If you are the Son of God…… (Luke 4: 3)

If I was to ask you what your expectations are for Lent this year,    

what would you say? Will it just be to get through these next 6 weeks

unscathed or do we actively wish to engage with, seek after or spend time with

God?  There is always the unknown; the unexpected and even the

unpredictable. Not things that we generally like.

Canon Mark Oakley, the Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, in this year’s “Reflections for Lent” comments that “Coming up out of the water, Jesus had heard the unmistakable voice that matters, telling him he was cherished, wanted and ready. He then goes into the heat of the desert spending time with himself, hearing other voices that want him to bow down to them. He knows that his vocation can only be lived out by following the voice he heard that day in the river. We follow him. Where he goes, so do we”.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1951) produced a series of paintings of “Christ in the wilderness” of which “The Scorpion” (1939) is one. You may know it. What is particularly moving is the way Christ is looking down at the scorpion in his hand. Jesus once likened God to a good father, putting the question: “If we ask a father for bread, will he give us a scorpion?”.  In this painting it is just such a scorpion that Jesus cups in his hand, looking down at it with a sense of deep pity. Scorpions can sting us to death, and the painting depicts more scorpions all around Jesus on the ground. It seems as if Jesus is contemplating his future and facing up to his destiny. It is not the bread that his Father gives him, but the sting of death.

Teresa White – a member of the Faithful Companions of Jesus - writes in this year’s Lent Book entitled “Hope and the Nearness of God” that “God is with us in a special way during Lent, our Christian season of prayer and fasting, and wants to unlock the doors of depression or pessimism in which we may feel ourselves trapped. When we take time to pray, to reflect, things which had previously escaped us in the jumble of existence become more clearly visible. It is God who gives this new vision. God that unblocks our ears so that we hear echoes of the distant melody of hope. God who touches our hearts and draws us towards what is good and beautiful. Hope in the nearness of God can set us free to walk more courageously into the unknown. It opens up our horizons. It is not a substitute for action, but it relies on God to point the way forward”.

In Lent, we are invited to enter into the wilderness in order to seek God’s presence, and to pray that we will become more alert to that which is invisible. The wilderness is a place of encounter with the divine, and God’s nearness can be very real in this place of apparent sterility and strange, unlooked-for beauty. As Pope Francis has said “God does not hide himself from those who seek him with a sincere heart, even though they do so tentatively or in a vague or haphazard manner”.

Jesus, friend and brother,

You were tested and found faithful,

When we are tested give us the insight to recognise what is right,

The will to do it,

And strength to continue in the true path.