A few years back, on the first Sunday of Lent, I presided over the baptism of a 7-year-old child. The congregation was between pastors, and this weighty responsibility fell to me as a minister on the presbytery’s supply list.

It being my first baptism, I was anxious to get it right and insisted on meeting with the family before the service. In the course of things, I became acquainted with not only the gifts of the child being presented for baptism, but also something of the sorrow that had preceded this moment in her young life. I came to the service with a heightened sense of that adversity that is the constant backdrop to even life’s most holy moments. 

The Gospel text for that Sunday was Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, which takes place immediately after his own baptism in the Jordan River. No sooner is he baptized and declared beloved of his Father than the Spirit drives him into the wilderness where he is harassed by Satan for forty days. There’s no time for resting, for basking in the elation of his belovedness. Christ is commissioned and already evil is at the door.  

Preparing for worship with this text in mind, my thoughts fell to the “renunciations” of the baptismal liturgy:

Do you renounce all evil, and powers in the world which defy God’s righteousness and love? 

I renounce them. 

It’s a simple point, but maybe an overlooked one: That to follow God is to turn away from all the voices of not-God. That the way of God has a shape and a contour that rules out certain visions of the world. To capitulate to those alternative visions is the temptation faced by Jesus and the temptation faced by Jesus’ followers every day since.

At the Jordan, Christ sets his course for his Father’s mission and must correspondingly set himself against the way of the Deceiver. It is no less than Jesus’ commission at the Jordan that is on the line. In each of the three tests Satan offers Jesus “‘only’… the counsel, the suggestion, that He should not be true to the way on which He entered [the] Jordan, that of a great sinner repenting; that He should take from now on a direction which will not need to have the cross as its end and goal.” (Karl Barth discussing Luke 4 in Church Dogmatics IV/1, 261)

Among the visions of the world that Jesus rules out in the wilderness are the ones that tantalize and taunt us today: that the only hunger is the immediate one, that might makes right, and that glitter and flash will give us a better return than the patient, painful work of love.

In the second week of the third month of the year of our Lord 2025, in the United States of America, many of my fellow Christians and I have had more than our fill of Satan’s wiles and human capitulation. It takes very little attention to register the latest string of blasphemies that fill up our news feeds: blatant abuses of power, offenses against human dignity, and shipwrecks of justice. We’re all up to our necks in evil’s machinations. We may even feel like we’ve been renouncing evil till we’re blue in the face, to no avail.

Often, we can identify the voices of not-God that fill up our news feeds, can conjure the appropriate horror when a mighty nation crushes its weaker neighbor simply because it can. We have a harder time recognizing the bad exchanges dangled before us in the day-to-day: our willing captivity to immediate wants, our drive to best an aggressor with an unanswerable comeback, how our hearts thrill to what dazzles and distracts. But these smaller trials are ultimately of a piece with the larger challenge of injustice. They ask us “only” to side-step our calling, to attempt to bend those around us by sheer force. With less punch but with equal craft, they chip away at our faith that love can really outlast hate, in the long run.

If we hope to cultivate a courage equal to the demands of the day, we’ll need to practice it through smaller acts of justice, love, and truth-telling. Perhaps we start today by checking our own propensity toward mindless consumption—our addiction to convenience that weakens our resolve to fight the larger economic influences that enslave and enthrall us as a nation. Maybe we start by doing the work of differentiating the battles to which Christ is calling us from those that merely feed our ego. Or we might begin attending to the needs of those living in precarity in our own vicinity, resisting the capture of our attention by the spectacles that skate across our smart phones.   

Jesus shows us that the call to faith has a reverse side in struggle. As much as we faithfully position ourselves against the evil that looms in headlines, the very same often ambushes us closer to home. But to fight the one requires that we fight the other, and both fights are entailed by our baptism. 

Do you renounce all evil, and powers in the world that defy God’s righteousness and love?

I renounce them.

It’s a question we ought to ask ourselves this Lent because it is being asked of us, repeatedly through each hour, in the pressures of bigger forces and in the smaller compromises that pull at us from all sides.

Three Temptations by Cara B. Hochhalter, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

Cell phone photo by Kaboompics.com on Pexels