February 25, 2007
Luke 4: 1-13
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Every year, on the first Sunday in the season of Lent, we have the same Gospel story: The Temptation of Jesus. All the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, report the event, with some variation of detail among them; but the story is set before us as a not-too-subtle reminder of our own struggle in the spiritual wilderness that stretches from the mortality of Ash Wednesday to the new life of Easter morning.
We should be clear at the outset about this word, temptation. The way St. Luke uses it in this passage, it means literally to test, to examine in order to see what a thing or person is made of, to try to determine the essence of something or someone. So an accurate way to portray this setting would be if the devil were to say, “Since you are the Son of God, let’s see just what kind of a son we have here. Will you be a son whose mission and ministry are devoted to the Father, or will your mission and ministry be those of a son devoted to going his own, independent way? Let’s find out.”
We know about temptations. We’re smart, worldly wise; we know not to flirt with temptation, to stay away from it. Doesn’t help much, does it?
In his fine book about baseball, Men at Work, George Will interviews four pitchers. One of them is Orel Hershiser, the Dodgers ace; and he asks him about his philosophy of pitching. Hershiser says “Most guys, if they know a batter is expecting a certain pitch, they’ll throw him something else. That’s pretty standard. I do it a little differently. If I know a batter is expecting a certain pitch, that’s exactly what I give him. Only I exaggerate it just a little bit. If I know he’s a high fastball hitter, I’ll throw him a high fastball. But I’ll throw it just a little too high, or a little too inside. He might get a piece of it, but he’ll never hit it well. I know what’s going through his head: ‘This looks so good, it feels just perfect.’ And he’ll go after it just about every time.”
That’s the way temptation works with us, isn’t it? It looks so good, feels so perfect! But Jesus saw these three “perfect pitches” for what they were. Notice how he handled them.
The first temptation or test has to do with the physical reality of hunger. Scripture says that Jesus had been in the wilderness for “40 days.” That’s Biblespeak for a long, long time. And at the end of it, he was “famished.” This is not just hungry, not just ready for dinner. “Famished” literally means voracious, ravenous. Jesus is at the point of starvation. The devil, ever the clever marketer, suggests bread. “Since you’re the Son of God, turn this stone into bread.”
Tempting, isn’t it, to allow ourselves to be motivated primarily by the meeting of physical need, either our own need or the needs of others, which we call compassion? But a careful reading of Scripture shows that Jesus was never motivated primarily by the meeting of human need; he was motivated primarily by God’s word. That word usually led him to care for human need, but he never got the priority confused. The Word of God always came first; what that Word led him to do always came second. The Word of God alone saves; ultimate devotion to anything less is simply idolatry.
The second temptation is more subtle than the first. The first had to do with hunger, with survival; the second had to do with almost as powerful a desire: power. The devil took Jesus to the top of a mountain and showed him the vast, majestic kingdoms of the world. It can all be yours, he promised. But it was a cheap illusion. Scholars tell us that the Mountain of Temptation actually sits several hundred feet below sea level, and the view that it offers is not of vast, majestic kingdoms but of tiny, impoverished hamlets and villages.
But the devil is not offering real estate here; he’s offering power, a sense of territory, the appeal of domination.
Tempting, isn’t it, to buy into the allure of bigger-better-more-stronger-newer, and when we get a taste of that kind of power, to pay almost any price to keep it coming? “All it takes, Jesus, is just a little shift in allegiance, just a minor adjustment in what you put first.”
The third temptation deals with another huge human desire: certainty, that God is who God says he is, and that God will do what God says he will do. St. Luke tells us that this one happens at church, so we need to be especially heads-up about this temptation. The Bible tells us, the devil says, that God will take care of you, protect you. Try him and see. Let’s find out.
Tempting, isn’t it, to call God to account, to take the promises of God and demand that God keep those promises on our terms, to try to have God act at our command, even though we might not look at it that way?
“If you are God and you’re here, fix my marriage; it’s been such a long, difficult struggle.”
“If you are God and you’re here, end this war in Iraq and bring the troops home.”
“If you are God and you’re here, heal my illness.”
“If you are God and you’re here, do something to show yourself!”
But this is not the Joel Osteen show; this is real life. God is not present in the world as evidence; God is present in the world as promise. Submitting to that reality is the agony of faith, but it is also the key to freedom.
All of these temptations – the temptation to physical satisfaction, the temptation to power, the temptation to certainty – form one lesson about confrontation. Jesus confronts the devil, to be sure; but most fundamentally he confronts himself, his own vulnerable points. We need to remember that, yes, Jesus was truly divine, truly God; but he was at the same time fully human, just like us. What we read in the Letter to the Hebrews is true: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in very respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” Jesus is victorious in these temptations because he clings to his identity as God’s Son, and he clings to the Word of God.
Our temptations are powerful ones too, our temptations to physical satisfaction, to power and domination, and to certainty. And there is no way around dealing with them. In fact, it just might be that we are to engage those temptations with a sense of confidence. Did you note why Jesus was in the wilderness to start with? It’s there in the first verse of the Gospel lesson. The Spirit of God led him out into that wasteland. He had just been baptized, was filled with the Holy Spirit, and that Spirit led out into the wilderness where was tested. God intended for that time to be a productive time of refining, of strengthening, of identity clarification.
So often, when we find ourselves in a time of temptation or testing, or in difficulty, it seems as if God has simply left us, as if he suddenly had something else to do and dropped us into this mess – whatever it might be – and left us there to figure it out by ourselves. But in fact Scripture tells us that we are never out of the presence of God. Instead, God uses those times to sharpen our character as Christian men, women and children, to deepen our commitment and strengthen our sense of identity as God’s own people. This is not to say that in every case God brings about our times of temptation – we’re quite capable of getting into all kinds of trouble without God’s help – but it is to say that when we’re in those difficult times, God can use them to our benefit. It certainly doesn’t seem like it at the time, but often it’s only by looking back and connecting the dots in our lives that we’re able to see that the greatest times of trouble were also the greatest times of strengthening and building.
As we engage our struggles and try to make right choices in our lives, as the tempter appeals to our own vulnerable points – our wounded ego, our bruised pride, our anger at being ignored, our fear of failing – we too can cling to the promise of God that Paul expressed in his first letter to the Corinthians: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”
The good news for us is that our salvation doesn’t depend on our right choices; it depends on God’s choice of us, a choice that he has already made in Jesus. Remember: we were baptized into the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and that means that God loves us not because we are good but because we are God’s. When your time of testing comes, and maybe you’re there right now, cling to that promise. Because in that promise, you will find strength.
Amen.
