Readings: Matthew 4:1-11
Let us pray:
May the words of my mouth and the
meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our
redeemer. Amen.
The temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. Not the easiest start or the most comfortable
fit for the first Sunday of Lent as we look for a gentle introduction into our
journey toward Easter. Placed as it is
in Matthew’s Gospel directly between Jesus baptism and the beginning of his
journey to the cross, the passage clearly is of import for us, but how?
Is this reading primarily about struggle –
God’s Son and the Devil battling it out on the desert plains. Confrontation, battle, fighting for control,
dark moments like this painting by Rosetta Jallow.[1]
Or is it about the act itself -
‘temptation’. Warning us to beware, bulking us up for the strength to
resist. Probably most of us will, I
imagine, know the hymn by Horatio Palmer written in the 1860’s
Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin;
Each vict’ry will help you some other to win;
Fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue;
Look ever to Jesus, He’ll carry you through.
Each vict’ry will help you some other to win;
Fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue;
Look ever to Jesus, He’ll carry you through.
Yet while I was studying this passage, I
came to a different (for me anyway) understanding that kind of distracted me from
this ‘struggle for supremacy’ and ‘evil of temptations’ interpretation and
guided me into a rather simple message that spoke clearly to me. And that is that the thing that most leads us
away from God is the misuse of power. This
is suggested by the way that Matthew has presented this story to us.
When you look afresh at it, this is a
narrative almost totally devoid of practical advice, spiritual encouragement or
moral exhortation. It is what we call
today an action sequence. Very little
personification, deliberations or value judgements at all are given to us to
ponder. This is what happened – end of
story.
When we look at the brief mention of the
wilderness experience in Mark’s Gospel: we have a sense of both the earth and
heaven strengthening Jesus for unknown temptations. He was not alone, held in the care of
creation and creator. Even in Luke’s
story, similar to Matthew in much of the detail, there are more obvious and
ongoing battle lines drawn – the devil waited till Jesus was hungry from
fasting before approaching, and quite clearly hadn’t finished with Jesus – the
last line is ‘when the devil had finished every test, he departed from him
until an opportune time.’[2]
Much more relational and manipulative than Matthews version.
Matthew, by
using such an unadorned way of writing and refusing to provide, as one
commentator put it, anything remotely useful to reader or preacher, is I think seeking
to turn our attention away
from the struggle (for it can be argued that there is the sense that the
outcome is never in doubt, Jesus shows not a chink of vulnerability) and away
from the teaching inherent in Jesus responses (for it seems to be more about Jesus
and his strength of character and obedience as God’s beloved than any
user-friendly guide to how to deal with temptation) and toward other truths.
Actually I loved the image that Gregor used
for the front of the service sheet today – and I went searching for some more
of the images by Stanley Spencer – they all seem to interpret Jesus time in the
wilderness in the same way as Matthew - as not much about whether Jesus can
survive the temptations but rather to show that he is grounded and unassailable
in the power of his relationship with God.
The one that particularly connected for me is this one – where Jesus is contemplating
the hen with her chicks and experiencing the 40 days of wilderness living. This suggests that Jesus was not the woebegone,
on the edge, vulnerable figure locked in a battle with the devil but someone
really fully aware and safe as the beloved child of God in the power and protection
of the oneness of creation.
So if Matthew is not writing to teach how
to deal with temptation or to tell of struggle between Jesus and the Devil,
what does that leave us with? I would
say it leaves us with the questions - that
the Devil asks.
This was the Devils big day – planned for
and anticipated with some hope of effective sabotage. And so what, after great consideration, is
put before Jesus as the best shot – the temptation of power. Miraculous power , spectacular power,
termporal power and this last the most powerful of all..
This was felt to be the surest way to lead
us astray – the offering of power
Jesus saw it for what it was – the quickest
way to distract us from God, the best thing to destroy love, the most effective
way to replace God in our lives.
How might that look today? Well you could liken the changing of the
stone into bread as an attempt to set aside the laws of nature and experience
of this world, one that God created and was pleased with, and to introduce a
new order - as one commentator put it – a redemption theology that leaps straight
to the kingdom without the cross, seeking to bypass the world as it is and look
only to a miraculous new world. And this gives us permission to ignore what is
happening around us, to abuse the planet and dismiss the suffering and refute
the world we live in with all its tensions and paradoxes and vey human ups and
downs – it takes us right away from the way of compassion and love that Christ
calls us to here and now.
Then the second temptation – the power of the spectacular – jump and let us
experience the thrill as the angels catch you at the last moment. Show us something amazing and we will aspire
to it. If it’s not exhibited with all
the fanfare – we won’t call it good. Our
current obsession with celebrity status surely underlies this message. The church when it denies its humanity, its
fallibility, which seeks to promote a Jesus
whose role is to make all things right for us – again takes us out of the real
world and into a place of aspiration for that which is not – there we go, off
the track again.
And then the power of political control –
blatant, no persuasion used here – just plain total control of the world. Domination – my way or no way!
This is the scariest of the scenarios – the
right to say how it’s going to be. We
see this where a religion seeks to control access to God, when we hold up a
Christ that exercises not the power of love but the power of retribution and
exclusion. Hey how is this for a story
of power that the devil would be absolutely delighting in. The person who
posted this on FaceBook suggested that it makes you want to give up Christianity
for Lent.
There
is a pastor in a Christian church in ?
US who is offering as a raffle prize at an upcoming service ( and if you
haven’t choked on that alone) he is offering a AR-15 assault rifle – oh and
just in case that isn’t enough the bible verse he is quoting in his posters is
John 14:27 ‘my peace I give unto you.’ This same weapon was used to slaughter 26
school children and staff in 2012. The
power of having certainty of right for others is perhaps the most invidious and
invasive of all.
We talk about and believe in the power of our
creator God, the gospel of divine love made known in the life death and
resurrection of Christ, (and here’s a statement that you can challenge me on) but
never in the history of the church has anyone succeeded in exercising the power
that puts self first without diminishing in the only power in the world that
Christ calls us to exercise: the power
of reconciling love, especially for the weak and the suffering and the
vulnerable, for us.
Margaret Garland
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