Jesus in the Desert with his Adversary

 Lent I| C| St. Paul’s, DeKalb, Illinois   

      “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  These are the words with which we started out our Lenten journey this week.   They bring “front and center” into our consciousness a huge and bewildering paradox: I am/you are-- beloved of God.  And you and I will die.  The first truth does not prevent the second.  The second truth does not negate the first. 

     In many ways, this is the same paradox Jesus wrestles with in our Gospel reading this morning.  At his baptism, Jesus hears the truth about who he is: he is God’s beloved Son.   But when the Spirit leads him into the wilderness (other gospels say the Spirit drove him/forced him) things get pretty tough and it might have been hard at times for Jesus to remember.  In that, I imagine he is like us.  It’s a challenge to hold onto love in a bleak and lonely wasteland.  He has to trust that he can be beloved and weak with hunger, precious and nobody special/ valued and vulnerable---all at the same time.  He has to learn that God's love and concern are all profoundly part of his flesh-and-blood humanity.  

      As if fasting wasn’t difficult enough, this entity called “the devil” shows up to take advantage of Jesus’ weakness.  This word “devil” remember, isn’t a proper name but a description of what it does.  The word “devil” derives from Hebrew word “shaytan,” or satan---which also is not a proper name, but a description of what it does, what it brings into the situation.  Literally, it means the the one who slanders, who lies.  It is the enemy or “adversary,” of human well-being and flourishing.  In this morning’s gospel, it offers Jesus three chances to abandon his humanity--recalling from last Sunday, the fact that God is perfectly human---and that Jesus is the perfect incarnation--en-fleshing-- of God’s humanity.  These “temptations” actually can become invitations for us — invitations to trust God’s love in the rough, barren places of our own lives.  Remembering that it is our intention and hope in this life to become more and more humane—more and more human, more and more like Jesus.

     The first temptation focuses on hunger—Jesus’ hunger, but also the hunger of everyone else.  “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”  People everywhere are hungry—do as I say, says humanity’s adversary---and you can end world hunger.  In the Adversary’s economy, unsatisfied desire or wanting--is an unnecessary aberration; not just part of what it means to be human.  By inviting Jesus to magically satisfy his hunger (and anyone else’s) his adversary invites Jesus to deny or alter the reality of the incarnation.  Of what it means to be human.   To “cheat” his way to satisfaction, instead of waiting, paying attention to his hunger, and leaning into God for its lasting fulfillment.  Along the way, the Adversary encourages Jesus to disrespect and manipulate creation for his own satisfaction.  To turn what is not meant to be eaten — a stone — into an object he can exploit.  As if the stone has no intrinsic value, beauty, or goodness, apart from Jesus’s ability to possess, manipulate, and consume it.

     Many of us have “given up” something for Lent this year.  Chocolate, wine, TV, Facebook.  The goal of this and any fasting is to sit with our hungers, our wants, our desires — and learn what they have to teach us.   What is the hunger beneath the hunger?  Can we be consumed by our hunger and still live?  Desire and still flourish?  Lack what we want, and still live generously, without exploiting the beauty and abundance all around us?  Who and where is God when we are famished for whatever it is, that we long for? Friendship, meaning, intimacy?  A home, a savings account, a family?

     Fasting to endure—to tough out our hunger--in and of itself is not a virtue, it’s a classroom or better yet, a laboratory.  To sit patiently with your desire — to become its student — and still embrace your identity as God’s beloved, is hard.  It’s very, very hard.  But this is the invitation.  Can we be loved and hungry at the same time--hope and hurt at the same time?  Most of all, we can trust that when God nourishes us, it won’t be by magic.  It won’t be manipulative and disrespectful.  It won’t necessarily be the food we’d choose for ourselves, but it will feed and nourish us, all the same.  And through us — if we will learn to share — it will feed the world.

    The second temptation targets Jesus’s ego.  After showing Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world,” the devil promises him glory and authority.  “It will all be yours,” he says.  Fame.  Visibility.  Recognition.  Clout!  A kingdom to end all kingdoms, here and now.  The implication is that God’s beloved should not labor in obscurity.   Surely, to be God’s child is to be center stage: visible, applauded, admired, and envied.  A God who really loves us will never “abandon” us to a modest life, lived in what the world considers insignificance.

