Truth, Lies and the Devil
1ST SUNDAY OF LENT 2009: Mark 1:9-15
St Mark
never wastes words. He tells us of the temptation of Jesus in just two brief
sentences: 12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He
was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild
beasts; and the angels waited on him.
That’s it.
You may remember that Matthew and Luke have much more elaborate accounts, but
Mark focuses in on just the essentials: Jesus was driven into the wilderness
and he was tempted by Satan. By its very brevity Mark’s account makes us ask
some key questions, like who is this Satan and how did he tempt Jesus?
Who is
Satan? Jesus himself provides one answer to that elsewhere in the Gospels,
where he gives Satan a nickname, calling him the father of lies. That doesn’t
mean just that the devil fibs, or tempts us to fib. It goes deeper than that ,
it means that everything that is not straight, everything that is not true, all
the lies we tell ourselves, and everything in the world that is twisted and
deformed to fit someone or something’s agenda, all that is of the devil, all of
that has a potentially demonic power to destroy.
While preparing this sermon I heard on the Today programme one morning, two
stories that graphically illustrate that demonic destructive power at work.
One was a
young woman, now 16 or 17, who had only just survived anorexia. She described
having a voice in her head that told her lies, that told her she was
disgustingly fat, when in fact she was pitifully slim, that told her that food
was unhealthy, when in truth it was vital to her health. She survived, because
she was hospitalised and fed for 9 months, but also because she learnt to hear
and attend to another voice that named the lies of the first voice, and told
her that she was worth feeding.
The other
story was I think less hopeful, because the man telling it didn’t seem to have
reached the point where he had discovered that other voice, the voice that told
the truth. He was someone who had been made redundant from his job in the back
office of one of the big city investment banks. He has been out of work for 3
months, with no immediate hope of a job. He had a debt of 150,000 pounds on
his credit cards, because he and his new partner when they wanted something they
bought it, assuming there would always be a good bonus at the end of the year
to help pay off the debt. The little money he had now he was redundant he was
using to keep his creditors at bay. So he stopped paying maintenance for his
two teenage children by his previous marriage, and he had told the daughter who
had hoped to go to university that he wouldn’t now support her. As he told his
story this man kept laughing. I guess it was an uncomfortable laughter, because
at some level he was beginning to register the discrepancy between reality and
the lie he had been living, that lie that possessions were more important the
relationships, the lie that happiness laying in spending and more spending, and
the lie that something would always turn up to pay off his debts.
Those are
two extreme examples, but I am sure that there isn’t one of us who hasn’t at
some stage struggled with something similar. The world is full of tempting
lies, and facing the truth of who we are and what we are called to be in the
world can be demanding. So we struggle.
Mark told us at the very beginning of his writing that this story was good
news, and the good news here is that we are not alone in this struggle, Jesus
has been tempted as we are tempted. At his baptism Jesus heard the voice of
truth out heaven, naming him, telling him who he truly was. In the wilderness
Jesus encounters the Father of lies. And Jesus has to choose, whether to
accept the truth of who he was, and all that that implied for his future, or
whether to opt for the apparently easier, but ultimately destructive lying alternatives
offered by the devil.
Really there
is no choice. To turn away from the truth is to turn away from God, which for
Jesus was impossible, and for us as Christians should be impossible. God knows
us and loves us and meets us in the truth of who we are. Lent, and the
disciplines of lent are an opportunity to strip away the half-truths and
evasions, and to discover again the truth of who we are, and who God is.