The Sifting of Peter

“Behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.”—LUKE xxii. 31.

IN Saint Luke’s Gospel we are told
How Peter in the days of old
          Was sifted;
And now, though ages intervene,
Sin is the same, while time and scene 
          Are shifted.

Satan desires us, great and small,
As wheat, to sift us, and we all
          Are tempted;
Not one, however rich or great, 
Is by his station or estate
          Exempted.

No house so safely guarded is
But he, by some device of his,
          Can enter; 
No heart hath armor so complete
But he can pierce with arrows fleet
          Its centre.

For all at last the cock will crow
Who hear the warning voice, but go 
          Unheeding,
Till thrice and more they have denied
The Man of Sorrows, crucified
          And bleeding.

One look of that pale suffering face 
Will make us feel the deep disgrace
          Of weakness;
We shall be sifted till the strength
Of self-conceit be changed at length
          To meekness. 

Wounds of the soul, though healed, will ache;
The reddening scars remain, and make
          Confession;
Lost innocence returns no more;
We are not what we were before 
          Transgression.

But noble souls, through dust and heat,
Rise from disaster and defeat
          The stronger,
And conscious still of the divine 
Within them, lie on earth supine
          No longer.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882

Scriptural reference: Luke 22:31-34

On the Pinnacle

'Temples and Spires are good for looking down from;
You stand above the world on holy heights,
Here on the pinnacle, above the maelstrom,
Among the few, the true, unearthly lights.
Here you can breathe the thin air of perfection
And feel your kinship with the lonely star,
Above the shadow and the pale reflection,
Here you can know for certain who you are.
The world is stalled below, but you could move it
If they could know you as you are up here,
Of course they’ll doubt, but here’s your chance to prove it
Angels will bear you up, so have no fear….’
‘I was not sent to look down from above
It’s fear that sets these tests and proofs, not Love.’

-- Malcom Guite, (1954- ), English priest, poet, theologian, musician, and songwriter, from Sounding the Seasons and The Word in the Wilderness.

Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

 

Image: "The Temptations of Christ," from the Drogo Sacramentary, mid- 9th Century, French (in Latin).

Rev. Guite's Commentary:

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” Jesus answered, “It says: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time’ (Luke 4.9−3).

If the first two temptations in the wilderness were in some sense ‘obvious’; the temptation to mere physical satisfaction of appetite, and the temptation to worldly success and power, then the third temptation is subtle and dark, all the darker for pretending to a kind of light, or enlightenment. The third temptation takes place on the ‘pinnacle of the Temple’ on the height of religious experience and achievement. What could be wrong with that? But the best things, turned bad, are the worst things of all. A ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ life can be riddled with pride and a sense of distinction, judging or looking down on others, despising God’s good creation! Such a twisted religion does more damage in the world then any amount simple indulgence or gratification by sensual people. One of G. K. Chesterton’s wonderful Father Brown stories, ‘The Hammer of God’, explores this theme with his usual combination of acuity and humour. In the story a curate who has constantly taken to ‘praying, not on the common church floor with his fellow men, but on the dizzying heights of its spires’ is tempted to deal justice to his sinful brother by flinging a hammer down on him from the heights. It is Father Brown who sees and understands the temptation and brings the curate down from the heights to a proper place of repentance. Here’s a fragment of their dialogue before they descend:

‘I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray,’ said Father Brown. ‘Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from.’

‘Do you mean that one may fall over?’ asked Wilfred.

‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,’ said the other priest …

After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with his pale grey eyes. ‘I knew a man,’ he said, ‘who began by worshipping with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.’

Wilfred’s face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white as they tightened on the parapet of stone.

‘He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a floor.’

‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,’ said the other priest.

I was remembering something of this story when I wrote my sonnet on the third temptation, but thanks be to God that in resisting this temptation to spiritual loftiness and display, Jesus shows his solidarity once and for all with all of us, trusting himself to our flesh and blood so that we can trust our flesh and blood to him. He does not look down on us but looks up with the humble eyes of the child of Bethlehem.

