Temptation

Matthew 4:1-11

Lent 1

So Lent begins on a chipper, upbeat note: life is full of demonic possibilities!  We begin the season with a reminder that life will be difficult because of Satanic temptations!

How do you imagine the devil?  Our gospel text records that after his baptism Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the “devil” (the word actually means “accuser”).  This evil figure is also referred to as “Satan” or the “tempter.”  In the Genesis story of Adam and Eve we read today, the tempter is visualized as the walking, talking snake in the Garden of Eden.  But Matthew’s story of Jesus’ confrontation with the devil avoids any visual cues.  So what do you imagine?  A personified demon?  Red, tail, pitchfork, goatee, apparently flame resistant?  

Gothic art imagined a demon with horns, a scaly body, wings, and claws for hands and feet.  (This emphasizes the grotesque, repulsive, deformed character of evil).  Renaissance art pictured the devil as an old man in a monk’s habit, betraying himself by a cloven hoof or claw visible under his garments.  (This emphasizes the cunning subtlety of evil -- it often appears as a wolf in sheep’s clothing).  What about the image in your bulletins -- what do you think of Otto Dix’s Satan figure?  Dix imagines a forbidding monstrosity that lurks near us.  

Lent begins with the gospel reminder that, like Jesus, we live and work in the shadow of powerful forces set against us.  Otto Dix makes the point visually - Jesus lived and worked with Satanic powers always nearby.  Still dripping wet from his dunking in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, Jesus is whisked by the Spirit into the wilderness for a time of testing.

There wasn’t any roadmap for the way Jesus should live out his life before God.  He had to make hard choices about how to respond to God.  Should he focus on right sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple?  Should he form a small community that withdraws from society to live in caves?  Should he lead another armed rebellion against Rome?  Each of these styles of Jewish leadership were attractive to Jesus.  All were popular options in Jesus’ day.  But by relying on God’s Spirit, he decided on a different course.  He chose a life of eating with prostitutes, touching lepers, and healing the disabled on the Sabbath.  He taught that loving God and our needy neighbors is way more important than anything else.  He chose a path that would bring him great suffering.

For Jesus, Satanic temptation involved the appeal of a life focused on self-preservation.  Late in his ministry, Jesus began explaining to his disciples that he was to go to Jerusalem and be killed.  “And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord!  This must never happen to you.’  But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan!  You are a stumbling block to me’.”  These passages from Matthew make it clear that we are not in a world with a cartoonish Satan.  We are up against the difficulty of living life God’s way in the face of attractive alternatives.  And even on the Thursday before he died, Jesus is still praying to the Father, let the cup of suffering pass from me.  Jesus’ life shows us that temptation does not come to us just once.  Instead, our lives will be a continual time of testing.

The story of Jesus’ temptation helps us jettison a couple of myths about the ways we’re tempted.  Temptation doesn’t always involve a clear choice between good and evil paths.  Often the tempting path appears to us as the good path.  We don’t recognize it as “temptation” at all.  Part of the attractiveness of sinful ways of living is that they look like healthy ways forward.  Moreover, the focus on temptations to individual “acts” or “sins” can trivialize both the attraction of sin and the damage it can do.  Jesus’ temptations were life-shaping temptations.  Like him, we are attracted to shaping our lives in patterns and rhythms of unfaithfulness.  Eating too big of a brownie is not what’s in view here.  Subtly and quietly shaping your life to avoid living in the love of God and neighbor is the really dark and terrifying possibility.

Reflections on the gospel story:

Jesus cannot begin his public ministry before he comes to grips with his own attraction to sin.  First he must wrestle with the demonic temptations that are real possibilities for him.  Just like in the Garden of Eden story, the devil appears out of nowhere, with no explanation whatsoever.  There’s no back story, no account of who he or it is, no footnote explaining the strangeness.

But the most striking feature of this story is Matthew’s way of telling it.  Jesus enters this time of testing not as an isolated individual but as one who carries the stories of many others in his own life.  This scene recreates the Genesis story of Adam and Eve who were lured into unfaithfulness by the tempter.  Jesus’ 40 days of fasting call to mind other stories: the devastation of Noah’s flood, where the rains came for 40 days and nights and destroyed the whole earth because of its wickedness; the story of Moses who fasted 40 days and nights before ascending the Mountain to receive the Law; and most importantly the story of God’s people Israel, who were tested during their 40 years of wilderness wandering.  

The three temptations Jesus faces will seem odd or arbitrary to you unless you realize that these temptations echo those Israel faced in its 40 year wandering.  Jesus quotes the Bible three times, each time from Deuteronomy, from the story of Israel’s wandering.  And then when the testing is over, we’re told that “angels came and fed him,” just like the angels fed the prophet Elijah during a difficult period of Israel’s unfaithfulness (I Kings 19).

