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Sermon - The Story of Redemption - 10th February 2008
St Alban’s Epping 7:00am, 8.00 am & 10:00am
Readings: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-21; Matthew 4:1-11
I enjoy going to the pictures. But the stories I like best are the ones where people are given a second chance. They’ve made some big mistake. Their lives were going in the wrong direction. But the story is about their second chance, a chance to put things right again, a chance to get back to the life they should have had.
One of my favourites is a film called “The Shawshank Redemption.” There we have a man committed to a life sentence in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. But as the story unfolds he reveals that his life had been on the wrong track before he had arrived in jail. And what he had to decide now, was how would he live. What would the rest of his life be about.
As he saw it, he had two choices, “Either get busy dying, or get busy living.” And the rest of the film is about what he did next, as his attempted a second chance at life. These sorts of stories can always draw us in. There is something intensely human about them. But there’s more than that. There is something intensely spiritual about them as well. Because the story about the second chance is the story about redemption, and of course, it’s the story about our redemption.
And we see that story in two of our readings this morning, from Genesis and from Matthew. From Genesis we learn of our creation and how Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden. They could eat from any tree in the garden except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they ate from that tree they would die. When the serpent appears in chapter three, he attempts to muddy the waters by suggesting that they can’t eat from any tree.
But Eve corrected him by pointing out that there was only one tree that brought death. But the serpent then disputed the truth of that. He questioned whether or not they would die. Rather he suggested just the opposite. He suggested that this tree would only bring good things. And so Adam and Eve believed him, and doubted what God had told them and ate from the tree. And for the first time in the Bible human kind learnt about death.
The story raises the question at the beginning of the Bible of who can you believe. How will we respond to what God has told us. Will we trust him or ignore him. And it raises the question of what is the future for human kind now that it faces death. What hope is there of a second chance. And so we come to our gospel reading. Now, instead of Adam and Eve, our focus is on Jesus and his encounter with the tempter.
This was where Adam and Eve had failed. Israel had gone through a similar test in heir Exodus and time in the wilderness for forty years. They hadn’t done much better than Adam and Eve. So now it was Jesus’ turn. He had been in the desert for forty days and nights fasting. And Matthew mentions that he was hungry. He was vulnerable.
He would now be tested like Adam and Eve, just as Israel had been. But this is where the story of the second chance becomes really interesting. First, the tempter suggests that Jesus should turn the stones into bread to eat. He certainly had the power to do it. He certainly was hungry. However, Jesus quoted Moses’ sermon in Deuteronomy 8 where Moses said “Man does not live on bread alone.” Later on Jesus was to teach that life was more than issues of what we eat or what we drink.
God had taken Israel into the deserts where there was no food, there was nothing to drink. The things that normally sustain life had been stripped away from them and yet they did not die. And the only reason they survived the experience was that God had kept them alive, day after day, day after day. They survived not because of their access to bread, they survived because God loved them and promised to sustain them.
Human life is much more than what we eat or what we drink. Life finds its ultimate expression when it is in communion with its creator. The tempter offered Jesus the satisfaction of bread but Jesus knew he could do much better. So, having passed that test, the tempter took Jesus to the highest point of the Temple and told him to jump off. Here the tempter tried quoting Scripture. The angels themselves would come to Jesus’ rescue.
And Jesus’ response presents us with some hard teaching, a lesson we might find difficult to except. He would not jump and be rescued by the angels. Rather, he quoted Deuteronomy 6:16 “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” The point was that God had taken Israel into the wilderness to test them, to teach them they could trust him. He brought them to the place called Massah where there was nothing to drink. But Israel complained and asked "why had God bought them to this place to die?"
In effect, they dared God to prove himself to them rather than trust him to preserve their lives. And, of course, he was able to provide them with plenty of water. But the difficulty here is that Israel was trying to reverse their relationship with God. They were forgetting that he is the creator and they were his creatures.
They’re faithfulness was being tested in the wilderness, not God’s. God has always shown his faithfulness to us. It is always us who have shown our weakness in our faithfulness to him. There is great wisdom in Moses saying, “You don’t put God to the test.” Failing to understand that, means we fail to understand who God is and doubt God’s faithfulness throughout history.
Can you imagine doing that to your husband or your wife. If you feel you’ve reached that point where you want to put their faithfulness to the test then there probably isn’t much of a relationship left – it would be a difficult marriage to rescue.
And then finally, the tempter took Jesus to the top of a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and then he made him a great offer. “You can have it all if you will worship me.” It would be an offer hard to refuse from a human perspective.
But it raises the issue of who will you worship. God has presented himself as the creator of all things, as the one who promises to bless his creation, and the one who remains faithful to his promises. Yet human kind has always shown a bias to a belief in anyone else, to trust any one else rather than the God who deserves our worship.
Jesus’ Messiah-ship, his kingship was going to be different to anything anyone had seen. People are too keen to worship at the altar of the gods of wealth and power and prosperity. And it has never worked. Jesus’ ministry would be completely different. His ministry would be marked by servant-hood, by loving your enemies, by doing good to those who hate you, going the second mile, turning the other cheek.
The tempter wanted Jesus to go in a very different direction, and make the same mistakes as Adam and Eve, and Israel and so many after them. During his ministry his own disciples would plead with him to take advantage of the power he had to achieve his mission. And even Jesus himself, in the garden of Gethsemane, pleaded with his father to take this cup from him if there were some other way. And here Jesus succeeded where all others had failed. He uttered those words, “but not my will, but your be done.”
So easily our tongues trip over that phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” But those words were a death sentence to Jesus, as he became the answer to his own prayer. And yet in that act of obedience, Jesus won redemption for all human kind. And that leaves us with our second chance. It leaves us with our discipleship, with the decision about the path we will take. The temptation is to be like Israel, to lose confidence in tough times, to forget where we are heading, to forget the challenge of Jesus’ discipleship and just be like the rest of the world.
There will always be the temptation to choose power before servant-hood, to be so focussed on the pursuit of bread, that everything else gets forgotten, to forget who is the creator and who is the creation. But Jesus knows that true wisdom can only be found in his heavenly father, just as we know that true obedience is only found in the Son. And so as we go through this time of Lent we have the wonderful example of Jesus, who taught us through his manner of life, and all he had to say, how to live as the people of God, how to avoid the errors of the past, and how to honour our father in heaven.
Let us pray through this time of Lent that we will become more and more the people God created us to be as we are conformed more and more into the image of his Son.