     That we Christians tend to have an uneasy relationship with power is an understatement.  Church history is littered with the ugly fallout of “Christian” ambition, power, fame, and authority gone wrong.  So, the question for us/ is whether we can accept Jesus’s version of significance—which is borne of humility and surrender.  How important is it to us that we’re noticed?  Praised?  Liked?  Is our belief in God’s love for us contingent on a definition of success that doesn’t come from God at all?  Can we trust that God sees us even when the powers-that-be do not?  Can our lives as God’s beloved ones thrive in quiet places?   Humble places?

     The uncomfortable truth about authentic Christian power is that it seems like weakness.  Jesus is lifted up — but he's lifted up on a cross. 

     The third temptation targets Jesus’s vulnerability.  “[God] will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,” coaxes the Adversary.  “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”  The implication is that if we are beloved of God, then God will keep us safe.  Safe from physical and emotional harm, safe from disease, safe from accidents, safe from death. 

     It is a powerfully enticing lie, because it targets our deepest fears about what it means to be human in a broken, dangerous world.  We want so much — so, so very much — to believe that we can leverage our beloved-ness into protection.  That we can get God to guarantee us rescue if we just believe hard enough. 

     But no.    If the cross teaches us anything, it teaches us that God’s precious children still bleed, still hurt, still die.    We are loved in our vulnerability.  Not out of it.

     Three temptations.  Three invitations.  What will we do with them? 

     In some ways, Jesus’s struggle in the wilderness brings the ancient story of human temptation full circle.  "You can be like God," whispers the snake to Adam and Eve in the lushness of the first garden.  “Will you dare to know what God knows?”

      In the wilderness, the Adversary offers Jesus a cunning reversal of those questions: "Can you bear to be fully human?  Can you exercise restraint and accept limitations?  Abdicate power?  Accept danger?  Can you bear what it means to be mortal, to be fully human?”

     If those forty days in the wilderness was a time of self-creation, a time for Jesus to decide who he was and how he would live out his calling, then here is what he chose: emptiness over fullness.  Obscurity over honor.  Vulnerability over rescue.  At every instance, when Jesus could have reached for the magical, the glorious, and the safe---he reached instead for the mundane and boring, the invisible, and the risky.

     The Gospel tells us that Jesus didn’t choose to enter the wilderness. The Spirit led him there. And here's the main thing to take from all of this: Jesus didn’t choose a wilderness experience.  We don’t volunteer for pain, loss, danger, or terror.  But these are common to humanity--the wilderness “happens.”  Whether it comes to us in the guise of a hospital waiting room, a broken relationship, a troubled child, a sudden death, or a crippling panic attack, the wilderness shows up, unwanted and unwelcome, at our doorsteps.  It insists on itself. 

        Sometimes it is God’s own Spirit who drives us into the difficult places we find ourselves in.   It all inevitably comes down to this.   Experiences that are hard because, in our complicated world, we  to choose to do the right thing/the ethical, the moral thing—even if works against our own more narrowly defined desires or interests.(   )   Does it mean that God can redeem even the most barren periods of our lives, if we choose to stay and pay attention?  Yes.  Does it mean that our deserts can become holy even as they remain dangerous?  Absolutely. 

      What does this mean for us as we begin our Lenten journeys this year?  Maybe it means it’s time to follow Jesus into the desert.  It’s time to look evil in the face.  Time to hear evil’s voice, recognize, and confess its appeal. It’s time to decide who we are and whose we are.  Remember, Lent is not a time to do penance for being human.     It’s a time to do penance for resisting our humanity, to embrace all that it means to be human.  Human and hungry.  Human and vulnerable.  Human and beloved.  (pause ) And, remember that the adversary, the evil one---never goes away completely.   It (and it is an “it”) never really goes away.  It merely departs until a more opportune time.

      May God--in God’s great love--grant us all a holy and meaningful Lent.