First Sunday in Lent
By The Rev. Stephanie Paulsell
Affiliated Minister, Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church (2019-2021)
Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies, Emerita, Harvard Divinity School
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Feb. 22, 2026)
Good morning, everyone. I’m very grateful to Matt, and to all of you, for the invitation to be here this morning.
Would you pray with me.
O send out your light and your truth, let them lead us.
Let them lead us to your holy hill, and to your dwelling.
Then we will go to your altar, O God, O God our exceeding joy.
And we will praise you with the harp, O God, our God. Amen.
Maybe it’s the professor in me, but whenever I read the story of the temptation of Jesus, my first thought is that Jesus and the devil have obviously done their reading. When we come upon them in the desert, they are busy swatting verses of scripture back and forth. The devil starts it, tempting the hungry Jesus by alluding to God’s power to make nourishment miraculously available: water from rock, manna from heaven. If you are the son of God, the devil says to Jesus who is famished after forty days of fasting, command this stone to become a loaf of bread. Jesus finds a quick reply in the book of Deuteronomy: “It is written,” he says, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ Soon, the devil, too, is quoting scripture. “God will command his angels to protect you,” he says, quoting Psalm 91, as he tries to lure Jesus into a show of messianic power. Jesus reaches again into Deuteronomy for his comeback: “Do not put the Lord your God,” he says, “to the test.”
What Jesus and the devil are doing might be called prooftexting—and, as our seminarians can attest, it’s something we’re taught in divinity school not to do. Basically, prooftexting is a way of reading that extracts biblical passages from their context and uses them as “proof” for particular arguments. We’re taught not to do it because the context matters so much—and because prooftexting is most often used to stop conversation rather than opening up space for more of it.
This is not to say that a verse of scripture can’t speak powerfully on its own to our current situation. During the Occupy Wall Street protests—which seem like a long time ago now—I remember watching the news one night when one of our students appeared on the screen being interviewed by the press in Zuccotti Park. What are your demands? the reporter asked him. And without missing a beat, the student said: that we love our neighbor as ourselves.
Rather than cutting off conversation, this verse opens outward, into more questions, just as it did when Jesus told his parable. Who is my neighbor? What would it mean to love them? What does it mean to love ourselves? It’s an invitation to thought, to prayer, to love, to action, to wondering what those old words of scripture might mean in our world.
And that’s true of what Jesus does in this story, too. All the verses he uses to fend off the devil’s temptations are from the book of Deuteronomy, a book about how to read scripture in a way that gives weight both to the world in which scripture was written and how it might speak to the needs of the current moment. “One does not live by bread alone,” Deuteronomy says, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Scripture, Jesus seems to say, is not a tool of power’s false promises, but a nourishing, living word with the power to challenge us, sustain us, and change us.
Jesus is after more than besting the devil, but winning an argument with scripture is not all the devil’s after in this story, either. He’s trying to lure Jesus into a transactional relationship, and he’s twisting scripture to do it. Worship me, he says, and I’ll give you bread. Worship me, and the wealth of the world is yours. It’s a zero-sum game the devil is proposing, the very opposite of God’s capacious and unpredictable grace, and Jesus knows it. He knows the game itself is rotten to the core.
But even more than winning the argument, even more than drawing Jesus into a quid pro quo, the devil seems to want, most of all, to goad Jesus into losing faith in himself, maybe even to forget who he is. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread…If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.” In a story that’s so much about the power of words, that little word “if” may be the most important word of all. It’s small enough to slip underneath Jesus’s skin, small enough to lodge in his mind--and sharp enough to wound.
Jesus will hear that “if” again when our Lenten journey brings us to Good Friday. Soldiers and passersby will mock him, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” On the face of it, it seems Jesus is being tempted to use his power to avoid his death. But even more, that “if” tempts Jesus, in the violence and terror of the moment he is living through, to forget what his life means.
The season of Lent invites our contemplation on what our own lives mean as followers of Jesus, as children of God, as human beings alive on this earth, in this country, at this moment. And the stories that bookend this season—the temptation of Jesus in the desert and his death on the cross—remind us how differently our faith can feel when life suddenly puts it under pressure. Jesus’s view of his life and ministry must have looked very different from the vantage point of the cross. As our own faith does when we lose a parent. Or receive a threatening medical diagnosis. Or lose our job. Who am I without my father? Who am I with malignant cells in my body? Who am I without my job, my career, my profession?
