1 Lent
Bethany Lutheran, Crystal Lake, IL
March 9, 2014
Pr. Cordell Strug, Preacher
Since
I’m retired, I lead a life that’s entirely peaceful and unadventurous. My pulse rate goes up when the UPS truck goes
down the street; if it stops with a package, I have to lie down and catch my
What
I’m getting at is: I personally never
had to fight off a zombie attack. Or
dally dangerously with a glamorous vampire.
I bet you never did either.
Yet
the fabulous and the dangerous grip our spirits out of all proportion to the
likelihood of their gripping our lives.
Stories of adventure and wonder, real and imagined, flicker across our
tv and movie screens as their
ancestors crackled around the campfires of our
ancestors—ever since people learned to say ‘once upon a time’ or ‘you will
never believe what just happened to me’.
Given
the sheer routine of most lives, and the way almost anything can become
routine, we might put this appetite for the marvelous down to nothing but a
desire for a little escape and excitement, something rich and strange to flavor
the ordinary.
But
who says we live only in our bodies? The
human record might suggest the opposite.
Besides, the merely strange
will bore us very quickly: a vampire
would only be a rodent, without the young couple we want to see escape the bite
of death; a gunfight would only be acute population decline, somebody else’s
problem, unless there were someone in it we wanted to see get home; even
Wonderland is just some other place, until Alice—that human girl—falls into it
and finds it weird and frightening.
We
want to see one of us tested against the fabulous, against
the dangerous. Our spirits are gripped
because we have a stake in the fight.
All our beloved tales, both
real and imagined, really do tell us something about us, about our
vulnerability and our power, our fears, our desperation, our hopes; something
about courage and fortitude and dedication; about defeats that look like
victories and victories that look like defeats.
Telling a story is the oldest way of thinking seriously about life and
death, what tortures life, what brings death, what makes the passage worth it
and what ruins it all.
We
follow Jesus today into one of those strange arenas of testing, a landscape of
earthly devastation and supernatural clarity, as distant from the ordinary
scenes of his life as from ours. Jesus—for one of the rare times—is the most
ordinary thing in the story, as well as the only human in sight, just as Adam
and Eve are the only ordinary things in their magic garden. We have left the superficially ordinary; but
we’ve gone back to basics.
‘Jesus
was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.’ He’ll be tempted by things we would never be
offered, because we’re not powerful enough, faithful enough or important enough
to bother with. Yet Jesus is one of us,
and he is there as one of us. He’s not there as Superman: he’s being tested on the basics of our life: how humanity stands before God, the deep conflicts
of our needs and desires.
And
look how harmlessly it all begins.
That’s what makes this story such a pure picture of the basics of
life: nothing ever looks bad when you
want it badly, or when you can convince yourself you really need it. That first temptation—turning stones to
bread, which seems to boil down to eating—seems
so unquestionably necessary, so neutrally basic and fundamental, it almost
can’t count as a temptation. The devil
seems…supportive, almost caring: ‘Man, listen to me: you are dying here. Who are you?
Joe Schmo? Wake up! You’re the Son of God! Make a little bread! Explain to me, please, what harm this could
possibly do. You can’t be moral if you’re dead.’
But
we’re probing what makes our passage through life worth it. What we
need is being turned from an apparently obvious fact into a
troubling question. The claim of
fundamental need can hide the
question of fundamental choice. All the
monsters of history—the conquerors, the ethnic cleansers, the mass murderers,
the assassins and the torturers, whom we joined so easily, so easily—all have claimed helpless necessity to hide the reality that
a choice was being made, a choice that led into the darkness. All the thugs have found their first and
easiest excuse in necessity.
Now,
we could say the temptation here is to doubt the power of God to provide. That is, we could try to trump the devil by
an appeal to faith. But Jesus’ answer
goes deeper: he challenges the
obviousness of what it is we think we need:
‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the
mouth of the Lord.’ That’s basic, that’s
fundamental.
There
was a modern psychologist—whose name I’ve blessedly forgotten—who said human
needs formed a kind of pyramid: basic
needs at the bottom and the less essential as we go up. He took the scale as obvious, and his point
was we satisfy ourselves from the bottom up:
self-preservation, food, clothing, shelter; after that, you get a more
comfy chair, a new coat, maybe a pickup truck; with a little more, you go for
an i-pad, maybe a hot tub; and pretty high up on the pyramid, you could run
into a religious need you might
satisfy—unless you’d rather have a yacht.
I
heard this pyramid of needs expounded with
admiration, for its alleged wisdom, at a church meeting, by a conflict
manager who worked for one of the synods, and I came away wondering whether the
speaker was an emissary from hell sent to convince us the church was a useless
luxury or just one more modern half-wit too enamored of psychological gurus.
What’s
wrong with that pyramid is that it describes almost no society known to
history—except perhaps our own, bloated with physical satisfactions, choking on
junk we don’t have enough landfills to keep up with. That bottom of the pyramid can become
endless; this country is producing billionaires who don’t even notice the lives of other people except
as sources of more wealth. If that’s how
our pyramid starts, it never has to
go up.
