Headline

Tim Miller Dyck

Editor/Publisher

My mother grew up as the oldest child on the Janzen farm homestead just outside of Rosthern, Sask. She and her mother spent many hours in the kitchen cooking, baking and preserving. There were seven other family members to feed besides the two of them, and even more during harvest time with hired help. If the moisture came, you could grow a shoe tree in that place by just leaving your boots outside. But the winters were long and hard. By spring, food stocks were thinning, and you were limited to what you had put aside.

I think that’s why when my mother had her own family, she set us all to so much canning, freezing and drying the vegetables from our garden and the fruit we bought in those lovely days of late summer. There were washing tubs of cucumbers to scrub for pickles and hundreds of jars to fill with tomatoes and peaches, pears and cherries.

When the cold months came, we didn’t buy expensive things from the store. There were always some mason jars still left in the twisty room under the stairs or in the garage to serve for supper and to give to guests to take home.

The thinner eating at this time of year has something similar in the church calendar. We’ve entered the time of Lent, which is a period of 40 days before Easter during which we remember the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. This ancient church tradition especially calls us to prayer, generosity to others and fasting. The goal is to focus not on the pleasures of self, but on Jesus, God’s gift to us.

The 40 days comes from Jesus’ own time of self-denial in the desert as he prepared himself for ministry (see Luke 4 and Matthew 4). My pastor, Steve Drudge, preached on this text recently and called our attention to the difference between trials and temptations. He described how the root of temptation is not accepting our limits, but the same situation becomes a trial that strengthens us when we do say no.

While Jesus was in the desert, he ate nothing for 40 days. The devil comes to Jesus after this and says that if he really is the Son of God, why doesn’t he turn this stone into a loaf of bread? Jesus resists both the seductive call of the pleasure of eating good bread and the lure of pride to prove who he is (just as Jesus did when he was later mocked on the cross: “He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.”)

The devil then takes and shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. He offers them to Jesus if only he will worship him. But Jesus honours the limit of who and what we can worship. “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,’” Jesus says.

Finally, the devil tempts Jesus to publicly prove to everyone that he is the Son of God by jumping from the temple peak, and God would certainly send angels to bear him up. Maybe the devil was tempting Jesus with what a public witness this miracle would be. But Jesus says no to witnessing to the right thing the wrong way, and to the temptation to try to exercise power over how God acts.

Pastor Steve mentioned how, in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus’ responses in the desert are called “a real stupendous miracle.” It’s a miracle of restraint, of choosing to stay within the limits that Jesus himself chose and that God gave.

The message of the world is that we don’t have limits—spend more, borrow more, eat more, act as you want, do whatever feels good. Temptations are to be tasted, not turned down.

But there are limits. God gives us limits. Together as a church we set boundaries for faithful living as God’s people. God’s creation itself sets limits. Vegetables don’t grow in the winter. The soil and the air can only take so much pollution. There is only so much cheap, accessible oil available.

I think that the question of how we deal with limits and with competition for limited resources is the biggest moral question our society will face in the next generation. How should the church respond? I commend to you a new series, starting this issue, in which Paul Fieguth takes on precisely this question. He told me as we were developing this series, “These articles may be challenging or unsettling to read, but these issues are so important and pressing that I feel it is irresponsible, even immoral, to ignore them.” Paul is a brilliant thinker and his careful research and writing on these issues is a gift to all of us.