Sermon 1 Lent, March 9
What am I doing up here? Well, preaching! And what is that? It is proclaiming to everyone that the gospel news about Jesus is true! To unbelievers, who need it, and to believers, who may need a booster shot. But that isn’t the only way our words can serve God. We might get in a conversation with an atheist, who thinks in his or her despair that there is nothing but power, or atoms…you might give that person a reason to think again- that is called ‘apologetics’ from the Greek word ‘defense.’ It can’t prove the Gospel, since it needs faith, but I can come to its aid. But there is one more way Christians can serve with words, called ‘theology,’ Here we don’t defend the faith, but we assume it. But that isn’t the end of the matter, since the Gospel inspires wonder. Paul calls it ‘the worship of the mind,’ and in its service Charles Wesley wrote ‘ and can it be?’ Here we take two things that are true, and struggle to see how they are both so at once. God loving but just. Jesus made sin who knew so sin so we might be the justice of God. The kingdom come in the resurrection of Jesus but not yet. Here too there is no resolution until we stand before the throne, when the circle is finally unbroken. As I say, this all is in the key of wonder and bated breath.
Our liturgy quotes the Epistle to the Hebrews when it says that Jesus was ‘tempted as we are yet without sin.’ How can both be true? You can see why I am raising this question this Sunday, as we hear how Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, and yet was impelled to go there by the very Spirit of God. There Satan tempted, tried, tested, him, call it what you will. We want to know what it meant for that to happen to Jesus, as opposed to happening to us, and what his prevailing means then for us.
Let’s start, like detectives, gathering some evidence. the first is the most obvious, that the three trials of Jesus are all religious. He is tempted to perform so as to convert the world. He is tempted to bring the kingdom in quickly, as the early Christians themselves prayed ‘Maranatha’, ‘come quickly Lord.’ And thirdly he is tempted to put all the rebellious kingdoms under the rule of God, though it may take a bad means to a good end. He would, like Borramir, in the Lord of the Rings, use the ring of power, but for good. And I might add, each has a biblical warrant- the miraculous manna in the wilderness, being borne up by angels, and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God. These are not temptations to gluttony or adultery or to violence. They are spiritual sins, like that of Satan the fallen angel himself. They involve bending the knee to the evil one. They are self-assertive, and lack the trust that God will do as he says, like those Israelites in the desert who feel Moses has tarried too long, and make themselves a golden calf in the meantime to quell rebellion in the masses.
Now our second piece of evidence. This passage at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, anticipates, and in some ways parallels, the scene at its earthly end, in the Garden of Gethsemane. There Jesus cries out to his Father to let the cup pass. Faithfulness here shows weakness. He would rather the plan not be so, and says it. Then on the cross he cries out, to be sure in the words of the Psalms, that his Father has abandoned him. He is undergoing what he has us pray not to undergo, the great and final trial, when all seems bereft, translated in the Lord’s prayer simply ‘temptation,’ but let us say Temptation with a capital T. But of course the early Christians realized that this was not their Lord’s failing, but his triumph, as He himself proclaimed in the words ‘it is finished.’
St. Athanasius, a key writer of our Nicene Creed, famously said, ‘what God has not assumed, he has not redeemed.’ He means this from the God’s eye point-of-view. Here is the hinge, by which we begin to enter into understanding. God the Father has submitted himself to the lostness of His world in his Son. And I mean all the way, to abandonment, to death, which is unthinkable, for God cannot die. Our minds go blank. This terrible and wonderful submission is visible in the temptations in the wilderness. What seems at first a challenge to Godhood- tempted? Lost? Is in fact the height of his love, which is after all his nature to an extent and in a way we also cannot comprehend. This mystery lies at the heart of a God who needing nothing makes a world, free, fragile; he is also the God who overcomes sin not around, but through death, wherein his divine and very new life enters the world.
Let’s go back to the temptation story. What we have learned is that nothing in this story is what it appears at first. The messiah who works wonders, brings in the kingdom, and rules the rebellious nations- he would be no such thing, but willful, impatient, ready to trade means for ends. And the messiah who is pressured, hungry, tried, is in fact utterly identified with His Father surrendering himself in suffering for the world. Easy victory is defeat, seeming defeat is victory won from within. ‘Temptation’ in turns out, can means two things- in the mouth of Satan, being on God’s side on our terms. But ‘temptation,’ in the mouth of Jesus, means bowing to suffering and alienation in a way that turns out to be the very form of God himself.
Paul puts it this way…
Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Where, between these two reversals in opposite directions, does that leave us? On the one hand it leaves us with a bothersome suspicion about how we might use religious things for our own ends. And on the other, it leaves us with wonder, which is another name for worship. What more can we say? Though we should meditate on the high things of Christ, we do well to finish the matter, here at the outset of Lent, in a way simpler and closer to the ground, where after all the disciple treads. First we cleave to his words, especially when we think we know better than their plain sense. Second, this Lent we do a moral inventory of our wants, including the religious ones, with a scrutiny our own motives lodged therein. But for all that, third, we pray that a moment of theology might drive us back to the Gospel, for the temptation story is not ultimately about alienation, but about victory, not ours, but His, so that we are left, on the way, though struggling, more confident. Amen
