Deuteronomy 26.1-11, Luke 4.1-13
“Because you’re worth it!” I’m sure many of us
recognise that advertising slogan for the cosmetics firm L’Oreal. The company
is so proud of it that it has its own page on their website. Apparently it was
coined back in 1971 by a 23 year-old woman who was working on a L’Oreal ad, and
who wanted to challenge the message that women should look beautiful so they
could catch or keep a man. How would it be if we could just do it for
ourselves, she thought? It’s all very laudable, until we remember that it is
still just an advert for some gunk to put on our bodies, and that if our sense
of self-worth depends on having unwrinkled skin or glossy hair then we’ve
probably still got quite a way to go in terms of self-acceptance.
It works as a slogan, though, because it taps into our
anxieties about who we are and how we feel about ourselves. Many people – men
as well as women - don’t think they are “worth it”, whatever “it” is. They
aren’t sure they are loved, or loveable. Would anyone miss them if they were
gone? Have they done anything with their lives that is worth doing, that anyone
will remember or celebrate?
In desperation, when we feel like that, we will reach for
anything that seems to tell us we matter. We allow wealth, possessions, jobs,
social media ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ and
appearance – helped along by all that expensive gunk we’re sold - to define our sense of self-worth. But the
problem is that those things are transitory and fragile. Beauty fades sooner or
later, whatever we do, wealth fails, achievements are forgotten. The things we scramble
for and grasp at to tell us that “we’re worth it” slip through our fingers,
there’s never quite enough for us to feel really safe. If our sense of worth is
based on them, we’re building on sand.
The people of the Old Testament were no different. In the
reading we heard today, Moses speaks to them not long before they finally enter
the Promised Land. They’ve escaped from slavery in Egypt, where they were the
lowest of the low, with no status, no rights, nothing to call their own. Even though they are now
free, they’re landless and homeless, wandering for decades in the desert. But
soon they’ll enter a land “flowing with milk and honey”. They’ll have
everything they could want ; fertile land, abundant water, security. And human
nature being what it is, Moses knows they’ll soon come to assume that it is
theirs by right, that they have it because they are “worth it”, that they have
won it by their own strength and cleverness, that they are entitled to it.
That’s why the ritual Moses tells them to keep is so
important. Every year, he says, they must gather up some of the first fruit of
the land – the first fruit, not the leftovers – and bring it to the place of
worship to offer to God. Every year they must tell themselves their story once
again. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” the script begins, and it
goes on to remind them that when they were treated cruelly in Egypt, it was God
who heard them, rescued them, sustained them in the desert, and led them to this
new land. Everything they have is a gift, given to them by God, not to be
grasped for themselves, but to be shared with others who are homeless and
landless as they once were.
They must never forget when they are surrounded by riches, that
ultimately– like all of us – they don’t truly own anything. All that we
have is a gift, even life itself, and it is given not as a reward for our
brilliance, not “because we’re worth it”, but simply out of God’s love
for us, the God who loves us whether we are worth it or not.
It’s a hard lesson to get our heads around. The language of
entitlement, the presumption that we are getting what we deserve, is very
alluring. It puts us in control. We like to feel that when good things happen,
it is because we have done something to deserve them, and even when bad things
happen we can at least say to ourselves, “if only I had done this or
that, I could have influenced events and made things turn out differently,”
The language of entitlement is threaded through our Gospel
reading today too. Jesus “is led in the wilderness” by the Spirit at the
beginning of his ministry. I’ve stood in that wilderness; it’s a rocky, arid
landscape, with sparse, scrubby vegetation and very little shelter, a bleak,
inhospitable place. At the time of Jesus people thought it was the haunt of
demons. It very often was the haunt of bandits and wild animals. No one stayed
in it for any longer than they had to. It was a place in which you were
stripped of your security and comfort, and reminded how precarious life was. It
was a place of dispossession – where you found out what it was like to go
without the basics of existence; to hunger and thirst, to be without shelter,
baked by the sun, frozen at night, unable to help yourself.
At the end of forty days and nights it’s no surprise to be
told that Jesus was “famished” and it is at this point that Satan comes to him
with what he thinks will be his killer argument. “If you are the Son of
God…” He appeals to Jesus’ sense of entitlement. The key feature of being a
son in the ancient world was that you were the heir. You could assume you would
enjoy your father’s special protection in life, that he would invest in you, so
that eventually you would get to inherit whatever he had and continue the
family line. Sonship implied entitlement. “If you are the Son of God…then
surely your Father won’t let you go hungry or let you suffer, won’t want you to
go without even for a moment. If you are the Son of God, you are entitled to
have anything, do anything – you are entitled to absolute power.”
The Roman world was familiar with the phrase “Son of God”.
It was one of the titles they gave to their Emperors. They’d declared Julius
Caesar to be divine, so his heirs and successors were Sons of God, and became fully divine when they died. And they knew how
those emperors, bolstered by their sense of divinity, behaved. The threw their
weight around, expected unquestioning obedience, enjoyed the finest of
everything. It is still the way of the world today, as those who are suffering
the empire building obsession of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine can testify. Why
would anyone expect Jesus to be different? Satan certainly doesn’t seem to.? “If
you are the Son of God…” he
says, tempting Jesus to act in the same, entitled way.
But as St Paul put it in his letter to the Phillippians ,
Jesus did not “regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but
humbled himself, taking the form of a servant.” It’s significant that the
very first act in his ministry was to go out into the desert, dispossessing
himself of wealth, comfort and security, making himself vulnerable, living with
all the uncertainty, pain and limitation of human life. He was setting the
pattern for the rest of his life and ministry, which would be a demonstration
that material possessions and success are not necessarily signs of God’s
blessing, that those who have nothing and can do nothing have not fallen out of
God’s hands or been rejected by him. Jesus needs to be secure in this now, so that
he will be secure in it later. He hungers and thirsts in the desert, as he will
one day hunger and thirst on the cross. He rejects the temptation to call for
flights of angels to rescue him now, just as he will refuse to call for them to
rescue him from crucifixion. And yet he
never doubts his Father’s love whether he is rejoicing with his friends,
acclaimed by the crowds, or alone, in pain, dying.
Lent, which began last Wednesday, is often a time for giving
things up, but the most important thing to give up is our anxious attempts to
convince ourselves that we have to be “worth it” to receive God’s love. We have
it anyway, in good times and in bad. We can never lose it or destroy it. We
can’t make God love us more than he does, or cause him to love us less. And
that goes for everyone else around us too – rich or poor, male or female, gay
or straight, messed up or sorted out, Ukrainian or Russian…
The invitation of Lent is to go out into the desert – even
if it is just five minutes of stillness and reflection, to sit with God and ask
him to show us what we have allowed to define our self-worth. We are invited to
discover the God who doesn’t love us because we have done anything to make
ourselves “worth it”, but simply because we exist.
Amen
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