All The Kingdoms of the World

‘So here’s the deal and this is what you get:
The penthouse suite with world-commanding views,
The banker’s bonus and the private jet
Control and ownership of all the news
An ‘in’ to that exclusive one percent,
Who know the score, who really run the show
With interest on every penny lent
And sweeteners for cronies in the know.
A straight arrangement between me and you
No hell below or heaven high above
You just admit it, and give me my due
And wake up from this foolish dream of love…’
But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem.
Love is the waking life, you are the dream.’

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, musician, songwriter, and theologian, from Sounding the seasons and The Word in the Wilderness: Sonnets for Lent.

Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

Image: "Third Temptation of Christ," from the Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons, French manuscript, 1280-1299 CE.

Here is Rev. Guite's wonderful commentary on this sonnet, from his blog:

‘Then the Devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the Devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me and I give it to anyone I please. If you then, will worship me, it will all be yours”’ (Luke 4.5−7).

This second temptation is the temptation to worldliness, to ‘success’, money and power, set up obsessively on the throne of our hearts as rivals to God. It is the supreme temptation of our own materially obsessed culture. And it is our failure at this point that has led to the gross imbalances between what has recently been termed the ‘1%’ and the ‘99%’.

‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority’ is the dreadfully conditional offer that the Devil still makes, and in my sonnet I have tried to flesh out in contemporary terms some of the figures who seem to be making and receiving that offer now, and the contemporary contexts in which this dreadful deal is transacted. It’s a striking thing that the old terms ‘wordly’ and ‘worldliness’ are scarcely ever used in contemporary moral discourse. We still talk of course, and rightly about fairness, and fair distribution of resources. We are rightly concerned with justice and fair dealing in the worlds of finance, commerce and trade, but we seem to have lost sight of the long Christian tradition, and the substantial Christian teaching, that there is something essentially tainted and corrosive in the very desire for worldly pre-eminence and success.

A symptom of this amnesia, of this serious spiritual malaise that afflicts our culture, can be found in our extraordinary use of the word ‘exclusive’ as a positive term! The liberal West is allegedly the most inclusive culture there has ever been and we deploy a great deal of rhetoric about including the marginalized, and take care that everyone should use politically correct and ‘inclusive’ language. But this is of course just a fig leaf. One look at the advertising in any magazine or website, one glimpse of the commercials that saturate our airwaves tells a different story. Every Estate agent advertising their residential properties (or ‘homes’ as they like to call them- as though a home was something you could sell) reveals that their favourite word is ‘Exclusive’. Come and view these ‘exclusive’ flats, come with us on this luxurious and ‘exclusive’ holiday! And nobody asks, just who is being excluded. Nobody responds to these ads with a letter to say: ‘I am interested in your product but perhaps I am one of those unfortunate people whom you and your exclusive clientele would like to exclude! No one asks themselves, as they read these ads, ‘Just what is it in me that is being roused and appealed to here?’ For it is not our generosity, our courtesy, or our sense of community that is being worked on and developed in this appeal. Rather it is the worst in us; the desire to be considered ‘special’ and ‘better’ and ‘superior’ at the expense of other people that is here being inflated and inflamed. In his chilling essay ‘The Inner ring’ C. S. Lewis lays open this fallen desire in all of us to belong to exclusive clubs, cliques, and circles, to be someone who is ‘in’; ‘in the know’, ‘in the right circles’, ‘in on the real knowledge and power’ among ‘those who really count’, and to look down on those who are ‘out’, excluded, not part of the magic circle. So much of the consumerism that is choking our society and bringing misery, alike to the haves and the have-nots, is driven by this desire to have and to wear, and to drive, the status symbols, the ‘exclusive’ signs of belonging. Time and again goods and services are offered by their manufacturers not for their intrinsic virtue, the beauty of their design, or the genuine pleasure that might be had from owning or using them, but for their ‘exclusive’ cachet, their ‘exclusive designer label’.

The other word which worldliness loves and has in turn subverted is the word ‘Dream’. We are to have ‘dream homes’, ‘dream holidays’, ‘dream wedding days’. As though all dreams were to enmesh us deeper in the tangles of getting and spending, not to lift our vision, change our perspective and give us glimpses of Heaven. I have tried to highlight some of these issues in the following poem, and here I see Jesus taking the worldly ‘dream’ on its own terms and calling us instead to wake up to the fullness of life. Perhaps only then can we, in Eliot’s phrase ‘Redeem the unread vision of the higher dream’.

