![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # First Sunday in Lent March 13, 2025 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13* *Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity* *Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, March 9, 2025)* In the name of God, our one Holy and undivided Trinity, amen. As you notice from the prayers and from the long litany with which we begin our service, today is the first Sunday of Lent. For those who might be unfamiliar with this Christian tradition, Lent as a season of preparation before Easter. 40 days, a time of discipline, fasting, lots of Christians give up stuff. I went to Notre Dame for college and there was no meat in the dining hall on Fridays during Lent. It's a traditional time for people to take on additional disciplines, take on fasts and give up pleasures. And it's rooted partly in this story where Jesus is out in the wilderness for 40 days with nothing. And indeed, this lesson, this story I should say, of Jesus in the wilderness, is always the lesson on the first Sunday in Lent. We have different versions of it. This year we're doing Luke, but each year on the first Sunday of Lent, we hear about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. That word temptation, I mentioned this in my sermon on the first Sunday of Lent last year, but the word that is translated here as temptation from the Greek, pyrhazo, doesn't really mean temptation. And when we translate it as we have for hundreds of years as temptation, we sort of give the wrong impression, I think. When we say that Jesus is tempted in the wilderness and we think about our own time of preparation as a time of resisting temptation, then I think it makes us have a sense that this season is about individual vices or personal failings. It makes it seem as if my relationship with God rests, to some significant degree, upon my ability to resist a slice of cake or a second cup of coffee, neither of which, let's be honest, I'm very likely to do. Luckily enough for me, since I'm not likely to do that, I think there's something else going on in this lesson, as you could probably guess I'm about to say. That word, pyrhazo, which we have traditionally translated as tempted, actually means something more like tried or tested or proven, even. Some of you know I was in the Navy for a bit after college and life at sea is hard on sailors and on ships. And about every 18 months, a ship has to go into port and just be out of commission for a while and just get repaired and spends a couple of weeks to a couple of months, sometimes several months, just fixing all the stuff that breaks from being at sea a lot. And then once you're ready to take the ship back out to sea, you take it out for what's called the shakedown cruise where you just test everything. You make the ship go as fast as it can go and turn as sharply as it can turn. The ship shakes a little bit, just to see what it can handle. Now, the scene just before the scene we have of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, Jesus has just been baptized by John in the River Jordan. And as he's emerging from the river, a voice comes from heaven and says about this man who has just been baptized in the river, "This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased." And then he goes out into the wilderness. But the devil is giving Jesus here, the shakedown cruise. "Oh, you're the son of God. Let's see what you can do. Let's see what you're capable of if you are the son of God. Prove it. Prove that you are who you say you are." I want to say a word about this devil before I get into the ways that Jesus is asked to prove it. In the first century, the people reading this gospel for the first time, hearing the story for the first time, did not have any conception of the devil as we have a conception of the devil today. The idea of a all powerful or almost all powerful evil creature with red skin and horns and a pointy tail and a trident and a pitchfork or whatever, that's Middle Ages at the earliest. The Greek word this time translated as devil is diabolu, diabolical comes from that. And so we have this sense of the demonic about it, but it didn't mean demon either. Diabolu just means slanderer. It means someone who misrepresents you or lies about you or defames you, or slanders you. Harvard Memorial Church · The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts Ph.D. - March 9, 2025 | Sunday Sermon The people who heard this story for the first time wouldn't have thought Satan or Devil with a capital S or a capital D; they would've heard the word the slanderer, the one who slanders God, the one who slanders the Messiah. This is the one that Jesus meets in the desert. This is the scene of Jesus's testing in the wilderness. Not temptation by this extraordinarily powerful evil force, but we have this newly minted Messiah. And with him, we have the one who wants to slander him, the one who wants to misrepresent who he is and who he ought to be. And that's important because all the tests that the devil gives to Jesus are about who he wants Jesus to be or who he thinks he ought to be, who he thinks God is and who he thinks the Messiah ought