And as we
traditionally do, we begin with an accounting of Jesus’ temptation in the
wilderness. Temptation stories are rare
in the Bible; in fact, there are precisely two:
the temptation of the first man back in Genesis and our story
today. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it,
the first, the story of Adam, is the “temptation that led to humanity’s’ fall,”
while Jesus’ experience is “the temptation which led to Satan's fall.”1 And it’s important to remember this as we
talk about the wilderness: it’s not
about temptation in general, not about ours or our neighbor’s or Christians as
a whole. It’s about the temptation of
Jesus, who was the Christ.
The Holy
Spirit – the same spirit that came upon him at baptism, mind you – leads him
into the trackless waste. And there he’s
met by Satan, that symbol of all that is evil in the world, that
personification of our separateness, our alienation from all that is
God. And the devil comes up to him,
looking dapper, and fit, like he’s been spending a lot of quality time with a
Stairmaster, and he looks like the very model of a modern human being, a
successful yuppie with tasseled loafers and an Izod shirt, and he’s got a
Starbuck’s in his hand – or maybe a frozen margarita – and he holds it out to
Jesus, and when Jesus refuses, takes a big old satisfied gulp and lets out a
mighty sigh of contentment: “Ahhhhh . . . that hits the spot. Now then” – and he unsnaps his briefcase –
“Now then: we’ve got some business to attend to.” And he pulls a humongous rock out of the
case, and says “If you’re the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf
of bread.”
And without
hesitating, Jesus replies: “It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone’”
and you can’t quite see it, it’s almost as if you’ve imagined it, but a look of
naked fury crosses the devil’s unlined face, but only for a second, and then
it’s a broad smile and he says: “OK, OK, you got me . . . how about this.” And he holds up the briefcase, and Jesus
looks inside, and suddenly, it’s as if it expands to engulf them, and it
becomes their whole reality, and they’re standing on top of the world and all
its kingdoms are spread out below . . . they can see lions knifing through the
African veldt, buffalo covering the plains of North America like a muddy
blanket . . . they can see Rome and its Emperor who thinks he’s a god and – in
New York city – glittering towers containing CEOs who think the same . . . All of the world, past and present and future,
is laid out at their feet, and the devil looks smug, now, like this is a pretty
good trick, and he says “Alright – I’ll give you glory and authority over all
of this – because it’s been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I like –
if you’ll just fall down on your knees and worship me.”
And again,
Jesus answers him with scripture: “It is written, “Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him’” And now it’s clear: the devil’s mad – his perfectly
coiffed and gelled hair begins to smoke . . . little wisps of flame dance
around his fingers, so hot they melt his Harvard class ring, and abruptly, with
no fancy tricks, no pulling anything out of his briefcase, they’re on the
pinnacle of the Jerusalem temple-grounds, the epitome of religious power in the
Jewish world, and they can see the temple itself, with its big, empty bowl and
columns . . . they can see the sacrifices being offered, blood running into
grates in the platform, and smell the greasy odor of burnt-offering, and the
devil tries one more temptation: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself
down from here,” and this time, he quotes scripture as well: “For it is
written ‘He will command his angels to protect you’ and ‘On their hands
they will bear you up.’”
But for a
third time, Jesus calmly answers him “It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God
to the test.’” And with that, the devil’s eyes bug out, and he looks like he’s
about to explode, and with a loud Bang! he does, he disappears
into thin air. But Luke cautions us that
the devil is not finished, because he says that he departed “until an opportune
time.”
And the
lesson we take from this depends on what kind of theology and view of Biblical
authority we hold. For many evangelicals
– for whom scripture is inerrant and literally God’s Word – the story happened
just as it is told here, and Jesus’ resistance to the temptations shows that he
uses God’s written word – which they liken to a sword – to combat the
devil. That he wins proves he’s
divine. Other, more middle-of-the-road scholars,
view it as an idealized story, a metaphor that shows that Jesus was
sinlessness, and that also shows Jesus’ god-hood.
But I
kind of think it’s about the opposite, that it’s about Jesus’ humanity. Tom Brown Jr. wrote a memoir about Stalking
Wolf, the Apache shaman who was his mentor, and who he calls
“Grandfather.” Grandfather taught him
that there are three demons: self-doubt, ego and distractions of the logical
mind. You can associate each one of
these with of Jesus’ wilderness temptations.
When the devil tempts him to turn stone into bread, it’s a temptation of
self-doubt – only here, it’s reversed.
Failure – succumbing to the temptation – would be to do it himself,
to feed himself, instead of relying on God in heaven, whom he calls
abba. It would be like taking over God’s
work, which is to care for God’s people.
Jesus, of course, doesn’t even consider it. When the devil tempts him with power over the
entire world, it’s a temptation of ego and pride, of considering himself above
everyone else, of greed for power and control to feed his own sense of
self. Again, Jesus chooses the opposite,
he chooses to worship only God, not himself.
