your eyes just for a moment.

I would like you to consider: what does Jesus look like to you?

What colour is his hair, his eyes, teeth – crooked or straight? Ears – big or small? Tall or short? Hands – rough or smooth?

Just create a picture of what you think He looks like.

By this point in Matthew’s Gospel we have seen a very human Jesus. He was born, had a childhood; Jesus eats, drinks, sleeps, goes to a wedding, goes sailing, meets up with friends. He travels, he cries, he gets angry, he wants to be alone. All very normal and human activities. But we also see Jesus healing people, exercising demons; doing more supernatural things. He is doing a lot of teaching and preaching and the crowds are growing and the Pharisees are starting to close ranks.

Then we have the Transfiguration! If there were hints that Jesus was something more than strictly human, here we have it! Jesus really is more than a mere man, more than human. The Transfiguration is the luminous story of a mystical encounter, not only between God and God’s Beloved but also between those at the centre of the story and those who watch. Those at the centre are Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Those who watch are Peter, James and John. And then, of course, there are all of us watching all of them.

I want to focus on the watching, the listening and the closeness to God that happens in this story.

Peter, James and John are invited to accompany Jesus up the mountain where he physically changes his appearance before them. The description is that of a heavenly being, dressed in white. These three probably had a better understanding of who Jesus was; beyond being only human. Just before the Transfiguration account, Jesus asks Peter ‘who do you say I am?’ and Peter replies ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God’. Jesus blesses Peter for this answer.

Once this acknowledgment takes place, Jesus begins to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, to suffer and die at the hands of the chief priests and the elders, and on the third day rise again.

While it might not have made complete sense to Peter, James and John, they have already decided who Jesus is. He is the Messiah. They had stayed close to Jesus throughout his ministry being the first disciples called. They stayed with him through to the end – even Peter who denies Jesus three times never really leaves him.

If we want to see who Jesus is, if we want to listen to Him – we need to stay close to him.

Go back for another moment to your mental picture of Jesus. How far away is he from you? Three inches, three feet, across the room, a speck in the distance?

Where we place Jesus in our thinking and in our lives says something about how close we are to him. If we want to see his face then we need to stay close. Keep Your Eyes on Jesus. Also keep your ears on Jesus.

For the second time, the disciples hear a voice from the cloud saying ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. They first heard this at Jesus’ baptism; but this time there is an addendum, ‘listen to him’.

If we want to hear Him; then we need to stay close to Him. Jesus is always speaking but we are not always willing to listen to his voice. People sometimes tell me that they don’t think they have ever heard from God or had any encounter with him, what some might call a ‘mountain top’ experience – whatever that might mean for them.

I am always curious to know how people are positioning themselves to ‘hear from God’. Closeness to God is a thread that runs through both the Old & New Testaments.

There is an intimacy to a relationship with God; we see this as he takes aside certain people – Moses, Peter, James and John for particular purposes. Sometimes we have to be taken out of our circumstances and situations to meet with God. Moses is taken up and spends an extended amount of time in the presence of God: forty days and forty nights. Moses is given instructions for the building of the ark of the Covenant and other laws and commandments for the people of Israel whom he was leading.

Moses reappears in the Transfiguration story as representing the OT law that is fulfilled in the coming of Jesus. Throughout the OT God is hidden because he is too glorious to be seen by his people. They could not survive in all that glory.
It is through Jesus that we can stand in the glory of God – the God that is hidden in the OT is the God revealed and exposed in the person of Jesus in the NT.

It is in the Transfiguration that we are reminded of greatness and otherness of Jesus and of God which is helpful as we head into Lent. We need reminding that Jesus is more than we are, he is more than enough.

I think that many Christians try to reduce him down, make him fit into our lives, constrain him to our view of the world. We easily dismiss Him when he doesn’t do or act how we want him to.

With Transfiguration Sunday, we come to the end of another liturgical season. We have spent time with the people who experienced Epiphany (the wise men, Mary & Joseph, Simeon & Anna). We now prepare for the long darkness of Lent. We can’t know ahead of time what mountains and valleys lie ahead. We can’t predict how God will speak, and in what guise Jesus might appear.
But we can trust in this: whether on the brightest mountain, or in the darkest valley, Jesus is with us. Even as he blazes with holy light, his hand remains warm and solid on our shoulders. Even when we’re on our knees in the wilderness, he whispers, “Do not be afraid.”

So listen to the ordinary. Scan the horizon. Keep listening. Keep looking. It is good for us to be here.