Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the First Sunday of Lent 2025

Yesterday, the Church of England’s calendar commemorated Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the priest, poet, and army chaplain whose fame developed during the First World War. Known as Woodbine Willy, due to the cigarettes he handed out to the troops, Kennedy was decorated for gallantry in rescuing the wounded from No Mans Land under heavy fire. His premature death at the age of 45 was marked by an extraordinary outpouring of public grief. 

In 1918, Studdert Kennedy published a volume of his wartime reflections entitled The Hardest Part. Many of the encounters he describes are deeply moving. Early on he recounts a visit to the injured in a field hospital in Belgium. There, only miles away from the chaos of trench warfare, he was asked by a wounded officer “what is God like?” Kennedy’s instinctive response was to point, with impeccable Christological orthodoxy, to the crucifix hanging above the man’s bed. But quickly, this strategy begins to backfire. “That Cross”, the officer intimates in no uncertain terms, “does not help me one bit; it makes things worse.” He continues, “I asked you not what Jesus was like, but what God is like.”

In theological terms, this is a kind of Arianism – the heresy which believes Jesus is less than God, a creature, distinct from the Father. The orthodox Christian position, articulated 1700 years ago this year at the Council of Nicaea and held by all the mainstream churches, is that Jesus is rather the eternally begotten Son, before all worlds, God from God, light from light. The problem raised by the crucifix on that battlefield hospital wall was the problem of suffering: does God suffer? And if we are clear that Christ suffers, does that imply suffering-in-God as such? There are all sorts of ways to discuss this, and the classic Christian insistence that God does not suffer – God is not subject to change or weakness – does not infer that the sufferings of Christ are not very real indeed. Nor does it posit a separation of God from Jesus. Christian theology speaks in rather formal terms of the two ‘natures’ of Christ – fully human, fully divine – by which we can begin to understand this. But Studdert Kennedy’s soldier has another kind of objection. For him, it is nigh on impossible to see how a “battered, wounded, bleeding figure, nailed to a cross and helpless, defeated by the world and broken in all but spirit” can perfectly reveal, incarnate, “the Lord of Lords, whose will sways all the world”.  The cross, he says, “does not help me one but; it makes things worse.” It is perhaps completely understandable that in such a situation it is hard to imagine that the Lord of all creation and all life really identifies with, and bears, the bloody mess of the world.

The Gospel we have just heard sounds like it could be a cinematic epic. The scene is the desert. There is blazing sun and agonising hunger. The two characters in this story are Christ and the devil; and in what follows they identify themselves with aplomb. To each of the temptations, Christ responds with a straightforward sentence of scripture from the Hebrew Bible. The devil’s initial temptation is a bit of a low blow. ‘Hungry, are you? Well, why don’t you just turn one of these many stones into a snack?’ Jesus tells him he has misunderstood what life and nourishment are really about. The devil’s second go is to promise glory and power over all the kingdoms of the world – only, of course, they are not his to give. Jesus reminds satan – the disobedient, fallen angel – of the lesson he really should have learned, that worship is only ever for the Lord. So his final attempt is to provoke some kind of vanity or misplaced self-confidence in Jesus – to which Jesus responds (perhaps almost with a roll of the eyes), ‘don’t put God to the test.’ Throughout these exchanges we see the character emerging of both figures: Jesus is steady, stable, and engaged with deep truth rather than with froth on the surface. The devil is a liar. A con artist, an opportunist, taking cheap shots where he senses there just might be some vulnerability he can exploit.

And yet, the questions he poses are questions every human being wrestles with. What do we rely on to sustain us? How do we deal with the temptations of power? What can I get away with doing or not doing? Whilst Jesus is depicted in this account as absolutely serene, striding the scene with confidence and clarity, responding to the devil with direct clarity, St Luke is very clear as he introduces the scene, that the temptations are real and that Jesus was ‘famished’ with hunger. This is not a set-up. These are real temptations, and for sure, they must have come up similarly throughout Jesus’s earthly life. The very real battle which Jesus does with sin is for us and for our salvation. In this story we see Jesus fully human and fully divine. The Two Natures of Christ at work. From here, he strides into Galilee and pursues his public ministry which will culminate in his last and fiercest battle as life and death slog it out in the mire and misery of human cruelty and violence.

And that takes us back to Studdert Kennedy’s wounded soldier. Jesus’s resistance to temptation will get him crucified. This is what God is like. Willing to go to the end for us, not standing above us cajoling or beckoning from a perch, but truly God With Us, alongside us through temptation and despair, through the churn of the world’s chaos, and our own contribution to it. We look at the cross, and we see what sin does. How sin is lethal, but rooted in mundane, daily choices in how we live and how we love. This Lent will culminate in our celebration of the Cross and Resurrection because that is where all our human stories can begin to make sense, and where the power of evil is finally unmasked as futile. The temptations in today’s Gospel – what we rely on, what we worship, how we choose to live – find their focus in the love poured out on the Cross, which reveals who God is, and how God is for the life of the world.

This Lent, let us look towards the cross, nailing our own temptations and failures to its rough timbers, confident that there is one alongside us, who has been tempted in every way like us, and yet whose sinless and self-giving love is the remedy for all our weakness.