God delights in our embrace – Deut 26:4-10; Psa 91; Luke 4:1-13

1st Sunday of Lent, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

“Even the devil can quote scripture,” goes the saying. That line is actually not in the in the Bible (it’s from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice), but the truth of it is confirmed by the gospel we’ve just read. Actually, in Shakespeare’s play, that line is used to ignore rather than engage what I find actually a very interesting argument about the relevance of the book of Genesis to debates about usury. The way the saying is used often seems to follow the Shakespearean model, ignoring someone’s attempt to bring scripture to bear on a situation rather than engaging it. So, I suggest, that even though it’s the devil citing it, we pay attention to what he says when he cites scripture, pay enough attention to see why that doesn’t lead Jesus to do what Satan wants.

Satan quotes from the Psalms, from the 91^st psalm, which we sang tonight. It’s a perfectly good psalm. He cites two wonderful promise from it: “God will command His angels to guard you;” “They will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a rock.” Satan’s suggestion is that Jesus take advantage of this promise by throwing himself off the top of the Temple.

There are various responses Jesus could make to this. He could actually have just recited what comes just a few lines further on in the psalm: the psalm switches to God’s voice, which says, “If you cling to me, I will deliver you.” Throwing yourself off of a parapet doesn’t sound a lot like clinging to God!

I want to come back to that line, because I think it’s important, but it’s not Jesus’ response. Jesus, for the third time, cites scripture to Satan, and he cites the same book each time: Deuteronomy. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Deuteronomy isn’t the book of the bible I read the most often. We sing a psalm every Sunday at Mass and recite one every weekday; on contrast on average we hear from Deuteronomy 2-3 Sundays per year, and for about 1 week per year at daily Mass. You can see a lot of embroideries with verses from psalms on; my experience working with people planning funerals is that, often, their one request is that we do “The Lord is my Shepherd” either as the psalm or as a hymn. Deuteronomy, not so much. So, over the past week, I’ve been deliberately praying with bits of it each day. It’s the last book of the Torah, the last of the books of Moses, and presents Moses giving speeches right at the end of the Exodus journey, before the Israelites enter the Promised Land. It’s mostly law. It does contain the great love commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all you heart, with all your mind and with all your strength.” But, that’s about the only verse from it most of us would know by heart.

If we were in a synagogue right now, though, there’d be another verse that might be just as famous, if not more so, and it’s what we heard tonight as our first reading. “My father was a wandering Aramean;” a line that appears in the Passover Haggadah. It goes on to say “we were slaves in Egypt… God rescued us… so worship Him… let us bow down and offer sacrifice.” We were slaves in Egypt. Moses is saying this, and he never was. Most of the people who had actually left Egypt as slaves had died by this point in Deuteronomy. It’s the next generation claiming for themselves, we were slaves. God rescued us. So, let us worship. Let us bow down and offer sacrifice.

Jesus seems to be saying, you have to walk through Deuteronomy before you can get to Psalms. Not that you have to pay your dues, not that we can earn God’s salvation by being sacrificial enough. No, it’s this idea of clinging to God from the psalm. Clinging to God because God delights in our embrace, and we so long for that. How do we learn to cling to God? Jesus shows us the way. Walk through Deuteronomy. Walk through your memories of your life, and name how God has rescued you. We are invited to do what that wilderness generation did under Moses’ direction and build up our sense of solidarity with those who have known slavery in ways we haven’t.

This, I think, is Jesus’ lesson in how to live Lent. We don’t engage in grandiose sacrifices because we think we’ll earn God’s favor that way. No, we live Lent because we want to cling to our God more, because we long for that embrace. And we do that, in part, by living Deuteronomy. We do that make sacrifice, in part as a way of saying thank you, building up our sense of wonder and awe at what God has provided for us, building up our longing for Easter and our longing for resurrection glory by putting some things aside for the duration of Lent. We also make sacrifice to build up our sense of solidarity with those who know forms of slavery we don’t. The rice bowls provide one way to do this. They’re not just money boxes, but help educate us, our minds and our stomachs, about the plight of those who know food insecurity.

God will send a thousand angels if that’s what need, but not to stop us running from Him. God will send a thousand angels to help us cling tighter, embrace more fully.