The Gospel of Saint John tells us that Jesus, during His last meal with His disciples before he went to his death, spoke of himself as the Way, the Truth, and of the Life. This is one of the best-remembered sayings of Jesus and, precisely because this is so, we can easily pass over it without reflecting on what it really means. I would like to invite all of us this morning to reflect for a few moments on this very important saying of Jesus because it can help us understand a little better this strange story of the temptations of Jesus in the desert which we have just listened to.

At the heart of our belief in Jesus is our belief that He is both fully human and fully divine. How this can actually be is a great mystery, but the importance of this belief can hardly be exaggerated. If Jesus truly is fully divine then our encounters with Him, however they happen, are encounters with the living God. What this means, of course, is that the source of every single thing which exists in creation becomes visible to us and available to us in a way that we can at least partially understand. Without Jesus, our understanding of God would be locked in a mystery we can never penetrate. In Jesus this unimaginable mystery can, as St John says in one of his letters, be seen and heard and touched.

It is, then, through His humanity that Jesus reveals the full truth of who God is. When Jesus speaks we hear God speak; when Jesus acts we see God act; when Jesus forgives God is forgiving. This is already a remarkable thing, but there is yet something more to be said which is equally remarkable. Because Jesus is fully and completely human, when we hear Jesus speak, we understand how we should be speaking; when we see Jesus in action, we understand how we should act; when we see Jesus forgiving, we understand how we should forgive. Jesus does not only reveal to us the truth about God; Jesus also reveals to us the truth about what it means to be fully human. This is what Jesus means when He says that He is the Way and it is why the first Christians often described themselves as followers of the Way. This is who we are as Christians, as disciples or followers of Jesus.

It is with all this in mind that we can ask ourselves what the story of the temptations of Jesus is inviting us to build into our own lives. I want to offer just one or two simple thoughts which each of us might develop as we reflect on our own individual stories.

Jesus is led into the desert immediately after His baptism and there He confronts the power of evil. As is always the case, the forces of evil seek to lead us to remove God from the centre of our lives and replace God with something else. Sometimes that “something else” can be the accumulation of money and possessions; sometimes it can be a desire for domination over others; but always evil seeks in one way or another to make us turn in on ourselves and make ourselves the measure of everything.

In three different ways, the devil in this morning‘s gospel is tempting Jesus to do exactly this. In suggesting to Jesus, who is extremely hungry after 40 days of fasting, that He should use His miraculous powers to turn the rocks into bread, the devil is proposing to Jesus that the powers He has should rightly be used for His own benefit. Jesus instead insists that His powers are only and always at the service of God and of God’s people. This is what He intends to do with His life - to make it always a gift for the life of others and never something which is self-serving. This is the way of Jesus. It is the way that we Christians are called to follow.

In then suggesting to Jesus that if only He will worship the devil, He can have full power and authority over the whole world, the second temptation is to betray what is most important to Jesus, His fidelity to His Father, in order to achieve something good, for surely Jesus would use His dominion over others to lead them to God. But Jesus knows that to deliberately do evil in order to achieve a good outcome can never be in harmony with God‘s creative intention for His people. This is the way of Jesus - always to act with integrity and fidelity in the belief that only in this way can God‘s will ultimately prevail. It is the way we Christians are called to follow.

And then finally, in suggesting to Jesus that He throw himself off the temple tower because God will send His angels to catch him, the temptation is to adopt a false understanding of God as some kind of safety net, rather than to recognise God as the one who creates each one of us and calls us to allow Him to work through us for the good of others. This third temptation is in a sense trivial and even childish, but it is nevertheless dangerous because it invites us to see God as our personal wonderworker rather than as the one who calls us and sends us to catch others before they fall, or to lift them up after they have fallen. This is the way of Jesus - It is the way we Christians are called to follow.

Today, as always, the great challenge for us is both to recognise the patterns of Jesus’s life and then to reflect on how each one of us, in our own particular situations, can reproduce these patterns in our lives. As we begin our journey of Lent this Sunday, with our hearts open to conversion and renewal, my prayer is that each one of us will use the six weeks of Lent to reflect on just what being a follower of Jesus really looks like in the daily reality of our own lives. Let us make this our prayer for ourselves and for each other, and in a very special way for those who take part in the Rite of Election as they look towards entering fully into the life of the Church at Easter.