First Sunday in Lent,
March 6 2022
Penelope Bridges
Immediately after his baptism and commissioning by God, Jesus goes on an extended retreat in the wilderness. If your experience of the wilderness is the Southern California desert, I want you to know that the Judean desert is different. I have driven through that desert, and it is utterly barren: just sand and rock. No chaparral, no saguaro, no drought-tolerant shrubs. It is a place that is far beyond the control of human beings, a wild place, a place of death. And Jesus, prompted by the Holy Spirit, chooses to spend 40 days there. Now that he has been called and sent, he needs to contemplate the nature of this call. Who will he be for God’s people?
In his weakened state, hungry, thirsty, far from family and friends, perhaps still on a spiritual high from his baptism, Jesus experiences these profound temptations. The devil is good at this game: “If you are the Son of God” … this phrase echoes the “If you love me” manipulation practiced by domestic abusers: prove yourself by doing this thing that I want. Can you imagine being really, really hungry and having the ability to turn stones into bread? Of course we ordinary mortals can’t do that, but Jesus, as the incarnate presence of God, does have that option, so it is a real temptation for him, and it hits home as he considers his call.
How will he feed God’s people in his ministry? Will he provide free groceries, bribing the people as the Romans do to keep them docile? Or will he feed them with the word of God, a word that will make them even hungrier: hungry for justice, hungry for community, hungry for a true and lasting peace? He chooses the latter path and responds with that very Word of God, quoting Deuteronomy chapter 8 where it is written, “One does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
So the first temptation, to tame the people by keeping their bellies full, is defeated, and we are reminded of the life-giving power of God’s liberating word, even in the face of hardship and want.
Next is the temptation to instant and corrupt power: the devil offers Jesus the whole world – begging the question, how come it’s the devil’s to offer? Remember, this is the father of lies speaking, and just because he says the world has been given over to him doesn’t mean that that is the case. If Jesus falls for the trick, if he swallows the lie that all is already lost, if he abandons his God and instead worships Satan, then all will indeed be lost, and the power and glory Jesus wields will be the power of violence and death, evil wrapped up in an illusion of glory, a kingdom won without struggle or sacrifice and therefore worthless. And so he responds once again with the word of God, from Deuteronomy 6: “The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name alone you will swear.”
The temptation to despair, to give up the struggle because the world seems to be irreparably broken, is a temptation we have to resist. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to do whatever we can, in small and large ways, to start repairing the damage to the planet and to the human community, damage that we have contributed to with our wasteful lifestyle and pursuit of wealth. Maybe it feels like the earth is already doomed. But, as followers of Jesus we know that death is not the end, that Easter follows Good Friday, that chaos precedes new creation. We know that God can bring light out of darkness, no matter how deep, and we know that we have a role in that transformation. The Great Litany has never seemed more timely than today, with its pleading for wars to cease, for us to be spared plague and pestilence, to be delivered from hatred, malice, and envy. We know we need God’s power of love and life in order to defeat all these manifestations of evil, and thanks to our baptism we also know that with God’s help we can prevail.
All is not lost, and Jesus beats back the temptation to seize this phony power.
In the third temptation the devil gets extra sneaky and quotes God’s word back at Jesus, with phrases from the psalm that we have just read. Test God’s word, he says: choose death and destruction and see if your God will really save you. Surely the God who loves you won’t allow you to suffer injury. Reading this from the other side of the crucifixion, we know what an empty assurance this is. The core of our faith resides in the fact that God will allow God’s beloved to suffer, and this very fact is what proves God’s love for humanity.
Once again, Jesus rejects the premise, with Deuteronomy again to the rescue: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”. Scripture, God’s word, can be and is weaponized by the forces of evil: we have seen that again and again throughout history: to justify genocide and anti-Semitism; to defend chattel slavery and racism; to oppress women; to persecute LGBTQ people; to deny our abuse of the earth; and even today as some state legislatures seek to ban medical care for non-binary and trans children.
The third temptation, do a showman’s trick to prove God’s weakness, fails to deliver, and the devil retreats – for now. But stay tuned … Holy Week is coming.
In this struggle in the wilderness we see the devil trying to tame Jesus, to domesticate him, to take away the subversive power of self-sacrificing love that defines him. It is the Holy Spirit that has driven him out there in the first place, and the Holy Spirit is anything but tame. When we try to domesticate God, when we try to put Jesus in a box and keep him for our own purposes, we are following the lead of the tempter. When we limit love to narrow categories, when we deny people opportunity based on the color of their skin, when we restrict the sacraments to certain forms and circumstances, we are attempting to limit God’s grace and God’s freedom to be God. We hurt nobody more than ourselves in these actions, for we are denying ourselves the freedom of enjoying unconditional divine love; we are denying God’s sovereignty, as Jesus points out so clearly in this Gospel story.
If you want to find Jesus this Lent, go to the wilderness. Join him in that untamed and perilous place of hunger, of uncertainty, of utter dependence on God’s goodness. If you want to grow in faith, venture out there where there are no maps and put your trust in the God who led those ancient people through the desert from captivity to freedom, and who leads us today through the wilderness of this violent and frightening world. We cannot know where God is taking us, but we do know that God will always be with us, as God was with Jesus in his temptations, in his earthly ministry, and all the way to Jerusalem and the empty tomb.
And so we make the Lenten journey, in community, lifting up this broken world in our prayers, and following Jesus on the road. For, in the words of our Eucharistic prayer, “by his grace we are able to triumph over every evil, and to live no longer for ourselves but for him who died for us and rose again.” May it be so for each one of us. Amen.
