Sermon preached by Mark Wakefield on 10th February 2008
Genesis 2:15-17. 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

A couple of years ago Belinda and I marked two significant milestones in our life together. We both had what you might politely call “significant” birthdays and we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. We took the view that all of this added up to a great excuse to throw our cares - and not a small portion of our savings - to the winds by going on a spectacular holiday and we chose to go on safari in Zambia.

Having never done anything like this before we fretted about whether we might have made one big and very expensive mistake. After all, what would we do for two weeks buried deep in the African bush if it turned out that we didn't like it? There'd be no swimming pool to lounge by, no restaurants to go to, no interesting historical sites to visit. And what on earth, given the limits of solar powered electricity, were the children going to do without their iPods, not to mention television?

As it happened, any doubts that we might have had were dispelled immediately on arrival. Flying low over the African bush in a tiny monoplane was a thrill in itself but the drive from what was jokingly called an airport to the bushcamp was nothing sort of a revelation. Unfolding before our eyes was a landscape that teemed with the most extraordinary variety of life. Elephants searching for a watering hole, giraffes gawkily trotting by, crocodiles slithering off the river banks, a pride of lions snacking on a day old buffalo kill, hippos chuckling and thrashing around in the water and all of this set under a luminous, azure sky. And this was just in the first few hours after our arrival. Still to come was our first African sunset - a great orange ball in the sky that casts brilliant, golden light all around as it sinks below the horizon line and the blessed peace of night in the bush - real darkness and real quiet, only punctuated by the trumpeting of elephants and the mighty roar of a lion.

It all seemed so fresh, so pristine, so majestic that I found myself thinking of the book of Genesis and God's response to the world he had just created: "God saw everything that he had made and indeed, it was very good." What's more, it made me feel very small and insignificant. Coming from a country where even the landscape is overwhelmingly man-made, it's all too easy to think that this is our world, rather than God's world, whereas in the bush you see with different eyes and realise that we are but a part of this most glorious creation.

But of course, although we are but a part of God's creation, we are a unique part of it in so far as we have the ability to change it, for good or ill, by the exercise of our rational faculties and - of course -  it is these alone that set us apart from the animals. And so it was with a growing sense of shame that we learnt, as our holiday went on, of how the rhino, hunted for his horn, was no longer to be found in that part of Africa and of how, thanks to organised poaching, there were only 20,000 elephants in 2005 compared to some 100,000 twenty years earlier. As a result, this seeming Garden of Eden has to be patrolled by guards to protect the animals from the greed and folly of mankind.

This tendency of ours to mess things up is one of the great mysteries of our existence. As St. Paul so eloquently put it in his letter to the Romans "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate." One of the responses to this conundrum has been to locate the source of evil in a being that is opposed to God and who leads us astray. So in today's readings you see poor Eve tricked by the wily serpent's honeyed words of reassurance and Jesus tempted by the devil.

But all this talk of personal evil leaves us feeling a bit uneasy doesn't it? The fundamentalists will of course readily attest to the devil's existence, just as the atheists will say it's all stuff and nonsense, just like belief in God. But what do those of us who don't enjoy such a doubt-free outlook on life really think?

It's worth spending a few minutes clearing away a few misconceptions here because all is not quite what it seems. The first thing to note is that in the Old Testament the devil barely gets a look in.  In fact, the figure of Satan only appears three times in the Old Testament and every time he is a servant of God's, a member of his court. And as such, the role that he plays is that of either an accuser of the faithful or as someone who tests them on God's behalf.

And you can see him playing the role of tester in the New Testament as well, as in today's gospel reading. The first line of that reading says this:"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil." So the Spirit deliberately leads him to the devil. For sure, the devil is no friend of Jesus' but there can be no doubt that he is acting on God's behalf. And what he offers Jesus isn't so awful. On the contrary, in offering him an earthly kingdom he was offering what Israel had so long wanted - freedom from Roman oppression and the restoration of the Jewish nation. What was so wrong with that? But Jesus knew that his Father wanted something much, much better which no mere man could ever imagine - a kingdom built not on wealth and arms but one built on love and vulnerability. In this guise the devil is no more than God's agent of choice.

But elsewhere in the New Testament we meet a very different kind of devil and it's here that we find ourselves on much more familiar ground. For this devil and his associated demons are the avowed enemies of God, not his servants. It's not an exaggeration to say that the New Testament is saturated with this sense of present, personal evil. To do the maths, the New Testament refers to the devil and demons no less than 568 times, compared to only 340 references to the Holy Spirit.

In this guise for instance, Satan and his helpers prevent people from hearing the gospel and hinder St Paul on his journeys, while there are of course, countless stories of demon possession requiring Jesus' healing power. And it's here in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation, that we get that blood-curdling, disturbing image of hell where the devil and the damned are finally thrown into a lake of fire and sulphur and are tormented forever.

So what are we to make of this? If the New Testament is serious about devils and demons shouldn't we be too?

In answering this question it's important to enter into the mental world into which Jesus was born and the New Testament written. It was a time of terrible suffering, in which the Jews experienced great oppression under foreign rulers. It was also a time in which they were beginning to be influenced by Greek myth and philosophy and it was the Greeks who introduced them to the idea of demons as evil spirits and gave them the word devil, or "diablos" in Greek. In short, the Jews started to explain their misfortune in terms of these wholly evil beings.

Once we understand how novel these ideas were to the Jews, it is possible to see these references to the devil and his demons as something to be understood symbolically, rather than literally, something that was a means of reflecting on the awful reality of their experience. As the theologian Walter Wink says, the question isn't therefore whether or not we "believe" in Satan but whether we can identify in our own lives those aspects of experience that the New Testament writers regarded as Satanic or demonic.

And this is where it all begins to make sense. How else, for instance, can you even come close to understanding something as monstrous as Nazism without conceiving of it as demonic in some way, as some form of collective possession? And is there not something also demonic about our current drug and sex culture and even, you might say, in the light of recent press stories, in our celebrity culture, in the way that they enslave and destroy?

But let's be clear: all these evils are - or were - the results of individuals making their own choices. One of the great risks of an unhealthy obsession with the notion of personal, embodied evil is that it can so easily lead us to seeing evil only in others rather than in ourselves. So it can prevent us from loving our enemies and it can justify us demonising those we see as our opponents or even as just different from us.

To digress here just for a moment, whether you agree or not with Rowan Williams's conclusions about the relationship between Sharia Law and English Law, anyone who has read what he actually said this last week - as opposed to what was reported in the press - will realise that one of the problems he was trying to address and offer a solution for was this tendency to dismiss as evil those who are different from us. And the hysterical reaction he excited from some quarters only goes to show just how ingrained this tendency is. As Christians we must never forget that if Jesus' mission was about anything it was about calling each and every one of us to repent of the evil that resides in our own hearts.

In the book of Deuteronomy God presents the Israelites with a choice: "I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendents may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him and holding fast to him: for that means life to you."

It is the promise of our faith that there is no thought or action so evil as to put us beyond the love of God - that love so perfectly expressed in the life, death and resurrection of his son and which does not just encourage us but enables us to choose life.

Amen