‘I don’t think Christ needed 40
days in the desert. A long weekend would have done. It would have made it a lot
easier…’ The late Sir Jimmy Savile was quoted thus in a newspaper article in
1995 which proclaimed ‘the ritual of abstinence over Lent … has all but disappeared. The British public has given up on giving up.’
The dire
warnings of nearly a decade ago may not have entirely been confirmed by events,
because the Church of England announced this year that one in three churchgoers
were planning to observe Lent, but almost up to the last minute 32% of them
hadn’t made up their minds on what to give up or take up. Sadly only 9% of
those interviewed were considering ‘doing something spiritual like praying [or] reading the Bible’. Giving up chocolate or other
treats or doing more positive or kindly acts were much more popular
(respectively 17% and 21%). Apparently men are twice as likely to give up alcohol for
Lent, whereas women are nearly three times more likely to give up chocolate.
Our understanding of the purposes of Lent seems to
have narrowed. If we
contemplate the needs of the world, as Christian Aid asks us to do in their Count Your Blessings journey for
Lent, we are already
meditating and opening ourselves up to God in prayer. This is the essential
purpose of Lent. For as the late Cardinal Basil Hume remarked, ‘Christ shared our experience; he suffered as
we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he
underwent the struggle between good and evil.’
Continuing with the words
of the late Basil Hume, the
devil seeks to take advantage of Christ’s hunger ‘to tempt him to limit his
concern to the relief of human need. These are vital concerns; but they cannot
be the sole concern of the Church. We need daily bread; we need too a reason
for living, a sense of purpose, a vision. We need the bread of life, the word
of truth which comes from God.’ And as the Cardinal also remarked, the blessings we receive in the joy of the Resurrected Christ on Easter morning rest on the quality of our Lenten journey up to and including Holy Week.
Mark’s
gospel emphasises that after his baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus went off
straight to the wilderness for his 40 days’ preparation for his earthly
ministry. The Devil comes to tempt him, but Christ is clear in his response: ‘I
don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love. I am the Beloved of God, the One
on whom God’s favour rests.’ Though, unlike us, Jesus remained ‘without sin’,
he was not immune from temptation. In that respect, critically, he shared our
human condition. And remember, too, that like us, the challenge of temptation
never entirely left him. As Luke comments at the end of his version of the
story of the temptation in the wilderness: ‘having exhausted all these ways of
tempting him, the devil left him, to return at the appointed (or opportune)
time’ (Luke 4:13). We are most severely challenged when we are closest to God
and most open to God: it is then that temptation seeks to come in via an open
back door precisely because our defences are down.
