FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

February 26, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17, 25-3:7

Romans 5:12-21

Matthew 4:1-11

 

One aspect of the biblical mindset that may seem strange to us today is what’s been called the idea of corporate personality. Saint Paul presupposes this idea in his Letter to the Romans: “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.”

 

Again and again, throughout Scripture, the biblical writers use the same one name to refer both to an individual person and to the collective group of people represented by that individual. A case in point is the name “Israel,” which designates both a specific individual—the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham—and the entire nation descended that individual’s twelve sons, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In the Bible, then, Israel is both one and many.

 

Likewise, Saint Paul uses the name “Adam” to refer both to the first parent of all humanity and all of us who’re descended from him. In the fifteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall be made alive.” In Paul’s mind, then, it wasn’t only Adam who sinned in the beginning. We’re all implicated in his disobedience. He sinned in us, we sinned in him, and we’ve inherited and are still living with the consequences of his sin.

 

We don’t need to read the Genesis story literally to recognize the fundamental truth of Paul’s insight. In the original Hebrew, the name “Adam” means something like “humankind” or “humanity.” The biblical account of the Fall accurately describes the human predicament by means of these symbolic figures of Adam and Eve. We’ve collectively disobeyed God and, more than anything else, we need to be reconciled to God and to one another.

 

Conversely, Paul describes Jesus Christ as the new Adam, the progenitor of a new humanity reconciled and restored to communion with God. Unlike Adam and Eve, we have reliable evidence that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed as a historical person. But, here again, in Paul’s thought Christ is also a representative figure: someone who accomplishes in us what we can’t accomplish by ourselves. So, when we’re united to Christ in Holy Baptism, we come to share in his righteousness, and we’re brought into his right relationship with God his Father in heaven.

 

This fluidity and interchangeability between the one and the many in the biblical thought-world may seem strange to our modern western individualistic mindset. But think of how we talk about our sports teams. When the Eagles win a football game, we often say, “we won,” rather than “they won.” In a very real sense, the team plays and wins as a representative body, so that all Eagles fans everywhere share in their victory. (Admittedly, though, when our favorite team loses, we’re more likely to say, “they lost,” than “we lost”—which speaks volumes about our fallen human condition.)

 

If this can be true of a football team, how much more true it is of Christ! On the cross he offers the one, full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice that reconciles fallen humanity to God. He does so not so much as our substitute as our representative. He catches us up into his self-offering; he dies in us, and we die in him. And then, on Easter morning, he rises from the dead, again as our representative, so we share in his victory over sin and death. Such is the clear teaching of the New Testament.

 

Christ’s Temptation in the wilderness, recounted every year on the First Sunday in Lent, is best understood in light of this notion of corporate personality. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us the words, “Lead us not into temptation.” Paradoxically, after his baptism Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to fast forty days before being tempted by Satan. That is, he's led into the very situation he teaches us to pray that we might be spared.

 

The reason is not that he needs to be tempted for his own sake, as if somehow to establish his worthiness to undertake his earthly mission. Instead, he undergoes these temptations for our sakes, as our representative. By his obedience, he reverses and undoes Adam’s disobedience. The well-known hymn, “O love how deep, how broad, how high,” attributed to Saint Thomas à Kempis, puts it well:

 

For us baptized, for us he bore 

His holy fast and hungered sore;

For us temptation sharp he knew,  

For us the tempter overthrew.

 

Going out into the wilderness, moreover, Jesus is figuratively returning to the place where the Israelites sinned against God by grumbling and complaining during their forty years of wandering on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land. Resisting the devil’s temptations with aptly chosen quotations from the Torah he reverses Israel’s disobedience. Here again, the idea of corporate personality comes into play: Christ is the representative person who fulfills Israel’s vocation to faithfulness and obedience—just as God chose Israel to be the representative nation that would fulfill humanity’s vocation to love and serve God.

 

Down through the centuries, biblical commentators have offered various interpretations of the devil’s three temptations. One interpretation that I find particularly helpful is that they’re enticements to forsake trust in God and to try to solve all of humanity’s problems by the exercise of three types of power: economic, religious, and political.

 

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” This is the temptation of economic power. Master nature, and build up your support base by giving the masses bread. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the Temple so that his angels will catch you.” This is the temptation of religious power. Manipulate God’s people into following you by miraculous signs and wonders. “All the kingdoms of the earth and their glory I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” This is the temptation of political power—of the kind that comes from selling your soul to the devil. 

 

In all three cases, the temptation is to use the type of power in question for a specifically human agenda divorced from God’s will. And in all three cases, the remedy is trust in God, obedience to God’s commandments, and the sacrifice of human self-will in surrender to God’s will.

 

By undergoing and resisting these temptations on our behalf, Jesus makes it possible for us to resist these same temptations ourselves. In a mysterious but profoundly real way, we’ve already undergone and resisted these temptations in him, and he’s undergone and resisted them in us. The good news is that Christ has definitively won the human struggle against diabolical temptation on our behalf. All we need is to claim and live into his victory, which is what this season of Lent is really all about.