"And Jesus, full of the Holy
Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the
wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil.
And he ate nothing during those
days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him,
"If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." And
Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread
alone.'"
And the devil took him up and
showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said
to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it
has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then,
will worship me, it will all be yours." And Jesus answered him, "It is
written, "'You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you
serve.'"
And he took him to Jerusalem and
set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, "If you are the
Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, "'He will
command his angels concerning you, to guard you,' and "'On their hands
they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'" And
Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'You shall not put the Lord your God
to the test.'"
And when the devil had ended
every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune
time.
It's Lent again -
that time when the merriment of the Christmas season and the January
holidays most definitely comes to a crashing holt as we enter that
traditional period of sombre self-assessment leading up to Easter.
I appreciate, of course, that you
can't go on partying forever but I did feel a bit short-changed this
year, having Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent) fall on my birthday.
Even so, as I say, you can't go on partying forever, and I accept
indeed that now is the time to step back a bit from the revelry, just
as it's time to step back a bit in our Gospel reading today, to revisit
Jesus' temptations.
If you've been following our
readings over recent weeks we have been pushing our way relentlessly
through the Gospel of Luke. We've gone from Jesus being born
to Him being circumcised, to His baptism, the launching of His
ministry, to amazing miracles and good news to the poor, but now we
take a step back to the beginning of Luke chapter 4 where Jesus is
being tempted.
And that makes sense, I think,
from the point of view of the church year, because it's Lent, and hence
an appropriate time to slow down a bit. It may be less
obvious though why Luke the Gospel writer (who I assume didn't frame
his narrative around the church year) chose to insert this story where
he did in his Gospel, for it comes as something of an anti-climax.
I was trying to think of a good
Lenten story to tell today to lighten the mood somewhat and the only
one that came to mind was that one given me some years ago by an
elderly gentleman in an RSL club. He told me how he'd found an old lamp
while cleaning up in his garage. He said he'd tried to give the lamp a
bit of a polish and, lo and behold, the most beautiful genie suddenly
appeared before him. The genie said, "I've come to give you super
sex!" He said, "I told her, 'I think I'd better
take the soup,'"
I thought that story had a Lenten
feel about it and that it was strangely relevant to our Gospel reading
this morning, as we've got so many dramatic events taking place in
these early chapters of the Gospel of Luke and yet somehow today … we
got the soup!
For look at the sequence of the
stories we get in the opening chapters of Luke:
Jesus is born
Jesus is presented in the temple
Jesus is baptised
Jesus prepares to launch His ministry
And then they're followed by … Jesus is tempted.
You'd be forgiven for thinking
that Luke might as well have included 'Jesus has breakfast' or 'Jesus visit's the men's room'.
For being tempted is something that happens to all of us, every day!
Why bother mentioning the experience of being tempted in the
middle of this dramatic sequence of events? Why bother mentioning
Jesus' temptations at all? Were Jesus' temptations really all
that different from anybody else's?
Now the knee-jerk reaction of
course is to say 'of
course they were. Jesus' temptations were entirely unique',
and I appreciate that the dramatic dialogues with the Devil may not be
familiar landscape to us, and yet I have heard plenty of people
describe their own struggles with temptation in similar terms, and I
myself am not above depicting my own internal battles in terms of them
being bouts with the Devil, for indeed, Jesus is not the only one who
has to battle the Devil.
The extreme context of these
confrontations may seem unique though . Jesus does battle
with the Devil after 40 days without food, and that is something
outside of the experience of most of us. If our old friend
Father Elias were still with us though he would be humbly smiling at
this point as he has completed a 40-day fast on two separate occasions
if I remember.
I don't remember him telling me
whether anything particularly extreme happened to him after 40
days. In Jesus' case of course He seems to have the mother of
all temptation experiences such that we might expect, having survived
these temptations he would never be tempted to do anything
inappropriate ever again, but that turns out not to be the way it works.
There's no suggestion in this
temptation story that this was the only time Jesus was tempted, as if a
whole life-time of temptations were squeezed in to this one tumultuous
event, after which He was entirely above all temptation.
No! Indeed, how much later is it that we find Jesus was
shouting at Peter, "Get
behind me, Satan!" as He experiences again one of the same
temptations He'd already dealt with in today's Gospel story.
These wilderness temptations are
by no means the end of Jesus' struggles, and indeed, our narrative in
Luke 4 concludes with these words: "when
the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an
opportune time." (Luke 4:13) In other words,
temptation was going to return to Jesus, just as it does for all of
us. So, again I ask, 'what
is it that makes Jesus' temptations so special?'
Well … it's not the content of
the temptations, for they are in fact almost archetypal forms of normal
human temptation!
It was the great Jesuit priest
and psychologist, John Powell, who first drew my attention to the fact
that the first two temptations of Jesus (as outlined here in Luke 4)
square rather neatly with the two most famous theories of human
motivation, as detailed by the world's greatest personality theorists.
