Lent 1 sermon – The power of “No” in the wilderness
Sermon by Jamie Howison on Luke 4:1-13
Note that this sermon includes a reference to Si Smith’s comic cycle “40”, which retells the story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness in a really helpful way. You can watch a video of “40” by clicking here.
It is the first Sunday in the season of Lent, and in all three years of the lectionary cycle we always read this story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. In the years when we are reading from Luke or Matthew, it is this rather fulsome story of these three temptations, while the year in which we read from Mark it is more clipped, with just a kind of snapshot picture offered: “He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
There is another significant difference between Mark’s clipped version and what we hear from both Matthew and Luke. Mark uses the word “satan”, while the other two use “the devil.” Both of those words, diabolos and satana, mean the same thing—“adversary”—but we’re very accustomed to thinking of “Satan” as being a proper name. It isn’t. Anytime these words are used they really should be with the preposition “the”. The satan, the devil, the adversary. This voice, this presence, this tempter should never be given the dignity of a proper name, for it is more a tempting principality or power which sets before Jesus a distorted path.
It was interesting to go back over some of the commentaries and other books that deal with this story, to see how many of the significant commentators didn’t even want to have the reader mistake this as a debate between the person Jesus and a personal adversary. Both Robert Farrar Capon and N.T. Wright, for instance, were insistent that it is best to avoid seeing this as some demonic figure appearing to engage in tempting debate. As Wright puts it,
The story does not envisage Jesus engaged in conversation with a visible figure with whom he could talk as one to another; the devil’s voice appears as a string of natural ideas in his own head. They are plausible, attractive, and make, as we would say, a lot of sense. (N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone)
They make a lot of sense, but at the same time are the first step away from the heart of who Jesus is meant to be. And so Robert Capon offers the following reflections:
But notice too that Jesus’ “temptations,” as we misleadingly call them, are not temptations to sin… A little bread after forty days on no food is not a crime. A death-defying leap from a tall building could be the very thing the troops need to strengthen their faith in God’s power. And some effective measures to stop the ravages of politics-as-usual might be just what the doctor ordered. The test, therefore, is not to do wrong things; it is to do right things for the wrong reasons—to do good by the methods of the Prince of this world rather than to follow the paradoxical methods of the King of the universe. (Capon, Genesis: The Movie)
Think on that for a moment. This adversarial voice comes with three temptations… or perhaps we might pick up on Capon’s line and say instead three propositions.
You’re hungry after all these days in this wilderness. If you really are who you think you are, turn this stone into bread, and fill that hungry stomach.
Take control of all the kingdoms of this world and make them into what you know they should be… all it will cost is for you to bend your knee to me.
Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple and prove who you say you are… God’s angels will save you.
As each one of these is offered, Jesus holds firm by clinging tight to the scriptural tradition is which he has been formed:
“One does not live by bread alone.”
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
I really think that this story is brilliantly illustrated in the forty-panel cartoon created by the English illustrator Si Smith, with one panel added for each day of Lent. I’ve talked about the cartoon “40” before, and it is now posted on our website so you can view it—or perhaps re-view it if you’ve seen it in the past—because he catches the heart of this whole episode so brilliantly. There are very few words used. At the beginning the sentence, “For my 30th birthday I gave myself some time away from it all” appears, and then at the end comes “And now I’m back”. In between you see him pack up and head to the wilderness, beginning with great hope and joy, but then gradually growing more worn, tired, and even listless. A forty day fast is entirely possible, so long as there is water to drink. It is only after forty days that any damage begins to be done to the body, but that doesn’t mean that the long period of fasting would be easy, and particularly not near the end.
In Si Smith comic, it is on the 34th panel that the devil first appears off in the distance. In the 35th panel the devil is there, holding a stone to be turned into bread, and how is he pictured? As a very clean, awake, and aware Jesus figure. Oh, the figure is tinged in pink, but you see very clearly the implication. You can do this, you can forget what you thought you were, and be like me. Eat…
In the next two panels come the proposals to prove himself by letting the angels save him as he plummets from the temple pinnacle, and to have dominion over all of the kingdoms of the world… at the price of rejecting God’s way and assuming the adversary’s path. But no, this satan figure is utterly rebuked in panel 38th, and as it flees in panel 39 we see Jesus flat on the ground, with two angels coming in to tend to him. The final panel has the angels helping him back to Nazareth, followed by those few words, “And now I’m back.”
And of course, as these gospel writers have structured their telling of the good news, “back” is but the beginning. Now that Jesus is back from his desert time, he can begin to be precisely who he has been called to be. He will steadfastly turn away the temptation of taking any sort of short cut, walking steadily with his disciples toward the culmination of everything he is on the hill called Golgotha. Along the way we will watch as he feeds hungry people, heals broken people, challenges those who are oh so self-assured about their own religious self-righteousness, and presses those who follow him to embrace a whole different way of being God’s children. And we’ll watch all those times when he has to go away to a quiet place to pray, because if he doesn’t do that he might begin to forget what he stood for in the wilderness when he stared down the adversary, cited scripture, and said “no, no, no” to those temptations.
Yet we tell this story on the 1st Sunday in Lent not merely to remember Jesus’ particular walk, but also to again remind ourselves of what it might mean to follow him. And here N.T. Wright makes one of the most insightful observations, when he says,
Christian leaders today sometimes make the mistake of thinking that as long as they are pursuing the right aims in their public life, what they do in private doesn’t matter so much. That is a typical lie whispered by the same voice that Jesus heard in the desert. (N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone)
And I’d add that it isn’t just Christian leaders who make this sort of mistake; all of us can. And further I’d point to Robert Capon’s characterization of the test Jesus is presented with as being “not to do wrong things; [but] to do right things for the wrong reasons—to do good by the methods of the Prince of this world rather than to follow the paradoxical methods of the King of the universe.”
That, you see, holds for all of us. The gospels, the epistles, and in fact so much of the scriptures—both the Old and the New—are shot through with glimpses of the paradoxical ways of God. How many times do the last and the loser turn out to be the protagonists of the story? How about Jacob, or Joseph, or the boy David? How about the adult David, in his adultery and military maneuvering? What about the broken and exiled Israel, with the cranky prophet Jeremiah helping them to come to grips with who and what they are? What about Jesus himself, born to a peasant girl in some stable in Bethlehem? Or Peter and the rest of them, with their low-class upbringing and outrageous misses as to what Jesus is all about? What about Paul, who’d started his career as the greatest enemy of Jesus, and ended by dying for the sake of his love for him?
These are the ones who God chooses, asking them only to keep trying to say no, no, no to the temptations that will lead them down all the wrong paths, and then picking them up and dusting them off when they do trip down those paths and end up perilously close to the edge.
I can only say thank God that these are our stories, because they let me know that I’ll again be picked up and dusted off when I fall; again set on a road that will lead me to the place I truly belong. It is our promise and our hope.