Finally, when the devil tempts him to throw himself down, so that his
abba would send angels down to rescue him, he uses logic – scriptural logic,
like I used to put together this sermon – to offer Jesus an idea of what
God was like, a God bound by scripture to save his life. But of course, Jesus resists this final
temptation, telling him that we’re not to put our God to the test, we’re not to
require God to behave as we logically expect.2
As Tom
Brown’s shaman-mentor knew, these three temptations – doubt, ego and over
reliance on flawed, mortal logic – are all too . . . human. In fact, it’s a common practice in many
religions – including Native American ones, where it’s sometimes called a
vision quest – for shamans-prophets-wise-men or women to go into the wilderness
for “final exams,” to see if they’re ready to go, ready to begin work at their
vocation. Thus what Jesus does is very
human, something that’s common around the world, and very un-God-like at the
same time. Because really – what kind of
test would it be for Jesus if his God-hood assured he would pass it, if
there was no danger that he could fail?
It would be nothing more than a quaint story that tells us that Jesus
was inhumanly impervious to what ails us.
And what kind of example would that be?
Far from
being about his sinlessness, far from being about his divinity,
the story of the wilderness is about nothing less than the humanity of the
Christ. It touches that glorious,
mysterious conundrum all over again – how can he be human and yet divine? The mystery we affirm in a thousand ways, in
the pews and in the creeds and in the songs – fully human, he was, and yet
fully divine.
And the humanity of
it is what gives this story its great power to comfort us, to lift us up, and
to instruct us. For who hasn’t been
enticed as Jesus was? Who hasn’t been
lured by the ego, by the hunger to satisfy our appetite for self-fulfillment,
self-aggrandizement, self-glorification?
And who hasn’t been tortured by self-doubt, by an obsessive need to do
everything ourselves, to be responsible for everything, to take it all out of
God’s hands? I know I have, I know I’ve
succumbed to Grandfather’s demons and had friendships ruined by pride, had my
stomach tied in knots by worry and I know that I’ve gotten things
disastrously wrong by my own reckoning.
There’s a
story that’s become almost legendary in my family, about a vacation to Glacier
National Park, where I – puffed up with adolescent ego – was assigned the task
of navigator, or I assigned myself the position, I can’t remember
which. Anyway, I plotted out several
routes between Seattle and Montana, carefully calculated the distances of each,
and declared that it wouldn’t be all that much further if we went through
southern Canada, and we’d see some places we hadn’t seen before. Well, my parents took the bait, chose that
route, and because I’d been off in my calculations by five- or six-hundred miles,
and it took us a good day longer than it should have . . . which shows
that Grandfather’s demons often gang up on us, and pound away in tandem, or
even three-at-a-time. Ego drives us to
rely on our own wisdom, which makes us say “I can do it myself,
thank you very much . . . I don’t need you or God to do it for me,” and
then, more times than we’d like to admit – we fall flat on our faces.
But in our
story, Jesus chooses not to give in . . . he chooses, in fact,
God the father, whom he called Abba. He
chooses to rely on God, not himself. He
chooses to worship God, and not the devil, or just as bad, himself. He chooses not to define what God will or
will not do, not to put God into a box of his own logical making. Jesus shows there is a choice, there is
a better way. Paul tells us that the
wisdom of the world is foolishness to God . . . and Jesus chose God’s
foolishness over against the deadly wisdom of the world.
And about
now you’re saying “Righhhhht! All that
stuff about showing his humanity aside, this is Jesus, this is
the Savior of the universe we’re talking about . . . and to paraphrase what
Lloyd Benston said to Dan Quayle: ‘We know Jesus! Jesus is a friend of ours! And let me tell you something, we’re not
Jesus!’”
And that’s
surely true, we’re not Jesus. We have an
awful lot of Adam and Eve in us, and when confronted by temptation, we often
behave like it. But as Christians, we
also have Jesus in us – remember, he told his disciples “I am in you and
you are in me,” I in you, you in me . . . And so, as Bonhoeffer put it, “Either
we are tempted in Adam or we are tempted in Christ. Either the Adam in us is
tempted – in which case we fall. Or the Christ in us is tempted – in which case
Satan is bound to fall.”3
We have Christ in us, Christ who waits to take our temptations
upon himself, who showed us the way, who didn’t argue or use violence or any
other worldly means . . . he simply chose a new way. In the face of each temptation he chose the authentic
God, the God who would not be tested . . . the God who provides for God’s
creation . . . the God who does not coerce, who does not use violence to
control and dominate God’s subjects. He
did not choose the world’s God, not the false God of power and might that the devil
held up before him, but the true God he had come to know as his Abba.
Brothers and sisters, Christ is in us, he dwells
right here inside, and through Christ, through his loving example and power, we
are enabled to choose as he does . . . it’s not necessarily easy, we are
bathed in the world, seduced by it, brought up in it, and it’s not easy
to change the way we think. But Christ
is in us, by the grace of God, by Christ’s death for us not long from
now and – yes! – by his glorious resurrection shortly thereafter! And when temptation strikes, when that old
devil comes to us with all the world at our feet, we can let Christ be the one
who is tested, and he – and us – will choose the life-giving way. Amen.
1
Bonhoeffer, D., Creation and Fall/Temptation (New York:
Macmillian, 1978)
2
I am indebted to Michael Hardin and Jeff Krantz of preachingpeace.org
for the shaman example and analysis
3 Bonhoeffer, op cit.
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