Jesus' first temptation (to end His hunger by turning the stones into
bread) seems like a straightforward application of Sigmund Freud's 'pleasure principle'
- that all human behaviour is determined by the desire to increase
pleasure and decrease pain.
It's a pretty simple theory (even if Freud had to travel a rather
complex route to reach it) as it seeks to explain human behaviour
through reference to our basic bodily desires (for food, water, sex,
etc.) and in Jesus' first temptation His battle is both with the Devil
and with his own natural bodily needs - something we are all familiar
with.
Similarly, the second temptation
Jesus deals with - to have power over all the kingdoms of the world -
is remarkably reminiscent of Alfred Adler's theory that most human
behaviour is motivated by the individual's lust for power.
Those weren't Adler's words
exactly. He spoke more in terms of our all-consuming desire
to be 'somebodies'
rather than 'nobodies'
in this world. Either way, Jesus is again being tempted by something
that tempts us all.
The last temptation - to throw
yourself off a cliff - doesn't dovetail as neatly into these mainline
theories of human motivation though, frankly, it is the temptation that
I find the most personally unnerving.
I find I can't mention this last
temptation without seeing images of people I have loved who have
(sadly) given in to this exact temptation.
I appreciate that in Jesus' case
the temptation is framed in terms of His being able to expect angels to
lift Him up if He does jump off a cliff, so that He won't actually get
hurt but frankly I don't think that's all that different from what goes
through the mind of everyone who has struggled with the temptation to
jump.
It's always about taking the 'easy way out',
and that is exactly how it is put to Jesus too - 'Take the easy way down. God
will take care of you!'
At any rate, my point is that
with this and the previous two temptations, what we are dealing with is
not outside our normal realm of human experience at all. On
the contrary, Jesus is tempted just as we are tempted. Both in form and
in content Jesus is travelling the well-worn path that we all have
trodden.
There is nothing particularly
unique about the kinds of things Jesus is tempted with nor the context
in which these temptations take place. So what is it then
that makes these temptation narratives so unique and so worthy of
mention in Luke's Gospel?
I'm guessing that most of you
have already answered this question in your minds - namely, that what
is unique in Jesus' wilderness temptations is that He actually overcomes
temptation whereas we regularly do not. Jesus overcomes temptation,
beats the Devil at his game, and shows us that sin and human weakness
do not have the final say in the way the world is going. But
... I'm not sure that's really the answer either?
Well … it has to be a part of the
answer, I suppose. Certainly the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews
rejoiced in the fact that "we
do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our
weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are,
yet without sin." (Hebrews 4:15)
Even so, I wonder if it's ever
really that easy to make a clear distinction between temptation and sin.
There's one particularly lovely
boy in our Youth Centre who told me that he gave up his job as a
security guard at a local fashion outlet because he found he couldn't
stop starting at the patrons. He told me that he'd been
brought up to believe that 'if
you look once, that's okay but if you look twice …'
Now the obvious response to that
is to say, "well
bother, you were tempted but you didn't do anything about it.
Congratulations!" But from this guy's point of
view the being tempted was itself a sin of sorts, and who am I to try
to correct him on that when Jesus Himself did say that those who commit
adultery in their hearts (ie. are tempted even if they don't do
anything about it) are just as wicked as those who give in to
temptation!
Now I'm not suggesting that there
aren't some useful distinctions to make between sin and temptation and
self-control and human weakness but I'm convinced that it is all rather
complex, just as I'm convinced that Jesus' superiority over human
weakness is not the only reason (or even the chief reason) that these
wilderness temptations are given such priority of place in the New
Testament.
Indeed, I believe the reason that
the Gospel writers were so keen to portray Jesus as being tempted in
their narratives was not because there was anything particularly unique
or special about the Jesus temptations, about their context or even
Jesus' response to them, but rather what made this experience so
special was that it was in fact so ordinary.
We are tempted. Jesus was
tempted. Jesus was tempted by the same things and in the same way that
we get tempted. We struggle with these things all the
time. Jesus struggled too. And yet the Good News
that emanates from this wilderness story is that Jesus was not destroyed
by His struggles, which means there's hope for all of
us! For the struggle we see Jesus have in the
wilderness is the same struggle we all share in.
The concept of wandering through
the wilderness predates Jesus of course. The Israelites
wandered through the wilderness for 40 years, and there is no doubt
that Luke the Gospel writer is echoing back to that ancient wilderness
wandering in the way he describes Jesus' experience.
Our spiritual forefathers
struggled out there in the wilderness, and their struggles led them
around in circles to the point where (what should have been) a 40-day
trip became a 40-year nightmare, yet Jesus shows us that there is a way
out of the desert.
The struggle is the same, His
temptations are the same ones that are familiar to us all and yet … we
do not need to be destroyed by them. There is a way out of the desert.
Jesus has walked this way ahead of us and is keen to lead us home. Amen.
First preached at Holy Trinity
Dulwich Hill, February 2010
