Hear these words again from Isaiah 55:6-9 in another translation:
“Seek me, YHWH, while I may still be found; call upon me while I am near!
Let the corrupt abandon their ways, the evil their thoughts.
Let them return to YHWH, and I will have mercy on them;
Return to God, for I will freely pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways, my ways,” says the Lord.
“As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways
And my thoughts above your thoughts.”
We have entered the season of Lent, a time of wilderness preparation as we journey with Jesus to the cross in Jerusalem and resurrection on Easter morning. Ash Wednesday this past week marked the beginning of this season of the church calendar. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of our humanity, our limitations, our brokenness. We are not God, though we are bearers of God’s image. From dust, God created us and to dust, we will return. We take these 40 days of Lent to focus on repentance and humility. God is god, and we are not as much as we might want to be or think that we already are.
After hearing the words of Isaiah 55, we have a little bit better understanding of the core of the temptation facing Jesus in Luke 4, a temptation addressed directly when we allow God’s presence in each of our lives to transform our desires for security into living and active generosity. God calls on the exiles returning to their homeland in Jerusalem to trust God’s faithful love and forgiveness, a very challenging thing indeed for those who remember the walk not many years before from Jerusalem to the capital of the empire, Babylon. But trust is exactly what sits at the center of our stories today. In Isaiah, can these exiles trust that God really will have mercy and pardon for them and their enemies as they make their way back home? God’s response is that generous love and forgiveness may not be our broken human first instinct, but it is God’s way.
In Luke 4, when Jesus follows the Spirit’s leading into the wilderness, Jesus’s very identity is at stake. Will Jesus trust the words that were spoken over him at his baptism in the Jordan River when God anointed him with the Spirit and told him that he was God’s child, God’s beloved with whom God was already pleased even before he started his ministry in rural Galilee? Or will Jesus fall prey to the devil’s enticing words, to the very human temptation to take things into his own hands and make sure that his personal needs are taken care of. Personal, physical needs are the first and most basic form of trust that we are presented with each day. Can we be generous with our basic resources – food, shelter, and water – or will we hoard our resources to assure ourselves that at least our stomachs will be filled and our thirsts quenched.
This temptation hits so close to home that we don’t often take into consideration what generosity in this most basic part of our lives might look like. We have grown accustomed to grocery stores filled to the brim with hundreds of different varieties and options. We donate to local food banks for those who, in our own society, cannot afford to look through the options, even the cheapest ones, and make good decisions. Even more, we have economic structures of supply that guarantee our fill of different foods, while those who harvest the food or even live near it have little chance of getting even a crumb of what is left. What would moving our economic supply chains from security to generosity look like in this day and age? Even when we don’t consider how our food and water are secured for us in our daily lives, we cannot help but notice in our globally interconnected world how we live with so much available to us, while a quarter or more of the world’s population lives on a few dollars a day to gain their daily nourishment and care for their communities.
One of the New Testament scholars that I read this week offered what appeared in the Greek to be a more relatable way of reading this story. While we often hear the story as the devil and Jesus as two characters interacting in these different scenarios of temptation, this scholar offered that the Greek reads more like the devil’s words are whisperings in the thoughts of Jesus’s mind, small voices that nudge Jesus toward seeking his own way and will first without consideration of others. It is not hard to identify with Jesus in this moment. Jesus has not eaten in 40 days. His body instinctually continues to push him desperately toward fulfilling his most basic need for nourishment. As he continues to walk in the wilderness with little around even to satiate some small piece of his hunger, a small thought enters his mind. He could just change some of the rocks to bread. No one would know. He’s been by himself for many days, even weeks. What would it hurt? He is so hungry, and the weakness of his fasting is setting in even more now than before. You wonder if the Holy Spirit, the divine breath whispers in response, “But true and authentic life is not lived only on food and water.” Our lives are so much more than what we eat and drink. We are whole beings, in need of nourishment of body, mind, and soul, needs that run much deeper than this one moment. The temptation is not whether Jesus could change the stones to bread, but what it means for the rest of his ministry and teaching if he takes care of his own needs without any consideration of how the needs of others around him will be met. In community, we can find enough; in trusting God’s provision through our neighbors and siblings in Christ, we can find not only the nourishment for our bodies as we share meals together but also social and spiritual nourishment as we grow to love our friends and neighbors as well as our God. God created us for relationship, so a full or healthy life cannot only be attained by eating and drinking everyday but by following in God’s way of relationship.