Political upheaval can also upend our sense of who we are. Who are we when the structures and institutions we took for granted are attacked, weakened and compromised?
Who are we when the raw power of the state is deployed without mercy against the most vulnerable, and in our name? These are also identity-shaking experiences, and they tempt us to give in to despair, to let fear shape our choices, to forget who we are called to be. They tempt us to turn away.
When Jesus is mocked by the soldiers and passersby, what does he do? Notably, he does not come down from the cross and save himself. He continues experiencing everything that happens when vulnerable human bodies are caught in the maw of power’s cruelty, including the worst feelings of abandonment. The gospel of Matthew shows him once again quoting scripture. This time, he makes the words of Psalm 22 his own: my God, my God, Jesus cries out, why have you forsaken me? Even as everything is taken from him, he stays turned toward God, even when it seems that God has turned away. And he stays turned toward us and all that human beings can and do suffer.
The Jesus we meet in Lent is the one who felt the touch of a hemorrhaging woman on the fringe of his cloak and stopped to look for her in the crowd because he cared about her suffering. He is the one who taught us that our neighbor is not just our fellow citizen, but the person who needs our help. He is the one who sat down to dinner with those society despised. Jesus is that person at the beginning of his ministry, and he remains that person at its terrible end: one who, as the philosopher Simone Weil once put it, remains turned toward love, even as he is nailed to heart of the universe.
It takes a lot of courage to remain turned toward love in the midst of grief and anguish and doubt. Unfortunately, life brings us all many opportunities to try. Fortunately, it’s not all up to us alone. We have communities like this one that hold onto love and hope and faith for us when we feel them slipping out of our hands. Sometimes all we can do is put one foot in front of the other. But putting one foot in front of the other is all we need for the journey of Lent.
Hungry and harassed in the desert, Jesus also keeps putting one foot in front of the other, and his steps lead him out of the desert and into Galilee where he preaches repentance—a call to transformation as Matt put it in his letter to us this week. From there, Jesus calls his disciples, and begins to teach and heal. As we follow Jesus through the season of Lent, we will see him nurturing his sense of himself in community, in prayer, in humane acts of care and courage. And—in Luke’s gospel anyway—also in his reading—reading which takes him far beyond the empty transactional promises of his tempter and into the richness of his vocation: to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and to proclaim the mercy of God.
In between the story of his temptation and the story of his death, there is another story in which Jesus is addressed with that little word, “if.” It’s a story that appears in all three synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—in almost exactly the same form, using almost exactly the same words. This suggests that the story was known in several early Christian communities and that it was meaningful to them as they tried to nurture their own identity, their own faith. It’s the story of a man with leprosy whose disease has kept him on the margins of the community, despised and uncared for. He approaches Jesus and says “if”—not in a mocking way, but in a longing way. “If you choose, you can make me clean,” he says to Jesus. If you choose, you can acknowledge my existence. If you choose, you can recognize my suffering. If you choose, you can heal my body. If you choose, you can bring me into the care of the community. If you choose, you can defend me. If you choose, you can decide not to turn away. If you choose, you can heal my loneliness.
Jesus answers with intention, with clarity, without hesitation. “I do choose,” Jesus says in Matthew, in Mark and in Luke. “Be made clean.”
The season of Lent invites us to stand on both sides of that “if”—asking for healing and choosing mercy. It’s the rhythm of our breath, the rhythm of our movement. If we make it the rhythm of our Lenten pilgrimage, moving back and forth from one side of that “if” to another—asking for healing, choosing love, asking for healing, choosing mercy--the meaning of our lives as followers of Jesus, as children of God, as human beings alive on this earth, in this country, at this moment, will come ever more clearly into view. There will be so many opportunities for us to practice asking for healing and choosing mercy this Lent. Asking and choosing, asking and choosing over and over again, we might hone our response to what is happening within us, around us and between us to be as unambiguous as Jesus’s was: I do choose. Of course I do. I do.
Amen.