There is no doubt that Marley was dead.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. 

Those sentences are from the beginning of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and they are some of my favorite lines in literature. Dickens spends his first few paragraphs detailing the fact that Jacob Marley is dead; dead as a door-nail. He goes to such lengths because if you doubt that Marley was dead, then the rest of the story loses its wonder; its oomph.

I’ve been struck by similar lines in the gospel of Matthew.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

After not eating for 40 days, Jesus was hungry. When you read it in isolation it seems like such an understatement. Hunger is an understatement. Literally, in the Greek, he is craving food.

We tend to pass right by this simple statement. We are in such a hurry to show that Jesus is divine, that he is the Son of God who came to die for our sins that we often forget that Jesus was hungry, just as we would be after 40 days with no food.

We need to stop, we need this to jump out at us from the text. If we don’t grasp that Jesus was hungry, then the rest of this story doesn’t make any sense. This story, like Dickens’ with a living Marley, would lose its wonder and its oomph.

If Jesus was hungry, then he could really be tempted by the Devil’s offer of fresh loaves of bread; then his desires could be bent into taking up the Devil’s dare to leap off a tall building, or into taking the bait of  bowing his knee for wealth and power. We all know that we can do uncharacteristic things when we’re hungry. In short, if Jesus was hungry, he was human.

That is the beauty of observing Lent. It reminds us that Jesus was human, and no time is it more obvious than the 40 days he spends fasting in the wilderness. I was speaking to someone recently who is a non-practicing Roman Catholic. He mentioned that he likes the idea of saints. I asked him what he likes about ‘his’ saints, and he said he likes their accessibility, that they are ‘real’ people. 

Jesus was a ‘real’ person. It was in Jesus’ humanity that he overcame the Devil’s temptations. He didn’t scare off the Devil with some extravagant divine fireworks coming from his fingers. No, he countered the Devil’s scripture laced lies with a more holistic picture of what the scripture teaches. 

Perhaps that is what we should be about this Lent, imitating Jesus’ time in the wilderness, by taking up a thoughtful reading of scripture. Not sure where to start? Start with the gospel of Mark. Mark can be easily read in about an hour. It has a distinct Part I (Chapter 1-Middle of Chapter 8) and Part II (Middle of Chapter 8-End), so you can split it up. Questions? Comments? I’d love to chat with you about what you discover as you rediscover the real Jesus.