But
you listen to Jesus: that’s not where we start! There are people of faith, communities of
faith, that lived and died with nothing compared to what’s stored in my
garage. Even apart from faith, people
have scorned self-preservation,
they’ve scorned to preserve themselves for the sake of something more precious
to them. Watch high-school kids when
they get off the bus: why do they have thin
clothing and no head covering in the middle of winter? Because they’re slaves of glamour: they value beauty more than health.
More
seriously, people sacrifice their lives—they sacrifice their livelihoods and
their futures—for the sake of other people they love. Police officers and fire fighters risk their
lives, out of civic and moral ideals, for
people they don’t even know.
(Picture
something helpless: a roomful of newborn
babies, two hours old. The pyramid would
say: their basic, immediate needs are
food, shelter, warmth. Wrong! Their basic need is someone who loves them
enough, or cares about them enough, or is
being paid by someone who cares about them enough, to give them those things
because they’ll never get them on their own.
The bond of caring is a more fundamental need—if that’s not
satisfied, they’re not lasting the week.)
That
psychologist described no life worth
living. That pyramid of needs hides all life’s fundamental values and
choices. Those don’t just appear in
the spare time bought by luxury: they’re always there, from the bottom up.
Now,
it would be pretty surprising if a bunch of Christians sitting in a church
service and looking forward to a tasty lunch couldn’t at least follow Jesus
that far with a nod of approval.
‘Yeah! You tell him!’
Here’s
where things get interesting. Here’s
where the story of the temptations becomes profound, and shakes the comfort of
the faithful. The devil throws faith
right back at Jesus:
‘There’s
my man! I KNEW you wouldn’t bite on
those stones! You got the power, the
faith, you live by the word. You know what? I’m so pumped I’d like to see some more of
that Big Faith—let’s say you and me climb to the top of the temple and you jump
off and I’ll watch the angels catch you….
I mean, you do believe the angels will catch you, right? You must know psalm 91—wait: let me
quote it for you…’
And
he does. And he does not distort
it: this is an honest quote—and if it
doesn’t mean what the devil says it does, I don’t know what it means.
Now
take this to heart: the devil sounds
more pious, more faithful, than
Jesus. What a provocative, challenging
lesson this is! Pure evil is just as
comfortable inside belief as outside it.
Don’t ever forget that. It’s the
devil that urges the miracle, the wonder; it’s the devil that urges the
defiance of the earth, the expectation of heavenly aid; it’s the devil that
proclaims the arrogant certainty of what God will do.
And
that clever devil always makes me think of the loud-mouthed Christian heroes
that haunt our media, the angry preachers and politicians so quick to tell us
how Christian they are, how DISGUSTING the rest of us are; or those
sex-obsessed men in black, the hilariously self-appointed guardians of healthy
sexuality, so ruthless in denouncing others, so generous in protecting
themselves. They and their audiences
might profitably ponder this passage and how easily the words of faith rise to
the lips of…even the devil.
could
think that Satan was the real believer and Jesus the doubting soul. It’s striking that Jesus, who was capable of wonders, does nothing
wonderful at all throughout the entire episode.
He never even mentions
wonders. He never mentions his own
unique mission and power. He never says
or does anything more than what one of us
could and should say and do.
It’s
the devil who’s intoxicated by Jesus’ status—he says twice ‘If you are the Son of God…’
What Jesus displays is his true humanity. Everything he says is a scriptural quotation,
somebody else’s words, each of them intended to guide all of God’s people, and Jesus identifies himself with us in every one of them. He doesn’t act out or argue from his
divinity: he displays human faith: we don’t live by bread alone, but by the word
of God; we don’t tempt God; we worship God alone. It’s the voice of perfect—but still
human—obedience.
By
the time we get to the third temptation, the game’s over: Jesus’ refusal seems like a foregone
conclusion. The devil sounds almost sad, begging like a doomed, rejected,
demonic lover: ‘Oh, I’d give you the
whole world if you’d only worship me!’
Refusing
that seems almost ho-hum…until we look in
the mirror and realize: a lot of us
sell our souls every day for a lot less:
for peanuts: for a shred of that
earthly power, for profit, for promotion, for pleasure, for payback, for…all
kinds of puny purposes. We almost give
our souls away and we don’t get anything close to the world in return.
It’s
good to remind ourselves that Jesus turns it all down—he turns literally everything down, all the garbage we
spend our lives chasing, all the garbage we’d give anything to have a fraction
of.
And
he does it, not with super powers, but with simple faith, as one of us.
We
hear in the story of Jesus our story, the true life before God, human life
restored for us, hidden within all creation’s allurements, but always calling
us as obedient creatures to the one who created us, who sent his Son to live
and die for us, to be one of us…and
show us how it’s done.
Amen
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