Lent 1
Gold refining
Are you wearing something gold – a ring maybe? Do you know how it got to be shiny and smart, rather than a muddy piece of rock? You can get gold that is 99.9% pure by putting it into an electrolyte bath and applying a current. The gold dissolves from the impurities and can be extracted. Or, you can run chlorine gas through liquid gold. The chlorine combines with the impurities and the compounds rise to the top. But this makes it only 99.5% pure.
We are particular about gold – we like to know how much of a ring or whatever is ‘pure gold’ – how many ‘carats’ it has. Gold has amazing properties, like not tarnishing, and being able to be beaten fine into gold leaf. It reflects back light in an amazing way, which makes it not only very useful in large office windows, but can make the dome of a cathedral that is covered with gold leaf mosaic seem as though it reflects the very light of heaven.
But it’s the refining that we are thinking about today – that process by which the pure gold is extracted from the bits that surround it, so that it emerges glowing, incorruptible, perfect.
The word that Luke uses for ‘temptation’ in the gospel has the sense of being like a refiner’s fire. It is a testing, a sifting, a purging of all that is not really gold. It is a way for something to emerge as its true self, without any impurities or alien matter. It’s the same idea as you find in the story of Job, who was tested by the devil to see whether extreme suffering and pain would make him deny God – deny the core of pure faith at his centre. Jesus too was tested to see whether he was truly pure gold, truly the Son of God.
The Son of God
It was all very new for Jesus: at the Jordan river, a voice had come from heaven saying: “You are my Son, the beloved”. Luke says that Jesus went straight from his baptism to the desert to be tempted by the devil. And the temptations were precisely about what it meant to be ‘the Son of God’. “If you are the Son of God …” says the devil.
“If you are … “ - if you are that embodiment of God on earth; if you are the Messiah longed and awaited for centuries … well, what might it mean? One who would save Israel from those who oppressed her; one who would gather in the nations to Zion, Jerusalem; one who would redeem those in slavery and poverty; and one, the rabbis argued, who would appear at the top of the Temple in Jerusalem.
But what was at stake was Jesus’ true identity, the pure gold of his nature and his relationship with the Father. This is what had to be sifted in the refiner’s fire, so that he could be revealed to the world. And so much of it was about purging others’ expectations of Jesus, so he could reveal what true son-ship was all about.
Expectations of Jesus
Jesus was to be confronted by expectations at both ends of the spectrum: on the one hand, there were those who remembered his human background. He was the carpenter’s son from Nazareth – the local chippie. Some would say – who does he think he is, claiming to be special? His family were pretty dubious about him too – why couldn’t he settle down to a nice, normal, Jewish family life? On the other, there are the expectations that the devil tempts him with: If you are the Son of God … well, you must really be a Son of God and be seen to be one. No half measures – you have to prove yourself, and I’ll help you.
The devil was a sort of spin doctor or marketing manager: as if he said, “together we can make this thing work, and you’ll be the hottest thing since Moses!” In a way, you can understand the devil - he was only tempting Jesus to be the sort of Messiah that people might expect. He says: “If you are the Son of God, use your power to show that you are” – turn stones into bread, grasp control of the nations, make God rescue you from harm.
This is what people would expect of a Messiah. But was it what God expected? Was this what God meant when he named Jesus at his baptism ‘The Son of God’? Was he to be a wonder-worker, popular, acclaimed, compelling obedience by a display of power and force, or was his son-ship something completely different? Was there a core of pure, incorruptible faith and dependence on God, whatever the circumstances? Was there a core of pure gold that could survive the devil’s testing and refining?
Expectations of us
It’s easy enough to trivialise temptation. It gets used for brands of chocolate. We say ‘naughty, but nice’. But if we think of it as a refiner’s fire, it gets rather more serious and a lot more painful. It makes us think: am I just living up to others’ human expectations? What is my real identity, the identity that I was given at my baptism, a child of God, beloved by God?
Am I prepared to let that pure gold be ‘me’? Am I prepared to accept that God has named me? Or am I sucked into the expectations that I should be this or that, or look like this or that, or wear this or that, have this job or that house?
Am I controlled by the expectation that I should be successful and capable? That I should have influence over others? That I should be a winner and not a loser?
All these things don’t really matter much in themselves: God may want us to be healthy and influential, or frail and quiet. But God does want us to be drawn into the closest possible relationship, intimately bound up with God, trusting in God, As we sang in today’s psalm: (God speaking)
“because he is bound to me in love,
therefore will I deliver him;
I will protect him because he knows my name.”
It’s so easy to forget God, and conform to the expectations of the age. The church as a whole is often guilty of this: we expect to be powerful and successful and influential. But we have to think about how we operate, and find a balance between trying to grow in gospel ways on the one hand, and trying to become popular and influential on the other, if it tempts us to use ways and means that are wrong.
We are called to faithfulness, not popularity. The church, too, must seek out that intimate relationship with God which treads the desert path of utter dependence on God. Only thus will the pure gold of our faith be tested.