Lent 1 2026
Year A Lent 1 2026 – Genesis and Matt 4: 1-11
I recently found out that the dad of a friend of mine from university is having a hard time. In fact to be honest he’s having perhaps the hardest time most of us could imagine, having been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The thing is he’s a friend’s dad but Andrew has a public role as well as the Bishop of Guildford and as a noted composer and musician.
Yesterday he wrote to the church in Guildford Diocese giving them an update, in which he said this.
I promised that I would update you on further developments and am sorry to report that the prognosis has got worse not better. As a result the hospital has passed me over to the care of the local hospice team. ‘So how long might I have to live? I plucked up the courage to ask?’ ‘You’d be doing well if you were still alive in a month’s time.’ was the sobering answer. Only our good Lord knows exactly how long I have left, of course.’
He goes on to write about the impact this sudden change of course, this realization he is nearer the end than he had thought possible even at Christmas, has had on his faith.
I don’t fear the prospect of dying and find to my relief that my faith in the ‘resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’ has only grown stronger over the past few weeks. Nor do I feel short-changed by what’s happening. I’ve sometimes had private worries that, when faced with the starkness of a terminal illness, my faith in the Risen Christ might falter. Well it hasn’t. Or better still, God hasn’t faltered. Quite the reverse.
We have entered the season of Lent again. These 40 days of prayer, fasting, and preparation for Easter. In English we traditionally call Lent a season of the church’s year. But I wonder how helpful it is to think of Lent this way? After all, seasons come and seasons go, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and there’s not much we can do about them other than emigrate. We are passive in the face of seasons. To think of Lent as a season might encourage us to think of it as something that happens to us or happens around us, a bit like rain in winter or rain in spring. Or rain in summer for that matter.
But in Italian and Spanish they do not just call this the season of Lent, rather it’s known as the Camino Quaresima the ‘journey of forty days’. If you speak Spanish, Lent is not a season that floats around you while everything in life looks pretty much the same. Lent is a camino, it is a pilgrimage you walk, a pathway you choose to take.
Thinking about Lent this way asks us to echo Jesus’ 40 day journey into the desert. All those years ago he had to find out who he really was. This is the beginning of his proper work, this journey in the desert. Matthew’s Gospel has told us about Jesus’ birth and a bit of his childhood and maybe in that time he had a sense that he was chosen for something special, a bit out of the ordinary, but this is the first time in the Gospel that someone asks him who he is.
And that someone is the devil.
If, if, if; those three questions the devil fires at him, while Jesus is hungry and thirsty and far from home. All designed to undermine Jesus’ relationship with God his Father. If, if, if. If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into bread. If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. If you will fall down and worship me, all of this will be yours. If, if, if.
That first Lent, that first journey of 40 days, Jesus is tested, twisted, tried. But as he grows physically weaker, instead of moving further away from God he grows closer to the heart of God, sees through the illusions the devil creates to distract him, understands the story that he needs to tell about the love of God for us his children.
Our lives each Lent should try to follow that pattern too. Because through the ancient pattern of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving we answer to the same questions that Jesus was asked in his 40 days. One for each of the devil’s ‘ifs’. If we give something up – we might start to hunger more for the word of God. If we pray more - we might deepen our relationship with God. If we give to charity - we might learn to see possessions not as monuments to our success but as gifts to be shared. Put all those things together and we might be confronted with the person we really are, the person God made us to be.
Life is a hard business at times. There are deserts to be crossed, wildernesses of grief and pain and disappointment to be navigated. No-one has all the answers to dealing with these things, not really, and if they say they do they’re deluded or lying. But what we practice when we journey through our 40 days of Lent, though our whole lives as Christians, helps us to drop anchor in the reality of the love of God when all else is storm.
Bishop Andrew is probably in his final Lent, but his words might encourage us all on our journeys, whether we’re just starting out like Khaleesi as she is baptized into the Christian faith, or whether we’re here for the 80th Lent in a row. As he says:
I’ve sometimes had private worries that, when faced with the starkness of a terminal illness, my faith in the Risen Christ might falter. Well it hasn’t. Or better still, God hasn’t faltered. Amen.