In C.S. Lewis’s novel The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape is an older, more experienced devil in the so-called Lowerarchy of hell, who writes correspondence to his younger, less experienced nephew, Wormwood. Screwtape wants to teach Wormwood how to be a more effective demon. In one of Screwtape’s letters, he coaches him on how to tempt what he calls Wormwood’s patient. The patient, as it turns out, is a new Christian.
In a chilling moment, Screwtape urges Wormwood to take advantage of the patient’s inexperience as a Christian. Screwtape notes that this new Christian will initially be caught up in the honeymoon phase of his spiritual life. The patient will be zealous and passionate, expecting to feel something satisfying in being a pious person. He will bask in the emotional highs of prayer. Accordingly, he will be more vulnerable when the honeymoon is over, when a dry spell of spiritual ennui enters the picture, when he is appalled by the behavior of other Christians, and when the mere presence of other fallible humans during worship becomes a source of irritation. Screwtape exhorts Wormwood to take advantage of this vulnerability, for he knows that if the patient survives a period of spiritual malaise and discontent, all bets are off for evil to win the day.
There is a real tendency to vulnerability in the extremes of life, those places on the border between emotionalism and the ordinary constancy of daily existence. As Screwtape sees it, Wormwood’s patient is traveling through such a borderland, transitioning from being a novice Christian to a more experienced one. It’s a risky moment for the maturing follower of Christ, a moment beyond which many people never persevere. The Screwtape Letters is a clever novel because it shows the nuance of evil. Demonic activity and temptations are rarely of the sort epitomized in horror movies or the modern imagination. Temptation is far more subtle.
The extremes of life are exactly where the devil finds Jesus in order to tempt him. At one extreme, Jesus has just been baptized and proclaimed as God’s Beloved Son. Immediately after this holy moment, he is thrust into the wilderness and tested. But did you notice how the devil didn’t approach Jesus at the beginning of his time in the wilderness but at the end? The end is an entirely different sort of extreme. The forty days and forty nights that our Lord spent fasting in the wilderness were more akin to the regularity of life. Those days must have been boring and tiresome. They must have been ponderous in their banality. But as those days and nights drew to a close, Jesus found himself at another extreme.
Then, he was famished, and certainly he must have been emotionally vulnerable, too. If you’ve ever tried fasting, you will know that all kinds of feelings well up from inside. Fasting has a way of bringing to the surface all that dwells within. In such an extremity of life, the devil approaches Jesus and attempts to prey on his emotions and full humanity.
If Jesus is desperate for food, in a state of high emotion, wouldn’t he be inclined to resort to a quick supply of food by abusing his power? If he felt lonely and abandoned after so much time in the wilderness, wouldn’t he want to test God, to throw himself recklessly from a pinnacle to see if God really is with him after all? If Jesus is tired of seeing injustice in his own day and fully aware of his vocation to bring justice to God’s people, couldn’t he justify a way to gain full authority over all earthly kingdoms, even if at the devil’s hands?
But Jesus doesn’t take the bait. The devil has underestimated Jesus, who is so fortified by prayer and endurance in the desert that he passes the test. He is so intimately bound in love and prayer with the Father and the Spirit that he refuses to accept the devil’s false portrayal of God, because that is exactly what the devil presents: a distorted image of the living God.
The creepy thing about the devil is that he knows Jesus is the Son of God, and he seems to know quite a lot about the nature of God, too. When the devil tempts Jesus by saying “if you are the Son of God,” he doesn’t question Jesus’s divinity, he assumes it. He uses Jesus’s special status to try to lure him into sin. And the devil does so by slandering the reputation of God.
The Slanderer is one of the Scriptural names for Satan. If the Slanderer knows something about the nature of God, then he is trying to convince Jesus and will try to convince us, too, that God is something other than the true God. In this spiritual libel, God is portrayed as a bartering agent, who demands emotional dependency on us. The relationship is distorted from free gift to supply and demand and co-dependence. If we are in desperate circumstances, then we will test God to seek protection, because according to the Slanderer, God simply preys on our extreme emotional state. If our relationship with God is simply an unending series of transactions, then we will only worship God to gain power or success or whatever else we desire.
The devil is a slanderer because he tries to dupe us into believing in a false god who is not like the one, true, living God. Our worst temptations will find us when we are in the extremes of life: when we are anxious about an uncertain future, when we are hungry for food, when we are impatient with injustice, and when we are tired of trying to make ends meet. The temptations assault us in all the extremities of life with one bogus, slanderous message: God has abandoned you. So, the devil says, worship me. Believe me.
But even as the devil knows who Jesus is, we know how the devil operates. The devil only functions in a conditional world, and this is antithetical to the nature of God. Since God is the Giver of all good gifts, God gives freely, not conditionally. In the devil’s world, everything is transaction, everything is conditional. Perhaps we can learn a lot about who God is by what the devil does. God is not like those things. God is not impatient, nor does God rely on our impatience to foster a relationship. God doesn’t dole out gifts to receive worship.
Instead, God gives us what we need, which is not always what we want. Instead, God protects us as is best for us, not as a backup plan of rescue for our recklessness. Instead, God is to be worshipped simply because of who God is, eternal Love and perfect Giver. We don’t worship God to get something. We worship God because God is God.
And this is why perseverance through the in-between times of life is so important. These are the times between extremes of emotions. These are the ordinary times. These are the long stretches of spiritual dryness where prayer doesn’t seem to be answered and God seems silent. The devil hates nothing more than a Christian who can survive in these in-between times. That’s why Screwtape told Wormwood to press hard on the patient in the times of extremity when emotions run high. If the patient can’t survive the extreme times, he will never make it to the in-between ones.
In the in-between times, we learn that God is always with us, and so when the anxiety or the hunger or the severe impatience come, we will know that God is still with us. When the suffering comes and the misfortunes find us, we will still know that God is with us. No wonder Jesus rebuked Peter when he tried to deny his prediction of suffering and death. Jesus called Peter Satan, for it’s the Slanderer himself who will always try to convince us of a Savior who can’t bear suffering or death and who only appears to be with us in the human condition.
But we know this is false. We know, as we begin this Lenten journey, that before we arrive at Easter, we must take up our crosses and follow our Savior, who took up his own cross for our sake and that of the whole world. We know that salvation is found not only on the mountaintops but especially in the valleys. We know that our Savior’s name, Emmanuel, is true. He is God with us. And no amount of slander or libel can ever take that away.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
February 22, 2026