I, like you, have probably heard many sermons on the temptations of Jesus. They usually end up with instructions

1. Do not just live on ordinary food

2. Worship The Lord our God and him only.

3. Do not test God.

The preacher had done a lot of research in coming up with that conclusion. Something we could all read for ourselves in 2 minutes from the passage we heard today..

When I read this passage I had to smile. I don’t know whether the writer was trying to be funny when it was stated that Jesus had been fasting for 40 days. At the end of it Jesus was hungry.

I wonder what the devil thought when he got home after  tempting Jesus. Did he go over the event and examine what went wrong? The conversation with himself might have  gone along these lines.

I reckon I went a bit too far.  One temptation may have been enough rather than three.   Smaller  temptations might have done the trick. One pebble into a cup cake might have tempted him rather than a whole field of stones into loaves of bread. A small cliff to jump off to see if God would prevent a broken ankle rather than the top  of the Temple and challenge him to jump to his death. I could have offered him one gold mine rather than the whole world. I obviously went over the top.

I am known for not believing in the devil as a person. I do, though, take evil seriously.  Equally so with  temptation. But evil and temptation come from us. There is not some outside person of influence on which  we can lay the blame. That just let’s us off the hook.

Yet, this story is in the Bible and is obviously there for a purpose. It is our job to try and work out what the lesson is for us today.

I am reminded of  The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.  It consists of thirty-one letters written by a senior demon named Screwtapeto his nephew, Wormwood, a younger and less experienced demon, who has the job of guiding a man, who gets the name Patient, to Satan and away from the enemy who is God.  After the second letter, Patient converts to Christianity, and Screwtape tells Wormwood off for allowing this to happen. Screwtape notes however, that they have the advantage of distraction, which could dull his new faith. Wormwood and Screwtape have different ideas.  Wormwood, wants to tempt Patient into dramatic and extravagant sins. Screwtape, older and wiser, tries tempting in smaller, more subtle ways. This story suggests that it is the more inoccuous temptations that we are more likely to succumb to.

The Temptation story seems too dramatic for me. There are far more alluring temptations without miracles or jumping off cliffs. I sometimes think that prayer is one of the biggest temptations we face. If that statement makes you worry stay with me. Sometimes we are tempted not to pray about something. Notice I said about something not for something. Prayer so often becomes what I call a shopping list. We pray for this or that and more often than not nothing happens. Praying about something is not about changing God but about changing ourselves. We see things in a different light and we my be encouraged into action.

The other temptation to do with prayer is the temptation to pray. This sounds odd. But often we get the request . ‘Let’s pray about it.’ The group goes quiet for a few moments  and everybody says, Amen. Everybody is now happy, Job done. It is now in God’s hands. It is no longer our problem we can put the issue on the back burner and often do.

I said that I believe evil exists. I also believe good exists. The odd thing is that they are not mutually exclusive. They can both exist at the same time and in the same person. It would be a rare thing to find a person who is wholly good or wholly evil.

The person who murders someone may also be a happy family man or woman. Good and evil are able to co-exist. This is one of the mysteries of life. It is the real world. It is the reality in which God exists. Goodness and evil, divinity and humanity tightly bound together. Evil is not just the behaviour that others do that we do not agree with. Jesus, in his humanity tried his best to dispense justice and love to all. Something even he struggled with at times. Rather than asking ourselves what are we going to do about evil it may be better to ask, ‘What is God going to do to change me? I think we are half-way there when we follow the teaching and example of Jesus. Because of our humanity it is not always easy and takes effort. Perhaps this Lent is the time to examine ourselves more deeply to discover what our evil tendencies are? Oh, by the way if you are tempted to say that you are not evil perhaps I should give you my definition of evil. It is the lack of goodness.