lent 1 Year C

Deuteronomy 26: 1-11 NRSV text
Psalm 91: 1-2; 9-16 NRSV text
Romans 10: 8b-13 NRSV text
Luke 4: 1-13 NRSV text

We need to demystify the temptation narrative. That isn’t the same thing as demythologising. My concern is that we understand the profound nature of the conflict going on here, and we quickly lose that if either we rush to do the “Can we really believe in the devil today?” stuff, or, conversely, shroud this incident in the shadow world of the demonic of The Exorcist and other popular myths. The danger of the former is that we fail to recognise the reality and effects of what Paul calls “the principalities and powers” – those things that exert such a powerful, self-destructive pull upon the hearts and lives of human beings both individually and collectively. The danger of the latter is that the world takes on a sort of Lord of the Rings quality, and soon becomes unrecognisable as the place in which we live our individual and collective lives. We quickly lose sight of the human Jesus, and with it, our own humanity. The antidote to both of these tendencies is to pay close attention to the story Luke tells us in these verses.

Mission & opposition
Imagine Luke’s gospel as a play or film. This is a transition point – the bridge between Acts 1 and 2. Act 1 has brought us from the immediate pre-history of Jesus to the point when he is standing in the water of the Jordan river, newly baptised. The Holy Spirit has come upon him. Jesus has heard the divine voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased!” In other words, everything that has happened until now has been “scene-setting”. We’ve learned about Jesus’ origins and his place within the saving story of God’s actions in the world. Interestingly, with the exception of the incident where Jesus remains in the temple (2:42-51), Jesus has been remarkably passive. His only action – significantly situated in the temple, in debate with the teachers – has been to provoke anxiety and opposition. But things have largely happened to him until now.

What is his first “action role” as an adult? It is to take on the opposition in a first, significant and decisive battle. The wilderness and the temptations – the three skirmishes that make up this first battle – are Jesus’ proving ground. That’s an important point for Luke’s original audience. They’re used to people of promise who fail to deliver. They know the stories of David. They’ve seen would-be messiahs in action. Pedigree is important – but what counts is whether Jesus can actually take the heat and deliver the goods. And Jesus does. “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time” (v13). Like Elijah challenging the prophets of Ba’al, Jesus emerges triumphant. In the battle over what sort of god God is, it is Jesus who is decisive.

And all this when Jesus is near to starvation. I find this interesting: Matthew has Jesus fasting for forty days, after which “the tempter” comes to him (Matthew 4:2). Yet Luke suggests that Jesus is harried from the moment he enters the wilderness – a sort of guerrilla war of attrition – and that it is when he has eaten nothing for 40 days (presumably as a result of the devil’s attentions, rather than a deliberate choice or fast!) the devil appears to press home his advantage. Despite this, he is unable to prevail. Yes, Luke tells us, Jesus has got what it takes.

The scale of the whole thing
There is one caveat to this emphasis on “Action-Man Jesus”: Jesus acts in the power of the Spirit. Luke could hardly make this more clear than he does with the double emphasis on the Spirit in the opening verse: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness”.

In other words, we are to see in the confrontation not only the testing of Jesus’ readiness for his mission, and not only a foretaste of the forthcoming struggle that will end up in the Way of the Cross, but a cosmic struggle for the Kingdom that Jesus proclaims, enacts, and makes present. It is a struggle between God and the ruler of the world. Jesus is the person in whom God’s presence and mission is incarnated, but it is present in the Holy Spirit. This is where Luke’s Christology differs from John’s, for example. For John, Jesus is unambiguously God present in human form. Luke shares John’s understandings of Jesus’ heavenly origins, but being God’s Son alone is not enough. Luke gives prominence to the presence and role of the Spirit as God’s presence in Jesus. Jesus is Son in terms of divine origin, but also Son by virtue of obedient action – seen ultimately in Gethsemane. And here, in the wilderness, Jesus’ commitment as Son to the Way of the Cross is tested, as we shall see shortly.

What are we to make, then, of this cosmic drama? The danger is that it becomes a Platonic, dualistic universe, in which the events on earth (the drama of salvation) are simply a shadow of a Greater Reality. It provokes all sorts of questions about human acting, human (free??) will and the significance of human choices. It is easy to read human beings as pawns or puppets, helpless other than to play their roles as mapped out for them in some heavenly script.

This isn’t what Luke appears to think. Luke is not a dualist. For all the reality he ascribes to the devil as the power behind all opposition to the Kingdom, here the devil says quite explicitly that the power he has is delegated. He “roams” with God’s permission; he holds sway over “all the kingdoms of this world” because that right has been given to him by human beings. Luke’s devil is no equal, competing shadow side of divine power and goodness.

