Growling Souls

This Sunday’s lectionary reading was Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). So you have Jesus, baptized and announced as God’s son led by the Spirit to be tempted. While temptations and acts of sin come in as many colors as the spectrum holds, hunger seems to be the ground of them all. In Jesus’s case the temptations are hunger for food, hunger for recognition and hunger for power. For the devil, it is hunger to be worshipped. For Eve it was hunger for knowledge; for Adam, hunger to please. 

Lent’s initial premise reminds us of our beginnings and endings and offers us the opportunity to consider how we fill the space in between. In its first Sunday, Lent asks what constitutes our hunger and how do we fill that hunger.

 

I think of this passage as God’s tacit reminder to us that 1) Jesus was human and 2) to live is to hunger. In Christ, God experiences all the hunger of humanity and sympathizes with the weakness those hungers bring. 

 

“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let’s hold firmly to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin. Therefore, let’s approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace for help at the time of our need.” (Hebrews 4:14-16, NASB)

 

May we know our hunger, may we know the One who can sympathize with our hunger and may we find the mercy and grace of God in our time of need.