Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Luke 4:5-7
“So here’s the deal and this is what you get:
The penthouse suite with world-commanding views,
The banker’s bonus and the private jet,
Control and ownership of all the news,
An ‘in’ to that exclusive one per cent,
Who know the score, who really run the show,
With interest on every penny lent
And sweeteners for cronies in the know.
A straight arrangement between me and you,
No hell below or heaven high above,
You just admit it, and give me my due,
And wake up from this foolish dream of love …
But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem.
Love is the waking life, you are the dream.'”
“This second temptation is the lure of worldliness: ‘success’, money and power are set up obsessively on the throne of our hearts as rivals to God. It is the supreme temptation of our own materially obsessed culture. And it is our failure at this point that has led to the gross imbalances between what has recently been termed the ‘1 per cent’ and the ’99 per cent’. ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority’ is the dreadfully conditional offer that the devil still makes…
The liberal West is allegedly the most inclusive culture that has ever existed: we deploy a great deal of rhetoric about including the marginalized, and take care that everyone should use politically correct and ‘inclusive’ language. But this is, of course, just a fig leaf. One look at the advertising in any magazine or on any website, one glimpse of the commercials that saturate our airwaves, tells a different story. Any estate agent advertising residential properties (or ‘homes’ as they like to call them — as though a home was something you could sell) reveals that their favourite word is ‘exclusive’.
Come and view these ‘exclusive’ flats. Or come with us on this luxurious and ‘exclusive’ holiday! And nobody asks, just who is being excluded? Nobody responds to these ads with a letter saying: ‘I am interested in your product but perhaps I am one of those unfortunate people whom you and your exclusive clientele would like to exclude!’ No one asks themselves, ‘What is it in me that is being roused and appealed to here?’ For it is not our generosity, our courtesy or our sense of community that is being worked on in this call to exclusivity. Rather it is the worst in us; our desire to be considered ‘special’ and ‘better’ and ‘superior’, at the expense of other people, is here being inflated and inflamed.”
Malcolm Guide in The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter (Norwich: Canterbury, 2014) 13-15.
I hope Lent is awakening you to resist the temptations Jesus resisted on his forty day journey that would launch His earthly ministry. I pray “the waking life” leads you to see truth from lies, to discern what the marketers are trying to rouse in you and, alternatively, what the Spirit wants to stir in you.
My wife, Jenni, and I were talking this weekend about how we used to be able to trust the news. Now we believe all we can trust is God’s Word. Try this. Watch the news less and read the Bible more this Lent in daily practice and see what happens. See if you also find that it really is the only thing you can trust.
You will feed “the waking life” of Jesus within you (as Guite puts it) and discover that life in God is not something ‘exclusive’ or just for the ‘1 percent’; it’s for everyone. Only in Christ do we find generosity and community; the former is a fruit of the Spirit and the latter is God’s design our lives and living.