Going to church is not about enjoying ourselves, but at the same time it is not meant to be a chore, something we have to do, to make amends with God. That is not what worship means. We worship to be happy; we are meant to enjoy God, enjoyment is a Christian word. So in today’s Gospel Christ refuses to worship the devil, to change stones to bread, to do anything at all which will take Him away from the joyous worship of God, His Father.
We go to church to be inspired, and this means we depend on the power of the Holy Spirit. The great writers on prayer warns us that prayer doesn’t always generate a great deal of feeling. The power of the Holy Spirit penetrates the whole human being, and there is more to a human being than feeling. Yet we seek peace in prayer and worship. We follow our Lord in the desert, to trust in God alone, to live by God’s word. We should remember that Jesus also sang hymns at the Last Supper before He went to Gethsemane. Good music is a part of the worship of God, and the Psalms are fundamentally songs. The singing doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be sincere. Above all, we should remember how important worship is. In the story of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness, which we heard as today’s Gospel, the devil was trying to disrupt Jesus’ worship. It speaks volume that the devil saw worship as the most important thing to disrupt in human life. The devil wanted to be worshiped, not for its own sake, but because idolatry is the best way to stop people worshiping God.
We are called to take worship seriously. A life without worship is a life without meaning. If someone says that he or she is unhappy, we could start by asking, how does that person worship? The Sunday Eucharist is the beginning and the end of Christian life. It takes all that we have done of any value and makes it part of the sacrifice of Christ, and so it is the end of our week. It also gives us food and drink for the week to come so that what we do, we do in Christ. This makes it the beginning of the Christian week. Christ in the desert explains the meaning of worship: it is the love for the best that there is; it is a willingness to let God our Father show himself to us and the world, and to it is to stop being afraid of joy. Christ leads us to the desert; the desert isn’t our final home, but the way to the new Jerusalem.