Stones into Bread

The Fountain thirsts, the Bread is hungry here

The Light is dark, the Word without a voice.
When darkness speaks it seems so light and clear.
Now He must dare, with us, to make a choice.
In a distended belly’s cruel curve
He feels the famine of the ones who lose
He starves for those whom we have forced to starve
He chooses now for those who cannot choose.
He is the staff and sustenance of life
He lives for all from one Sustaining Word
His love still breaks and pierces like a knife
The stony ground of hearts that never shared,
God gives through Him what Satan never could;
The broken bread that is our only food.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, musician,  and theologian, from Sounding the Seasons and The Word in the Wilderness: Sonnets for Lent.

Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

Image: "Temptation of Christ by the Devil," Spanish, from the Hermitage of St. Baudelio de Berlanga, Castle-Leon, Spain. The first Temptation, the subject of this sonnet, is depicted on the left. For more information, click here from the Metropolitan Museum of Art cloisters.

Tempted

Mark 1:12–13

Still wet behind the ears, he’s Spirit-pushed
up Jordan’s banks into the wilderness.
Angels hover praying ’round his head.
Animals couch against his knees and ankles
intuiting a better master. The Man
in the middle—new Adam in old Eden—
is up against it, matched with the ancient
Adversary. For forty days and nights
he tests the baptismal blessing and proves to his dismay
the Man is made of sterner stuff than Adam:
the Man will choose to be the Son God made him.

--Eugene H. Peterson (1932-2018), American Presbyterian elder, translator, theologian, and poet

a desert planet

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.


A desert planet....


Once we stood by the clear waters,
knowing who we were,
who the church was and where we were going....
...now we’re in the desert....
...uncharted territory.
...severe and bleak.
...but full of Eastern promise.
...the rules are different.
The old ways don’t work.
...it is a lonely place,
and dangerous.
There are snakes and scorpions.
Alien creatures.
we have been stripped of our illusions
of growth...
of plenty...
and we are in the desert.
waiting...
for God to speak.

Turn these stones into bread.
the instant solution.
the quick fix. If we just…if we just...
change our chairs, change our prayers, fix the roof.
Then everything will be lovely.
Won’t it?

The tempter said. Go on. Turn these stones into bread
bread. like the bread used to be, in the old days...
in a warm hearth in Nazareth.
It was so good then. I can almost smell the yeast.
A quick-fix and they’ll all come back.

But it is written. You can’t live by bread alone.
We need more than that. In this desert planet.

Every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Living God, we need you here, to tell us what to do.
Feed us with your words, we are hungry!
Show us the next step. How to be your church in this
undiscovered world.
As we sit in the sand and try to hear you.

And the tempter said. Look.
Here are all the kingdoms of the world.
I’ll give you all of this. If you just worship me.
Yes. Maybe that would be easier.
Maybe we should give up. And join the others.
Worship at Ikea, religiously.
Or Kylie, or Microsoft, or Visa,
I believe in the Holy Catalog Church.

You can have it all. Worship me.
Everything we’ve ever wanted.
At a price. But that price would be too high.

Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.
Who else can we turn to.
You’re the one who gives us life.
And though we may we walking in the wilderness.
You are here with us.
Let us glimpse a burning bush somewhere on the way.
This is a lonely planet.

He will command his angels.
They’ll protect you.
You needn’t even stub your toes.
Our attendance is plummeting but we needn’t fear
the angels will catch us.
Someone else will fix it. We’ll leave it up to them.
An evangelist with a funny name, or the parish next-door.
This desert is too difficult. So maybe I’ll just sleep.

Jesus answered the tempter.
Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
Jesus Help us.
Its hard to find the energy. When the sand pushes against us.
When we stumble in the wilderness. When we can’t see the way.
When the old signposts have disappeared
And all we have are sand-dunes.
But we know...
We can’t do a quick-fix
We can’t give up
We can’t leave it to someone else.

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit returned.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
Because he has anointed me.
To bring good news to the poor.
Good news came from out of the desert.
There is good news.
God has brought us here to hear it.
And God will lead us the Promised Land.

