|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Deuteronomy 26:1–11 |
Psalm 91:1–2, 9–16 |
Romans 10:8b–13
|
Luke 4:1–13 |
It’s fairly easy to dismiss the story of the temptation by thinking, well, of course! Jesus was the Son of God, after all! It was a snap for Him to withstand the devil. Come on now, what did you expect? Jesus had it all together and knew it. But we aren’t Jesus, we are just plain Philip, or Jane, or Sally.
To take the humanity of Jesus seriously, we have to take Jesus’ temptations as real, strong temptations and that the devil did not give up easily. However the question of the integrity of Jesus’ inner turmoil is not the thrust of this particular passage. The account of Jesus' forty days in the wilderness in preparation for his ministry parallels the forty years the people of Israel spent in the desert after they had been freed as slaves in Egypt, given the ten commandments, and before they entered a promised homeland of their own. As the forty days of Lent begins, we are drawn to connect the temptations and wilderness stay of Jesus with the temptations and searchings of people of faith today.
“If you are the Son of God, Jesus, turn these stones into bread. “Give us bread!” That was also the first thing the tribes of Israel demanded of Moses after they had gained their freedom. “Why did you bring us out here in the desert? In Egypt we had bread enough to eat”. If was if they had forgotten that they had been slaves with no future, and now were free with a future open before them. They forgot all the signs reminding them what God had done—they forgot the Passover, the pillar of fire, and the opening of the Red Sea. Incredible it would seem!
Yet, I can tell you every parish stewardship chair can at some point identify with poor Moses surrounded by anxious people asking, “Where’s the bread this time? We need more now than before.” Often the fear of not having enough threatens to overwhelm our perspective on the resources and potential we have already demonstrated, and instead builds a wall of amnesia between us and the long record of God’s grace helping us to make it through. The first temptation is so paralyzing because we get caught up in wringing our hands. We see night, but our tears of self-absorption block out all the stars, signs that Holy Spirit does not desert us nor lead us to dead ends.
The second temptation is that of power. The devil, in asking Jesus to throw Himself off the temple roof was, in effect, trying to manipulate God’s hand. After the Israelites had received the manna from heaven, they tried to force God’s hand by demanding, if we are to worship the God who brought us out of Egypt, give us water. God did give water, telling Moses to strike the rocks. Yet the incident became a reminder of people past and present demonstrating a lack of trust in God’s ability to keep promises.
Jesus did not mistrust God’s ability to provide the strength necessary to meet challenges he would face. However, in turning down the devil, Jesus is also reminding us that faith involves an acknowledgement of the boundaries of power. Jesus was not afraid to use power, but he always knew its boundaries.
As parents, we have power over our children, but truly loving parents have respect for boundaries. As citizens of the most powerful nation on the earth, there is a need to ask what are proper boundaries. (Parenthetically, in the story of Adam and Eve, legend has it that the one tree which God had forbidden them to eat was the tree God was saving to produce the seed to feed future generations. All that Adam and Eve did in their attempt to become like God was to steal and destroy some of the resources from their children and grandchildren.) The temptation of the devil is to pretend that power has no boundaries, but is only there to be accumulated and that it is a waste of our time to ask and wrestle with broader or deeper questions.
The last temptation involves idolatry. The devil promises Jesus the idol of security. “Follow me, and you won’t have to worry about your safety. You won’t have to go through any suffering. Let me show you a convenient shortcut to gain your objectives.” For Israel, the struggle was with gods, which seemed to offer a comfortable sense of security by not asking much in thoughtful consideration of the ramifications of one’s behavior. A scripted ritual was good enough. A golden calf was sure a lot easier to deal with and a lot less formidable than a God who thwarted pharaoh and who had gathered Israel to be a light to all nations, and a different kind of people. The desire for a limited, set structure to serve as security is natural. Yet so often as we begin to trust more and more in what we have constructed and things we have set up, the more we begin to make them into idols. We think we can’t live without them. Revision is unthinkable. So God is put on the back shelf as irrelevant. I suspect much of the unease in the mainline Christian churches today also involves putting too much faith in shortcuts, ideologies, and what the world thinks of us rather than in discerning where God is calling us. Incidentally the recent movie, The Queen is a good study in the dangers of an uncritical and unexamined faith in structures to guide one’s actions, especially in new, but critical circumstances.
That is why I’m not so sure that the temptations of the devil have changed that much for people of faith. What Jesus found on the mountain of temptation can easily be found today on the internet. While we don’t literally wander from place to place learning to survive in an arid wilderness surrounded by people ready to attack us if we camp too long on their territory, we must interact in a society that is increasingly alien to assumptions people of faith generally hold. How do we keep before us a vision of God’s new earth? How do we exercise the boundaries of our power? How do we deal with our need for security? What are the idols of our society? These are the questions the story of Jesus’ temptation invites us to consider. In one way or another, people of faith are called to follow through a land that is often hostile to the call and direction of the Holy Spirit.
And
I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