Along with the temptation of fulfilling his physical needs with no regard for those around him, Jesus was tempted in this changing stones to bread to do the spectacular. In rural Galilee, chronic hunger was a reality for most people, so couldn’t it have been easier for Jesus to open his own food pantry in the wilderness where people could get their fill of bread from all of the rocks and stones on the hillsides. Then he could show up the local authorities that took their fill of the local wheat and grains that people were not as easy to get for the peasants in their daily living. We must remember that God created this world with the potential for abundance and provision for all people if we can find within our societies and communities to share generously with each other. It is when we give up on our trust in God’s original purposes that we begin to seek our own security rather than God’s original act of generosity, a world pregnant with the possibilities of bread for everyone.
In Jesus’s second temptation, this whispering voice, the voice of the devil, shows him the kingdoms of the whole earth, the empires that have laid claim to their different pieces of God’s good earth. If Jesus will give up God’s calling on his life to bring good news to all people and worship the power and evil that perpetuates these empires, then Jesus will receive all of the kingdoms and their inherent power from the devil. Jesus response from the book of Deuteronomy gives us our best response whenever any amount of power and influence tempts us to give up on trusting in God’s ways: “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” When we stay centered on the God who has called us, stay focused on God’s purposes for us and for the earth, stay committed to our identity as creatures of God’s own making, we can better resist with the power of the Spirit to think that we can become gods. Remember that this time in the church calendar is a reminder of our limitations as broken human beings. We will always be tempted, as Jesus was, to take power into our hands and make the world into what we think it should be. When these attempts end in disaster, we realize that true community is found in trusting God to be god even when we think that we could do better. You’ll notice as well that the devil promises all of the kingdoms of the earth and their authority if Jesus will succumb to the temptation to worship the very power and evil that the devil represents, but what we find out is that when Jesus sticks to his purpose and calling as God’s unique representative in the world, he receives all of this authority but not by stealing it from others through violence, coercion, or manipulation but by offering the power of his Godself and sacrificing his needs for power and influence for the lives of all people. In a democratic society, we are often tempted to think that if we could only get the righ politicians or policies in place, then we can create our own heaven on earth, our own version of everlasting covenant that God offers in Isaiah 55 and Psalm 91. Yet, Jesus shows us that the only one who is able to bring heaven on earth is the very one who created all of it and sustains it to this day: God Almighty, the Lord.
When we get to the third moment at the very top of the temple building, and we hear the devil’s final comments to Jesus, we might not catch the change in tone that the devil’s words have taken. It’s as if this voice in Jesus’s head tells him, “So you really trust in God? Then act on that trust and do a trust-fall from the roof of the temple, knowing full well that God will not allow you to be physically hurt.” Oh wow, this voice has used the core of our message today against us. If you really trust God, then you can do whatever you want because you are so important to God’s plan that God will not allow anything to happen to you. You may not realize how subtle this temptation can be. In our current world and climate, it might sound something like this in its most extreme moments, “if you really trust in God, then you don’t need to go see a doctor. God is the only doctor that we need, and he will take care of us.” Or it might sound like, “If God has decided that it’s my time to go, then I won’t be able to change what God has decided anyway.” But this moment is really just another more manipulative form of the first temptation. What we are saying when we go to the extreme thinking of “we can only trust God,” then we have eliminated all of the other people that God has created for us to live in mutual love, trust, and community. In some ways, we might be saying, “I don’t need anyone else. I only need God and what God has for me,” but this is another lie, another temptation that leads us down the wrong path into thinking again that we have it all figured out, that we have found a security in our own clever thinking or sophisticated faith, but we have really only decided that we don’t need anyone else.
When we look at our third scripture text from Psalm 91, we realize that these are the words from scripture that the devil uses against Jesus in the third temptation. I want to end with this moment because we don’t often realize how scripture can be twisted and distorted in ways that make us think that we are following God’s ways. We must remember that whenever our temptations lead us down lonely roads, in which we feel that we can trust our own security rather than extending generous trust in God and our neighbor, then we have not followed God’s ways. We might think so; we might be fully convinced that this is what scripture has called us to until we find out as has happened throughout history that our own self-made security is never as secure as we want it to be. What God calls us to today is a generosity that sacrifices our personal security in love for God and neighbor, a generosity that transforms us and the rest of the world.
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