So what we have here is a communal story.  Jesus carries in his own body and life the stories of many, many others.  He is not a solitary Jewish man struggling with temptation.  He is the one who steps into the ring to fight on behalf of all of us others.  He will win or loose not for himself, but for all of us.  This scene involves our very lives and futures.  This famished, tired, weak human being is our hope, as he stands vulnerable before a deadly enemy.

God has created a world God loves and wants to bless, and the question hangs in the air: Will God find any faithful partners?  Will God find any who respond in love?  Could this be the man renders to God the fidelity of partnership that is the only appropriate response to God’s love?

Consider the three temptations.

1. Physical Pleasure -- The devil tempts him to turn stones into bread.  Jesus is hungry.  And the first temptation involves the physical desires of his body.  He is tempted to grab what his stomach wants.  He’s tempted to feed himself.  He’s tempted to live and lead others as if the hunger in our stomach for food is the only hunger that matters.  In this physical and bodily attraction to food he carries the stories of all who live for food, who crave bodily pleasures above all else, the pleasing taste of another drink, the pleasing rush of chemicals drugs afford, the pleasure of sexual expression any time the desire appears.

2. Recognition and Status -- The devil tempts him to throw himself down from the Temple.  Jesus waited for 30 years to begin his public ministry.  He had a short time to be effective and make a real difference.  Surely he was tempted to go directly to Jerusalem and perform attention-grabbing signs of his power.  Jerusalem was the political and religious city that anchored Jewish life.  Why not go there and impress the people who had the most influence?  Why travel the backwards villages of Galilee, teaching illiterate crowds who would misunderstand anyway?  In this deep desire to be recognized, Jesus carries the stories of all of us who spend our energies in the quest for honor, recognition, status, and visible success.

3.  Power and Influence --  The devil tempts him with immediate, universal kingship.  He is offered control over all the world’s kingdoms if he will worship Satan.  Here Jesus is tempted to skip the hard work, skip the rejection and ridicule, skip humiliation and torture and suffering.  He’s tempted to gain influence the quick way, to exert his influence on a global scale, to rule both near and far just like the Roman Empire.  He was tempted to think of himself first, to reap for himself the rewards of vast influence.  He’s tempted to rule over others in ways that accrue to his benefit.  He wanted to avoid a life of barely getting by day after day just like we do.  He didn’t want to have to trust God every morning for his basic needs.  In this attraction to a powerful, materially rich life, Jesus carries the stories of all of us who desire power and privilege and fear the costly way of humility and suffering.

So Jesus has been tempted like we are - by the physical pleasures of food and sex and satisfaction, by recognition and status with people who matter, and by the power expressed in influence and wealth.  Not only has he been tempted in these ways, he has felt these temptations far deeper than we have.  We’re constantly bending to them and giving ourselves to them.  We’re God’s failed partners.  We’re the ones who are loved by God and fail to respond with a life of faithfulness to what God wants for us.  Jesus responds to his heavenly Father with complete fidelity, a fidelity that resists the tempter all the way to his death.

How might these reflections on temptation help us take advantage of the Lent season?

On this first Sunday in Lent, we go with Jesus into the wilderness for a time of testing.  Some of us need this story because we tend to trivialize the grip that evil has upon our hearts and lives.  Some of us need this story because we are overwhelmed by testing and find ourselves despairing over the ways our attraction to sin has imprisoned us and harmed others. 

So bad news first: you will live for the rest of your life fighting with powerful attractions to leave the path on which Jesus leads you.  There is a monstrous power that lurks near you, a power that somehow knows when you are weak.  And at just that time, you will be attracted to choose pleasure, recognition, and power over Jesus’ way of life. The Bible has a name for this: We are sinners.  The point of talking this way is profoundly important: it’s not just that we occasionally do sinful things.  That’s not a dark enough picture.  It’s that we are in the grip of powerful forces that are distorting our lives.  We’re caught in a downward spiral of addictions that we don’t have the power to get out of.  

But here’s some good news.  Your struggle with temptation, your fight against the attractiveness of sin, isn’t the whole story.  It’s only a small part of a larger story in which you share in Jesus’ own life.  And his life is a life of fidelity to God in the face of temptation, a life of victory over the power of sin.  By yourself, you are one whose life has been bent and damaged because of your attraction to forces that resist God’s love.  But you are not by yourself.  By faith you share in Jesus’ life of fidelity to God and resistance to sin.  By faith you belong to a community made up of Jesus’ own people.  And this is a community that continually practices the confession of sin, a community made glad because God’s forgiveness comes new with every morning.  It is even, and I say this carefully, a community given a Spirit more powerful and attractive than the darkness nearby.

Jesus leaves us with a prayer that we are to pray, not once, but for the rest of our lives: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.