--Sue Wallace, found at re-worship blog

Lectionary Link: 1 Lent C, Luke 4:1-13

The Third Temptation: Image from the Book of Kells

 

Here is the commentary from Trinity College's website on the image from the Book of Kells:

"The third Temptation of Jesus (f. 202v) is currently on display in the Old Library. The episode is described later in the narrative, at Luke’s Gospel 4.9–13 (f. 204r), where Satan urges Jesus to throw himself from the roof of the temple in Jerusalem in order to demonstrate that the angels will save him:

‘And [the devil] brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence. For it is written that He hath given his angels charge over thee that they keep thee. And that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering, said to him: It is said: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’

Jesus is represented on a shingle-roofed building which resembles an Irish shrine, with lions as finials. Protected by angels directly above him and in the top corners of the page, he holds out a slender glass vessel, possibly a chalice filled with Eucharistic wine, in response to the small, black winged figure of Satan on the right. Stylized peacocks, symbols of his Resurrection, are placed within the crosses on either side of Jesus.

The image presents many complexities and difficulties of interpretation. The haloed figure with crossed flabella at the centre of the temple may portray Christ as Judge in a Last Judgment scene. The temple and Jesus may represent, in an almost literal manner, the body of the church with Christ as its head, while the human figures – thirteen at the foot of the page and nine to Jesus’ right – seem to represent the faithful of the congregation. It is also possible to read the page as the ground plan of a church with four pillars, showing both side and front elevations. 

The figure of Satan has been disfigured by around twenty small stab marks to the neck, the arms and the torso. This controlled attack, not visible to the naked eye at first glance, seems to have been undertaken at a time when the book was bound, with the knife going through the vellum to previous leaves. The date of this intervention in the life of the Book of Kells is impossible to determine with accuracy, though it may be supposed to have occurred in the middle ages."

Temptations

Creature comforts
And why not?
All you have to do is
Give up a few rocks
These sun-baked stones
That burn your hands and cut your feet
Could soon become a desert treat!
Stop being so hard on yourself!

Fame
All yours for the taking
All you have to do is
Leave this lonely wilderness
Head right to the center of the noisy crowd
Drop in your branding clear and loud
Start showing what you've got!

Power
Not as easy, but well within your reach
All you have to do is
Want it more than anything
Make it your top priority
Your one and only deity
Instead of your strange, silly God
Of Suffering
Solitude
And Silence

-- Brother Eckhart (Chip Camden), OSB and member of St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Palo Alto

Jesus is Tempted in the Wilderness: Art for Lent 1A

12th Century New Roman Mosaic of the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God in Monreale in Sicily

Felix Jospeh Barrias, The Temptation of Christ by the Devil, 1860

James Tissot, Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness (Jésus tenté dans le désert), 1886-1894, one of 350 watercolors in his episcopal series on the life of Christ from the Bible, from the Brooklyn Museum of Art

James Tissot, Jesus Carried Up to the Pinnacle of the Temple (Jésus porté sur le pinacle du Temple), 1886-1894, from the Brooklyn Museum

James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). Jesus Transported by a Spirit onto a High Mountain (Jésus transporté par l'esprit sur une haute montagne), 1886-1894, from the Brooklyn Museum of Art

James Tissot, Jesus Ministered to by Angels (Jésus assisté par les anges), 1886-1894, from the Brooklyn Museum of Art

Ducci di Buoninsegna, detail, The Temptation of Christ, 1310

Eric Armusik, The Temptation of Christ, 2011

James B. Janknegt, The Temptation of Christ, 1990

Relevant Scripture: Matthew 4:1-11

Lord's Prayer Cycle Prayer 6: Save Us From the Time of Trial

Our Father in heaven, 
loving Parent and Creator, 
tender Mother, 
save us from the time of trial, 
for we are prone to wander 
and lose our way. 

Make us stronger in our faith 
and more willing to wrestle with the angel of doubt. 
Guide us into living and loving more fully 
according to your precepts. 
Help us turn aside all vain ambitions 
and concentrate fully upon your Word. 
Give us courage to make our hearts bigger, 
even if that makes them bigger targets, 
for love is always the answer. 
Help us to persevere 
through the difficulties of life, 
knowing that You are always with us. 
Give us the sight to see hope amid darkness. 

O Loving One, hear our prayers 
and grant your benediction and grace 
to those whose needs we now raise before You.

Amen.


--The Rev. Leslie Scoopmire, from my prayer blog