The second thing we need to note in this connection is the emphasis that we find in Luke’s gospel on human choice. I am not going to try and provide even a representative list: it’s worth looking through, because it is as you read the gospel as a narrative that you feel the weight of the point. Let me simply mention both Gethsemane and the crowd before Pilate baying for Jesus’ crucifixion. Grace, in Luke’s gospel, is what saves us from the consequences of our choices. Our ultimate relationship with God depends not on our final word on the matter (which is to choose godforsakenness), but on Jesus’ choice to align himself with the saving will of the God whom he calls Father.

The point, then, is this: there is, for Luke, clear reality to the fact that there are powers beyond human, “natural” powers. There are powers that enslave human beings, and render them helpless. Human wills are not “free”. Yet the relationship between these powers (for good and for ill) and human will is subtle. While human wills are not free, we nevertheless have the freedom to exercise the power of choice. We see that in all the ways in which this world is not the Kingdom – the ways in which we have chosen to make our world! We also see it in the choices of faith – the choices we make for God. When we do God’s will on earth, we experience the reality of the Kingdom which we reach for – in mustard seed form, but in reality.

If that sounds complex and abstruse, let’s look at it in more everyday terms. When the British government chose to ally themselves with George W Bush in going to war with Iraq, we Britons allied ourselves with American foreign policy. It wasn’t an isolated choice on a single issue. It tied us into arms deals, troop deployment, local spending plans and the emergence of militant Islam in Britain. Decisions affecting the everyday lives of British people in all parts of the United Kingdom were made in the light of that greater alliance. To greater and lesser degrees, Britain became a player in US global policies. We took sides. Britons are not free of US interests, concerns, priorities and actions – a fact we’re only too bitterly aware of. There is a global play being enacted, and we have our place in events. Yet we are genuinely actors, whose decisions and actions shape and influence what happens. We are not pawns or puppets. It is this aspect of alignments and alliances, and the role of choice in relation to these greater powers, that Luke is signalling in the conflict between the Spirit-filled Jesus and the devil. It doesn’t trivialise or make a nonsense of human choosing: it points up just how crucial our choices are, because they genuinely shape the course of human history and serve the wider power struggles that are taking place globally and more locally!

Jesus the obedient Son of God
Luke consciously evokes echoes of the story of Israel in the wilderness. Israel is known in the Old Testament as “the son of God” and is tested. Luke boundaries the temptation sequence with the opening line from the devil, “If you are the Son of God …” In other words, he positively shouts at us that the issue at stake in this encounter between Jesus and the devil is about Jesus’ understanding of his divine sonship.

Note first how the temptations mirror the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness (cf Deuteronomy 8:3; 6:4-15; 6:16). The Israelites were being tested – and failed. Jesus, as Son of God, is obedient where Israel, the son of God, was not. We ought to see this as a point about the absolute congruence between what we are told of Jesus in the earlier chapters of the gospel, and Jesus’ character and actions. Jesus is the Son of God. And in the conflict of interpretations over God, we can be confident that Jesus gives us true access to who God really is.

But further, Luke is making a point about the New Covenant. As the wilderness period was the formative time of Israel as the covenant community of Yahweh, so we are to understand that the community of Jesus’ disciples – the Christian Church – is the new covenant community. We can trust that the New Covenant in Jesus’ body and blood truly is of God. And if that seems unsurprising, it ought not to! We need only ask ourselves how (rightly) suspicious we would be of some new supposed “truth of God” that claimed both to be the inheritor and fulfilment of what had gone before. And if it claimed to be centred in one single man, who met his end as a terrorist and blasphemer on a Roan cross, we might need some convincing and encouraging that we could trust our lives and futures to a covenant supposedly enacted and sealed in his body and blood! It’s one thing for God to institute covenants: it’s quite another for a man of extremely dubious character (at least in terms of his choice of friends and his final ending) to come, claiming that precisely his dubious death is the culmination of all God’s saving actions in the past.

Look at Deuteronomy 26: 1-11. In the context of presenting tithes and first-fruits, Israelites recite the salvation story. “Story” is an important synonym for “covenant” – not in the sense that it carries the same breadth and depth of meaning, but in the sense that it illuminates the element of continuity that is fundamental to covenant. To be a member of a covenant community is to stand within a long story – a saving story. It relates discrete events to a wider picture (story) of God’s saving purposes and actions. It links events and lives over time through the theme of promise and fulfilment. Variety and difference are accommodated in the story by the saving, constant and consistent presence of God. My point here is that, 2000+ years after Jesus, we do not sense the deep sense of rupture within Judaism that is Christianity. If we read Luke’s second volume – Acts – it’s saturated with it! Of course, it’s interesting to try and capture a historical consciousness that isn’t ours – interesting, but ultimately of antiquarian interest and importance only. What we need to capture is the horror and unbelievability of the cross – what Paul calls it’s “scandal”. It is when we sense the scandal that we understand the astounding grace of God. We also understand Luke’s concern with trying to say, “Yes, God really is in Jesus – wild and whacky and offensive as that might seem!” And here we are encouraged to trust that God is in Jesus because Jesus proves himself to be God’s Son.

