A sermon on Matthew 4:1-11 by Samara Pitt

It’s the first Sunday in Lent, and here we are faced with all these stories about temptation.
Some of us may have identified things we want to do, or not do, as a discipline leading up to Easter. We’re often encouraged to ‘give up’ something that has become part of our daily lives that we think is unhelpful for us and the world, or to ‘take up’ a new habit or practice. There are the usual suspects – fasting from alcohol, coffee, TV or travelling by car, or alternatively taking on bible reading disciplines, or exercise programs or charitable works. Some of my friends this year are taking up beer for Lent! In a reversal of the usual trajectory of Lenten activities, they will gather together to explore the joys and temptations of brewing things in our lives and society through scripture and drinking together. I guess they’re not inviting anyone who’s fasting from alcohol for the next 40 days!

So what’s going on here? Personally I find Lent a bit confusing when it comes to the fasting bit. But then I’ve been looking at the temptation story of Jesus in the wilderness, and I think that it is also a bit more confusing than I expected.

Jesus has just been baptised in the Jordan, and has had the amazingly transformative affirmation that he is God’s beloved Son. Wouldn’t that just totally fill you up with wonder and a deep sense of being in the right place, with the love and power of God surrounding you? And the next thing that happens, Matthew tells us, is that Jesus gets led into the desert by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil. That was the purpose of this wilderness visit. The Spirit leads him into the desert, he doesn’t eat for 40 days, and so he’s now good and ready to be introduced to the devil who’s going to mess with his mind. Thanks very much.

Why was that necessary? That doesn’t seem very fair! Is that what we expect of the Spirit of God, to be leading us into places where we are weak and likely to be tempted? Aren’t we supposed to flee from temptation? In the Lord’s prayer that I learnt at school, we learnt the line “Lead us not into temptation…”, but that’s exactly what the Spirit seems to be doing here. However, when I hummed through the version that we sing every week, I realised that we sing, “Save us from the time of trial”. Perhaps we have to face temptations, but we pray for the help we need to face them. Imagine if Jesus had said to the Spirit, “Uh oh, I’m sorry, but the desert’s not a very safe place, I’m afraid I can’t go there.” And, “Oh, I can’t go and preach either because the Pharisees will give me a hard time and I might say something I’ll regret, and I can’t heal anyone or raise them from the dead because they’re going to make a big fuss about me and I might get a Messiah complex.” Yep, I don’t think we can avoid temptation. But is it possible we even need them in order to discover who we are in relation to them? The Latin word ‘temptare’ means ‘to touch, test or try, to feel experimentally’. I wonder whether Jesus needed to know what he was up against.

The other confusing thing is, how does Jesus know who is speaking to him? I don’t really think the tempter appeared with horns and a pointy tail and sign saying ‘devil’. Even if he was famished, I’m guessing Jesus could probably spot that and then it could hardly be classified as a temptation could it? The Genesis reading tells us that the serpent or the tempter is ‘shrewd’ or ‘crafty’. The tempter knows how to get to us, to hook us away from where we want to be, to make us react.

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” What was tempting about this? Well, Jesus was famished. Bread probably looked pretty good. And bread was one of the main units of currency in those times. Imagine, money on tap. That’s a powerful proposition. They’re all hooks, but the one I hear in this story is hidden at the start so we almost swallow it without noticing: “If you are the Son of God…, If you are….” It’s that taunting voice, or that voice of doubt that questions our very sense of identity. Do you recognise it? “If you are a good mother, if you are a compassionate person, a real Christian, if you’re the smart one…” Isn’t it tempting just to leap into action, just to silence that horrible, taunting voice?

But I guess Jesus spotted it, because he didn’t engage in proving himself, in arm-wrestling about his status with the voice in his head or the vision before him. He held his ground, quoted something he could rely on. An alternative voice, the scripture that was in his bones.

The tempter tried it again. He took him to the Temple. Do we expect to be tempted in the holy place? After all, he’s the Son of God. And the tempter quotes the psalms and says the angels will lift him up and he won’t be harmed. That would be pretty spectacular. And we know that Jesus does do the spectacular – he raises the dead, heals people, he even feeds a multitude…with bread. But there’s something not right about this. Why does he need to leap off the temple, except because he’s being dared? He doesn’t get hooked in.

And finally, the tempter stops questioning his identity, but tries to lure him away, just at the price of a little compromise. “All this will be yours, if you will fall down and worship me..” Is that even true? “All the kingdoms of the world, and their splendour” – is that the devil’s to give? But Jesus reads the fine print and manages for a third time to resist being hooked. And, blessedly, the tempter leaves him. (In the gospel of Luke, it says he left him until an opportune time. This will not be the last time Jesus is tempted.)

Sometimes I’ve read this passage and I think it looks easy. Jesus sends the devil off with Scripture and resolve – he’s got an answer for everything! And I’ve wondered whether the experience of receiving God’s blessing in the river Jordan was like that blissed out experience of being newly in love. I am someone’s beloved! What could be more amazing? All those barbs and stings that come your way in everyday life just become irrelevant, and nothing bothers you! Maybe the devil couldn’t get to Jesus, because Jesus knew exactly where he wanted to be, and nothing else seemed important beside that relationship. I don’t know about your experience of struggling with temptation, but have you had that experience of looking at something that really used to trouble you, and finding that it has no hold on you anymore? What a relief, when the tempter has no power over you. When you’re already full up, and not susceptible to that something else that promises it’s going to fill up the hole and make you feel better.

But I dunno. I’m assuming that the Garden of Eden was pretty fine, and that Adam and Eve weren’t lacking for much, and there was no advertising to tell them they weren’t good enough, and that really they were missing out. But the voice of temptation still got in there. I don’t understand why that is, but it seems to hold true. We find it hard to be content. And we know that the experience of being blissed out in love doesn’t last, and we might look on alarmed at people who go mooning around because we know that life doesn’t leave us alone in that space for too long. Wilderness experiences will come along, and we have to figure out if this is a good spirit or a bad spirit that is speaking to us and telling us what we should be doing. And we have to be awake, and we have to work hard to figure out where the Spirit of God is in all this.

So this might mean that you’re spending 40 days facing down a potential pot of beer every evening, and saying no again and again. Because when we know we can say no, then when we get tempted the next time, we have something to fall back on. Or it might mean that you’re meeting with others to drink homebrew this Lent, to honour sustenance and celebration, so that you can get good at spotting a spirit of meanness and self-righteousness when it tries to hook you in. Whatever it is, do it with your whole heart. On the booklets table, there are some cards with a confusing picture of an angel or a devil, it’s hard to tell, and there’s a fish hook. You might like to take one, as a reminder to be alert this Lent, and to be encouraged as you face temptations to discern the spirits so that you might avoid being hooked away by a promise of something you want, but that’s just not quite right.

Or you might find yourself being hooked in to something new and good you hadn’t expected – in the gospels Jesus constantly hooks us in with his stories to envision a world transformed – who can tell? We’re resisting the spirit of temptation, because we’re searching for the Spirit of God. We want to know ourselves as God’s beloved, and we want to be part of what God is doing in the world. If we get to the end of Lent and can triumphantly proclaim that we’ve maintained our Lenten disciplines for the full 40 days, but we haven’t really considered God because we’ve been a bit preoccupied, then we might have missed the point. Soon, we’re going to sing, “Save us from the time of trial”, and then we’re going to eat the bread and drink the cup as the body of Christ, a free gift of righteousness containing an abundance of grace, and it is this that will sustain us to travel on the road that leads to life.

Resources
“Jesus in the desert” in The Active Life, Parker J Palmer