Christians who observe the season of Lent customarily begin their itinerary with the account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1–11). Having been proclaimed the Father’s Beloved Son at the time of his baptism, Jesus is compelled by the Holy Spirit into a place of solitude. After forty days of prayer and fasting he is tempted by the devil. First, he is tempted to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger and to prove he is the Messiah; then, he is tempted to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple to test God’s care for him; finally, he is tempted by power – the offer of all the world’s kingdoms if only he will worship the devil.

A tremendous amount might be said about each of these temptations and the extraordinary ways in which they not only summarize the temptations of ancient Israel in the Old Testament but also describe the various temptations that will confront Christ throughout his earthly ministry. But beneath these various interpretations, there is a fundamental sense in which each of Christ’s temptations clarifies what was proclaimed at his baptism – that he is the Beloved Son of God. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil begins. If you are the Son, you ought not to suffer hunger; if you are the Son, you ought to be preserved from bodily harm; if you are the Son, you ought to have power and authority. Christ’s life, the devil seems to say, ought to look like victory.

The temptations of Christ highlight precariousness of the human situation – that it includes hunger and illness and powerlessness. In the face of this precarity, Christ is tempted to find his life elsewhere: to seek it in material satisfactions, to seek it by preferring himself to God, to seek it by domination. Simply put, Christ is tempted to grasp life rather than to receive it. Change the stones, he is told, throw yourself down, claim what is yours.

But what is Christ’s? What belongs to the Beloved Son? Christ suggests that what belongs to him uniquely and exclusively is the task he has received from the Father. And that activity or mission has a particular directions: descent. In the Incarnation, for example, Christ descends into the world in the dark and so into its darkness; in his baptism he descends yet again, showing by his descent into the waters of the Jordan his submersion in the murky and subterranean realities of life in the world. This act of descent is fundamental to his Sonship because it is fundamental to love – to preferring the beloved to one’s own self.

Lent begins by learning to love meekness rather than despising it, to love the daily opportunities to save others and not ourselves, to accept that hunger and illness and powerlessness can be the places where God appears.

The temptations of Christ which inaugurate the church’s Lenten pilgrimage, quite apart from their content, include, strikingly, a constant ascent. From the desert plain they rise to the top of the temple, from the temple roof to the mountain. The devil constantly tries to draw Christ up. And yet Christ’s response to every temptation reiterates in some sense his descent; he draws himself down, placing himself beneath the Father. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” “Him only shall you serve.” The devil offers him a way up, but for Christ the only way up is the way down.

This habit of descent is all that belongs to the Beloved Son – to lose himself for others. This indeed is why he is Beloved, why he is the true son of the Father, the revelation in a human face of the Father’s mercy.

But what of Christ’s followers? They are, as Saint Paul suggests, “fellow workers” with Christ in the wilderness of the world. Like Jesus, they are beloved children of God; they too will be tempted. Christians know well the temptation to grasp life rather than receive it – to grasp at material pleasure, to demand a sign from God, to seek security by dominating others. How do they surrender the relentless drive to save themselves and cultivate in its place the habit of saving others? How do they hold in their hearts the grief of the world?

Remarkably, we are told very little in the scriptures about how Jesus was prepared for the desert. About the time before his baptism we know only that he was born, that his parents brought him to the temple as an infant and then fled with him to Egypt, that at twelve years of age he was teaching in the temple again. Everything else is silence, hiddenness. It would seem that the Lord was preparing himself to confront the devil not by extraordinary feats but by the daily work of daily life at home in Nazareth – in the words of an old hymn, “the trivial round, the common task.” And perhaps this is instructive as Lent begins. It may be that hiddenness and smallness, the humble life of love and prayer wherever we find ourselves, is where we will learn not to grasp life but to receive it.

It is hard to love obscurity, hard to love the limitations of life and to see them as freedom. And yet so many of the ways that people try to be bigger than they are, or larger than life – whether by acquiring more, by having power over others, or by preferring their own way to God’s way – are demonic in the end. Lent begins by learning to love meekness rather than despising it, to love the daily opportunities to save others and not ourselves, to accept that hunger and illness and powerlessness can be the places where God appears. Because, of course, the world does not need to save itself. It is saved by the Father’s love.