Prayer and Fasting

Sermon Notes 26th February 2023
Desiree Snyman

Lent 1 Matthew 4

About the text

From a literary point of view, the scripture today is fairly easy to unpack. First, the temptations roughly correspond to and follow on from the Ash Wednesday readings through which the Spirit drove us into the wilderness of Lent. Lent is about fasting, prayer and almsgiving. The advice for keeping Lent is in Mathew 6: 

·      So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you…(almsgiving).

·      But whenever you pray, go into your room, and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret…(prayer for the sake of others).

·      Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites …(fasting).

The temptations described in Matthew 4 for Lent 1 correspond to Matthew 6 for Ash Wednesday. The temptation to turn rocks into bread (Matthew 4) relates to fasting (Matthew 6). The temptation to test God is about whether your prayer is in service of others or your own ego. Owning the kingdoms of the world and their splendour is about accumulating wealth or releasing wealth to the poor, the stranger and widows and orphans, the real shareholders of our excess.

A second aspect of our literary analysis relates to the intention of Matthew. We already know that the writer of Matthew’s Gospel wanted to depict Jesus as the new Moses. The Gospel of Matthew is structured around this theme of Moses and draws obvious parallels between the life of Moses and the life of Jesus. Moses came from Egypt; Jesus came from Egypt. Moses went through the Red Sea, Jesus in his baptism goes through the Red Sea of the River Jordan. Legend has it that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Jesus the fulfillment of the Torah will preach the new Torah in five sermons that structure the whole Gospel from chapters 5 onwards.

Third, there are other literary illusions that the writer of our Gospel today may want us to consider. When Jesus had passed his wilderness exam suddenly angels came and waited on him. The presence of angels remind us of Elijah’s time in the wilderness. Elijah flees into the wilderness after Jezebel sets out to kill him. Hungry, tired, fearing for his life, totally alone, feeling like an utter failure, questioning the reality of God, Elijah is waited on by angels. The angels offer the best advice to anyone experiencing amygdala hijack when the prefrontal cortex has shut down any access to logic: eat something, drink something, have a nap. 

There seems little point in unpacking in detail the meaning of the three temptations Jesus faced as it is unlikely that any of us will ever be tempted to change stones into bread and none of us would be tempted to jump off a high building to test whether God’s angels will catch us. If we have those temptations we need a diagnosis, not a sermon. I want to talk about the wilderness and the tempter instead.  

Our story in the text

In my prayer I sit with Jesus in the wilderness. In my prayerful imagination I find the whole experience of being in the desert with Jesus utterly attractive. I feel rejuvenated in the wilderness. The air is fresh and silent. The silence itself is nourishing, as is the solitude. Although I have a deep, deep love for people, the depth of my love for people is sustained by being alone and the aloneness with Jesus in the wilderness sunrise is stunning. I feel closer to God; there is something about the rawness of undomesticated wilderness that rewilds my inner spirit and strips off the ways I have tamed divinity. My inner architecture is reconfigured by the architecture of creation. Awe at the unthinkable, unsayable God pulsating at the heart of all that is, is breathtaking. In this desert I sense solidarity with the trees, the vegetation, and the insects and it instils a delicious a sense of oneness with Universe.

The pleasure at being in the wilderness is coloured by my experiences of going on Retreat at Sediba, a silent retreat centre in the mountains outside Johannesburg South Africa, to which I regularly escaped. Like Jesus I feel drawn to the wilderness by the Spirit. Like Jesus I am confident of the reality of God’s love that calls me beloved. However, it is still the morning of the first few days of the retreat when the wilderness feels so attractive. It is usually on the evening of day four that the tempter arrives.

The wilderness that in the morning of the first day called out like a lover turns on you, betrays you. Sleep alludes you. Fears and terrors magnify. Mosquitoes the size of spitfires add to your torment and Lord have mercy, there are so many of them. The solitude that in the morning was nourishing has twisted into the ugly monster of loneliness. The silence that was so stunning has become so very, very, very, loud. Who knew silence could be so deafeningly loud. The darkness and the silence magnify the slightest sound: your heartbeat sounds like an ear-splitting thunderstorm; the gurgle of your digestive tract sounds like the threatening waters of a flood. All mystical thought has taken flight, as has any thought of Scripture. You wonder if your sanity will survive the night of sheer and utter terror. And, where, the hell, (word chosen deliberately), is God?