to be. These tests are the same in every version and they change the order a little bit, but it's the same every version. First, "Turn these stones to bread," then, "Here are all the kingdoms of the world." Last, "Call upon the angels to save you." In every case, the slanderer is telling Jesus, "This is what it means to be the son of God. To have absolute power over your own life and death, to have absolute power over all the earthly powers, all the kingdoms of the world. To be the Messiah means to have absolute power over all the powers of Heaven. That's what being the son of God means, so prove it." And Jesus rejects all those things, refuses all those things, not because they are temptations necessarily, but because they are not who God is, they're not who the son of God is. They do not represent the mission of this Messiah. More to the point, what the Slanderer offers Jesus are slanders, defamations, and misrepresentations of who God is, what God wants for us, and what God hopes for their son, the Messiah. Jesus' is not a mission of conquest and triumph and power, Jesus' mission is something else. Well, what is it? The gospel tells us. It doesn't tell us in the section we have here. Jesus is tempted by all these things, power over life and death, power over all the armies of the world, power over all the armies of Heaven, and Jesus says, "No thanks." And immediately after the scene, He goes and he begins his ministry. He goes into a synagogue and says, "I am here to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, liberation to the oppressed. I am not here to gather up the armies of the kingdoms; I'm not here to call down armies of angels. I'm here for you. If you are poor, if you are imprisoned, if you are oppressed, I am here for you." Jesus has power, he's willing to use it, but keep reading in the Gospel of Luke. He doesn't make bread for himself, he makes bread for 5,000 hungry people. He doesn't rule over all the nations; he sends his apostles out to declare to them the forgiveness of God. He does not ask God to save him. When he's dying on the cross, he asks God to save the people who are killing him. That is who God is, not the one who rounds up all the earthly and heavenly powers for a show of triumph and might. And the one who says that's who God is, is a slanderer. God is love and Jesus' mission is love. And the reason he refuses all those things in the desert is because he has one thing to do and one job to get to, and it's to love us. And it's what he starts doing as soon as he can get away from this slanderer and get to work. There's nothing wrong with spiritual disciplines; there's nothing wrong with fasting. I'm cutting back during Lent. I give up sweets to some degree every year, and I'm trying to do it again this year. It hasn't been going great; don't ask me. But these sorts of fasts, these sorts of spiritual disciplines, that's not why Jesus came, that's not what Jesus is up to here. It's not why God sent Jesus. It's not what God is asking of Jesus, and it's not what God is asking of us this Lent or anytime. One of the great mistakes of Christianity, one of the great ways that we Christians have slandered the mission of the Messiah is that we have too often made it about personal piety, about individual sins like personal piety, instead of about big social, structural things like justice and mercy and love, the things that Jesus was up to, the things that God wants us to be up to. The mission of Jesus is not about improving our willpower as if what God wants most of us is to have better impulse control around deserts, as if God cared more about whether I can decline a doughnut downstairs at coffee hour, than God cares about the literal millions of starving children who are waiting for shipments of food that we in this country have made and packed and packaged and promised them, and that will not be shipped and cannot be shipped due to a lie about government efficiency. That is not what God wants. What God wants from us is love and mercy and justice. What God wants from us is to turn away from the false securities of the political powers, from the false promises of worldly leaders and kings and presidents and tycoons and tyrants who assert that we can do it all and we can have it all as long as we let them do it all and let them have it all first. And by God, they're doing it, and they're having it. But these are lies; they are all slander and defamation. It is not what God wants, not what God wants for their son, not what God wants for their church, not what God wants from us. What God wants is for us to turn away from all of that, to turn instead toward exactly those whom this Messiah, whom this Christ, whom this Jesus came to serve and to bless, the hungry, the sick, the poor, the captive, the outcast, the queer, the immigrant, the foreigner, the enemy, the oppressed. All these, all of us, we beloved children of God. ## Full Sunday Sermon See also:- [ Sunday Service ](/blog-categories/sunday-service) - [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) - [ Matthew Ichihashi Potts ](/media-archive/matthew-ichihashi-potts) - [ Lent ](/sermon-topics/lent-0) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)