The King Of The Castle

Luke 4:1-13 Matthew 24:2

 I love the train journey down from Redhill to Chichester, especially the bit just south of Arundel when you can look back across that wide expanse of watery meadow and see the whole of the town set upon the hill side. Above all I love the castle. From that distance it looks particularly majestic and you get a strong sense of its solidity and security. I’ve never lived very far from Arundel and whilst life has changed enormously around me, that castle has been the same year after year.

We all need foundations to our lives – our faith, our families and the places we live, but there are other foundations which need to be shaken, actually they need to be raised to the ground.

Jesus was a threat to the devil for he threatened to destroy all that evil was built upon. The fear and the disease and the anxiety of living, he came to tear it down, and it was making the devil tremble, for these were the foundations upon which his castle was built.

So in these forty days in the wilderness he attacked Jesus unmercilessly. He threw himself at the saviour’s defences praying that he might make a breach and continue to reign supreme.

Lent is a time for us to reflect upon our own interior castle and what we are trying to protect. For around us and within us, if we look hard enough, we will find a moat, a series of battlements and ramparts and a watch tower. There is also a drawbridge, through which we could welcome others, but we control the mechanism and we have learnt to raise it sparingly.

At the heart of this castle we will discover what it is we are defending. We do this by entering three places,  the treasury and the dungeon and the place of the throne.

In the dungeon we will find those things we are anxious to keep under wraps and control, look around you in that place for it might be where you find God. In the treasury we will find those things that matter most to us, that which we possess, that which we think adds up to who we are, and when we come to the place of the throne, we need to ask ourselves who sits there, and if we’re honest, we might end up admitting, well, of course we do.

Lent is a time for unseating ourselves from the throne of our interior castle and setting free the God who we have confined to the dungeon, bringing Him out as revealed to us in Christ and setting him upon the place we had previously claimed for our own.

Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and so might we be, and the temptation will be that we continue to keep God under control, restrain him under lock and key, whilst giving free reign to our own desires. The devil will be on the sidelines applauding this.

The alternative though, is quite unsettling in its own way. The clue lies in a single verse of scripture in Matthew’s Gospel.

Jesus was walking in Jerusalem being shown the great buildings of the city and he says something which is going to cause him a great deal of trouble ”Truly I tell you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down”.  With Jesus on our throne, there is no need for the moat, the battlements and the ramparts, for we have nothing to defend, only the greatest thing to offer – his shared love. It all comes tumbling down.

When I set out walking the long distance footpath alongside Hadrian’s wall, the map showed me that along every mile of my journey there would be a castle. A milecastle, and I had visions of great battlements and towers rising up from nowhere,

The truth is that nearly all of them have crumbled away.  You can come to some points on the map and end up hunting through the undergrowth in vain to find even a single trace of the castle. You see all has been thrown down.

Arundel Castle tall and strong and unchanging, protecting the town and its heritage.  A milecastle along Hadrian’s Wall – lost without trace along with the pointless defence it was a part of. Somewhere here lies a decision for us this Lent and it rests on the extent we are really prepared to permit him to reign as Lord and King.

RH 21.2.10