The forty days of Lent bring to mind the forty days of Jesus’ struggles and testing in the wilderness and are related to Moses’ forty days without food on the mountain, Elijah’s forty days in flight to the mountain of God, and the forty years of Israel’s struggle and wandering in the wilderness. Filled with the Holy Spirit at his baptism, this same Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness and allowed for temptation to become real in Jesus’ life. Afterward, Jesus went into Galilee to minister in the power of the Spirit. In other words, throughout the whole desert experience, Jesus was never alone.
In this passage, Jesus' baptism has just taken place. In that baptism, he is affirmed as the Son of God. And at the end of his 40 days, Jesus is being tempted to be someone he is not. In our lives, how often do we allow that to happen to us? Temptation is more than just not doing something we would like to do but shouldn’t. Temptation is that which pulls us away from who we are... children of God.... those who are baptized… those who believe and trust in God.
Many of us face the same temptations that Jesus faced. First, the need to take care of our own needs immediately. For Jesus, the devil encouraged him to take care of his physical hunger by making bread from the stones readily available around him. We could all sympathize with the desire to have this deep hunger filled. But Jesus did not give in to temptation. Instead, he quoted from the book of Deuteronomy, saying in essence, that bread is not all there is to life.
Another common temptation for us is the need to use power over others. Like Jesus’ second temptation to throw himself from the top of the Temple, we often take unnecessary risks to prove something about ourselves to others. We want them to think highly of us, to understand our importance. How many times have you heard someone ask, “Do you know who I am?” when their demands are not being met? A mythic story among airline personnel is about a man to rushed through a group of people trying to get rebooked for a canceled flight, insisting that he be waited on first, then asking, “Do you know who I am?” when he was asked to go to the back of the line. Bravo to the gate agent who picked up the microphone and made this announcement, “We have a man here at gate 14 who doesn’t know who he is. If you know and can help him out, that would be great… we’re a little busy with everyone else.”
Jesus’ third temptation correlates to our willingness to sell our souls for power and wealth. Most of us think we don’t know a lot about either of those things and so we can be lured into making power and wealth our goals, instead of loving God and neighbor. To be given all the money and wealth that Satan promised, Jesus would have had to give up the most valuable possession he had – his relationship to God. Again, he warned that putting God to the test is a dangerous thing. And the Devil went on his way.
I’ll be honest, I’m often at a loss what to do with the few passages that mention the Devil or Satan. You and I both know that evil is very real in our world. But often we make light of temptation by dressing up the source of it in horns and cloven feet, the Devil of Halloween and Dante’s Inferno, not the Evil that comes disguised in our lives every day.
Under the influence of this Satan, we are tempted to do only that which is within our capabilities, but never to push onto something new. Through this evil, we are tempted to do only that which is desirable, and never that which is hard. I look at my life and the status of the world around us, and I am overwhelmed by all I see. But that’s what I get for being locked into the world's perspective. I must be constantly reminded that the power of God's Word defeats evil if we are willing to let the Spirit work in us.
Temptation has many faces. Jesus refused to turn stone into bread, then later fed 5,000 on the hillside. Jesus refused glory and power, but Paul tells us that one day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord of all. And Jesus refused to let the angels catch him in mid-air if he would throw himself from a high place, and then he ascended to heaven after the resurrection. Before it was done, Jesus accomplished all of the opportunities that the Devil gave him for greatness, he just did them in God’s timing and place. And it made me realize that sometimes temptation is to do good things for the wrong reasons, which doesn’t feel as bad but can be just as dangerous.
During Lent, we are challenged to rethink how we define temptation. Instead of seeing temptation as the desire for things we want, the question is more complex. Temptation is not a question of want versus need. It requires us to ask ourselves, “Will this compromise who we are as children of God?” In our first confirmation class, we did a deep dive on the Lord’s Prayer as we read through the Sermon on the Mount. One of the lines that gave us the most trouble was, “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil,” taken from the King James translation of the Bible, and also in the NIV. The question the kids raised is one of the questions for today. Where is God when things are not going so well? When we are sick? When trouble comes?
To gain some insight, we
looked at a couple of different translations – the NRSV, which we read today says,
“">Do not bring us to the time of
trial…”
Common
English Version – the Good News translation from my teenage years says, “Keep
us from being tempted.”
The Living Bible paraphrase gives us, “Don’t let us yield to temptation,” which I think gets closer to something helpful. But then again, we all know, temptation is often around every corner – the best advice on some days is “don’t go to the grocery store hungry.”
It was Eugene Peterson's The Message paraphrase that was the most helpful: “Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.” As it holds in my life, it’s probably true for you – our biggest temptations don’t come from God or outside influences… they come when we forget who we are created to be and how much God loves us. We are often our own worst enemy. So, what do we do about that? How do we get back on or keep focused on the journey to which we have been called?
I think that’s why the season of Lent continues to mean so much to us. If Jesus used prayer, fasting, and scripture to guide him through the "wildernesses of temptation", then as his followers we shouldn't be too quick to jettison the disciplines of Lent. Prayer, fasting, reflection on the scriptures, and Christian conversation… these disciplines will help us to know that when we are in our own wildernesses, we will never be alone.
Every day, we see what happens when the power of the world co-ops the authority of the Bible for its own use. False Messiahs are not the only ones who use prophetic bible verses to lure people to their false vision of God. Political leaders do the same, and one of our responsibilities as people of faith is to know enough about the bible and authentic faith in God and Jesus to say, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s right,” when a minister or a candidate or a political leader attempts to speak or act in hateful ways, cloaking it in religious lingo.[i]
This has been the struggle of the church from the very beginning… speaking truth to power. The Revelation of John was written to first-century Christians undergoing extreme persecution because they would not bow down to the Roman Emperor. Almost every cataclysmic event in religious and political history has some element of this misuse of scripture… The Crusades of the Middle Ages, the Witch trials and Inquisition of the 15th & 16th centuries, all the way through the US Civil War, both World Wars, and political and church skirmishes too numerous to mention.
I can’t think of a year when we needed the season of Lent more, to get back to the basics of faith, and to reorient God at our center, rather than claiming that place for ourselves. We have at our fingertips the means to keep our lives intact. The Scriptures, our fellowship and traditions as communities of believers, our friendships with one another, our willingness to let our old assumptions be challenged and new ideas take root.
When we read the story of Jesus’ encounter with the one who tempted Him in the wilderness, we see that there is a power greater than the selfishness of turning stones to bread, giving into to world-affirming power, and the violence that often puts our own lives in danger. That does not come from inside ourselves, but is evidence that the Holy Spirit continues to work in our lives, if we are willing.
And it is just a prelude to the joy we will experience at the end of the season when we will be reminded of how Jesus overcame the power of death to give all of us eternal life.
Thanks be to God!
Peace, Deb
(c) Deb Luther Teagan, March 2022
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