The scripture describes ‘ha satan’, an accuser, a tempter. Perhaps the accuser is a metaphor for that internal, infernal voice of doubt and criticism. But let me tell you something, at two in the morning, alone in the dark, after no sleep, those terrors and fears take on demonic, solid form. So I can be comfortable with the translation of “the tempter” as “the devil”. At my moments of greatest doubt and weakness the terror seems to have corporeal form. 

Why would I peel back my skin and share a short excerpt of my minute wilderness experience?  I unravelled like a cheap jumper on day 4, day 40 would destroy me. I suggest that the wilderness may be something we are all too familiar with, perhaps in different ways. In telling you my story of Matthew 4 I hope to remind you of your own desert experiences and that you are not alone in going through them. 

I described Sediba, a silent retreat centre in the mountains outside the city of Johannesburg. I once took a priest friend and colleague with me on retreat. We had breath training at 4 in the morning followed by silent meditation from 5-7am. When he didn’t rock up for meditation on the morning of the fifth day I went looking for him and found him on top of the concrete sealed reservoir where he had been facing his own terrors, all night. He told me hadn’t slept. I said nothing. I put a blanket around him and sat in silence next to him, not because I was holy and meditating, but because there is nothing one can say. While I empathise with his struggle, it was a comfort to me to know that I am not alone in hearing ‘demons’ ; others fight them too.  

This is why I told you my story of my experience of the scripture in Matthew 4. I hope to remind you of your own nights of terror. Wilderness spaces come in many shapes and sizes, as does the tempter. At some point we all sit for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert wasteland. St John describes the inner wasteland of loneliness, doubt, emptiness, and bone-numbing fatigue as a dark night of the senses or a dark night of the soul. What about the dark night of sheer and utter terror that threatens to shatter your sanity?

For some, the wilderness may be the loneliness of the work car park, after you have been fired and have endured the humiliation of packing up your desk and have been marched out the office building by security because that is ‘company policy’. For others it may be the recovery room in a hospital where you think you may never recover from yet another miscarriage. For others it is the deafness of the silence after a diagnosis from a doctor. For some people the wilderness is the sheer loneliness after the funeral of a much-loved spouse or the unending ache after divorce. 

Whatever shape our wilderness takes, and whatever voice the tempter has, the point is that the wasteland is an aspect of our spiritual journey which we cannot do without. Nor should we want to. There is no way around the desert, you can only go through it. While never pleasant, the desert frees us. The wilderness experiences strips us right down to our True Self that is and always was naked and one with the Divine. The God of our Sunday School teachers and the God of our preachers and parents dies. We rebuild our inner being on the foundation of our own faith. Our own faith is hard won through wrestling accusers, tempters, demons and even angels that kick us in the hip before blessing us and leaving us to limp out of the desert forever crippled, but richly blessed by the experience.

The desert sand also blasts our eyelids off so that we can no longer close them to the pain of the world. Our eyelids are ripped off by desert sand and our watering eyes look through the ordinariness of our society to diagnose the sickness that ordinariness masks. Any wilderness restores our authenticity, it prevents us from being too comfortable with the temptations we have habitually accepted and considered normal and ordinary.

Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” offers a chilling, hyperbolic but true example of what happens when we refuse to go through the pain of the wilderness and attempt to go around it. Hannah’s interpretation of temptation is that:

Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbours go off to their doom, and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them.

Hannah then concludes that the Germans had learnt to resist temptation. Hannah’s book shows us that we could become so comfortable in our day to day routines that we no longer question their very ordinariness, even when these ordinary processes automatise the wholescale murder of neighbours and friends.

Even Jesus’ invitation to be the Christ and to follow him are so well worn we no longer hear it and see it. However, our response to being in the wilderness defines our willingness to be truly God’s. May the Spirit who whispered your true name, “beloved of God”, who filled you then sent you into the desert, support you in your furnace of transformation.