Echoes of Eden (cf Romans 10: 8b-13)
There are echoes of the Eden story – Temptation and Fall – that are deliberate. Luke, remember, traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Adam. There is a sense that Luke’s Jesus represents all of humanity and “undoes” (by obedience and submission to God’s will – supremely in the cross) the whole story of human disobedience.

Eden is evoked in two related senses: the first is that the Fall is understood as human hubris – the desire to “be like God”. It is a refusal, therefore, to give Yahweh the honour due, and the desire instead to create the world in the image of fallen humanity, rather than of God. The second is the developed Satan tradition: Satan’s primal sin was the refusal to worship Yahweh (“Better a king on earth than a slave in heaven”). In the tradition, Satan has been given authority “on earth” – both through the permissive will of Yahweh but more importantly by human beings, who have “charge” over the earth. This is what the devil tells Jesus explicitly in v6. He does indeed have the right to offer Jesus the kingdoms of the world – in return for worship!

The devil, in other words, invites Jesus to recapitulate his own story of rebellion: “Refuse to worship God and worship me instead! The you will have real power!” It is this primal sin – the will to power and the refusal to submit to God – that Jesus resists. There is a close parallel here with Paul’s theology of Jesus as the Second Adam: Jesus resists the devil’s temptation and so becomes the first of a new “human race” – truly “human” because that word (in Jesus) means the restored image of God!

That is why Paul can argue that “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”. This passage forms part of Paul’s concern to show that the Old Covenant, while focussed in Israel, was never intended for Israel’s exclusive salvation. Indeed, God’s purpose in election has always been that Israel will be a blessing to all the nations: that is what God promises Abraham. The Law was meant to be the means by which a faithful Israel could be this universal blessing, but was frustrated by human sinfulness. Jesus, Paul says, both fulfils the Law and “ends” it – in the sense that it no longer functions as it did previously. Because, In Paul’s thought, Jesus is the Second Adam (rather than the Second Israel), God is now free in Jesus to accomplish the universal salvation of the whole world. “For now there is no longer any distinction between Jew and Gentile”, he says in Romans 10:12. Jesus has become the progenitor of a new humanity in Christ. God is “equally generous” to all who call on God (10:12b), so that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

The Way of the Cross rather than of protection (cf Psalm 91)
Look at the final temptation in Luke. It is the temptation to throw himself from the temple pinnacle and cast himself on God’s protection. Interestingly, Matthew inverts the order – the final temptation is to worship Satan. Why does Luke have this as the climax of the temptation narrative?

The first reason is the centrality of the Jerusalem temple to his narrative. It is central, as we have seen in other posts, because (a) it is the epicentre of opposition to Jesus and (b) because Jesus’ fate is bound up with his reception there. It is the scene of dramatic conflicts – both in this gospel and in Acts. Luke is flagging the role that the temple and the temple system will play in clashes with Jesus and his proclamation of the Kingdom.

But note that this is the only direct and most extended quotation from the Old Testament by the devil. He quotes Psalm 92, which speaks of Yahweh’s protection for the faithful within the covenant community. The devil is reminding Jesus of the covenantal theology that the Temple authorities cling to. Luke is signalling here the fundamental conflict of understandings of God and God’s ways that Jesus will cause. Is God a God who protects and preserves the faithful? That is what the psalm teaches! The devil says, “Remember – this is what God says! Don’t you believe that?” The devil is not misquoting the scriptures. He is claiming to be more faithful to the God of the covenant than Jesus – God’s so-called Son – is being!

What’s going on here? The devil is attacking Jesus’ confidence and claim to be the Son of God at a fundamental level. Will God preserve Jesus from suffering, death and destruction? NO! That’s precisely the point! To be God’s Son is to be committed to the Way of the Cross – and that flies in the face of all that was believed and understood about God. God’s presence and grace and salvation was seen in preservation, not in death! So the devil effectively asks, “Jesus, do you believe in the God who protects the faithful?” and Jesus says, “No. There is another way – the Way of the Cross. It is the way of death – but also of resurrection. And, bizarre as it may seem, the proclamation that God saves us through the failure, rejection, suffering and crucifixion of God’s own Son is true – wonderfully, savingly true!” And how do we know? Because, as Luke will tell us, in Gethsemane, when Jesus says “Yes” to the cross, God does send and angel – not to deliver him, but to strengthen him for what lies ahead!

Christ or antichrist?
These aren’t Luke’s terms, but they crystallise something he’d agree with. In the end, the temptation narrative is the story of the pressure brought to bear on Jesus to give up the Way of the Cross and become a popular miracle-worker and provider; to give up the Kingdom for the kingdoms of the world; to claim God’s protection instead of God’s company through suffering and death; to worship the devil instead of God; to be the devil’s Son instead of God’s Son. In other words, the devil offers Jesus – the Christ – the position of the antichrist. And Jesus sends him packing – for us.

Amen.

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