First Sunday in Lent
Not By Bread Alone — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 4:1-13/NRSVUE)
One Saturday afternoon when I was maybe eleven years old, my parents left me home alone. And what did I choose to do with this newfound taste of freedom, you might ask? Well, being the rebel that I am, I decided to turn on the stereo and have a little fun. After playing some selections from my own limited library of records at ear-splitting volume, I decided to raid my mother’s much larger collection. I mean you can only listen to “Detroit Rock City” by Kiss so many times before you find yourself wanting to hear something else (anything else).
Now, I’ve come to appreciate my Mom’s musical taste a whole lot more with the passage of time, but way back then Poco and Kenny Loggins weren’t really doing anything for me. And so I kept digging until I found something interesting to listen to — and wow, did I ever.
There in the deepest recesses of the record cabinet was an album I’d never encountered before. I can still see the cover of it in my mind’s eye: it was predominantly blue, with a long-haired bearded man clad in jeans and a matching jean jacket sitting on a tall stool in front of a chalkboard upon which was written the following: “George Carlin – Class Clown.” I took that slab of vinyl out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable, turned up the volume — and the course of my life was changed forever.
My parents used to let me stay up late on Fridays and watch the Tonight Show, so I had seen a few of George Carlin’s stand-up routines before, but this material sure wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d hear on network television. My eleven year-old mind was completely blown — especially by the notorious bit called “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”
But, like I said earlier, with the passage of time I’ve come to appreciate some things that I didn’t appreciate as a kid and one of those things is Carlin’s stories about his childhood spent in a Catholic elementary school in New York City — they’ve really resonated with me ever since I decided to go pro at this.
One of those stories is about the experience of what Carlin calls “Heavy Mystery Time,” the weekly occasion on which a parish priest would come to class in order to answer kids’s questions about God and religion. As good as the intentions behind this initiative may have been on the part of the adults, for the mischievous students it turned into an opportunity to try and stump Father Russell by coming up with all sorts of absurd and unanswerable theological questions; you know, gems like: “If God is all powerful can he make a rock so big that even he himself can’t lift it?”
After reading today’s story from Luke’s Gospel — the one about Jesus’s forty days of temptation by the devil in the wilderness — I have some questions that I wish I’d had the chance to pose to Father Russell:
First, wouldn’t Jesus have been able to do a lot more with a loaf of bread than he could with that rock the devil showed him? After all, he’s out there in the desert starving, isn’t he?
Second, would we all be better off if Jesus had jumped off the temple into the arms of the angels instead of dying on the cross? I mean, both are ways for him to demonstrate that he’s God’s Chosen One, but the first one sounds a lot more appealing that the second, doesn’t it?
Third, wouldn’t life here on earth be a whole lot nicer for everyone if Jesus had just accepted that offer to rule over all its kingdoms? I have to tell you, that one’s been on my mind a lot lately.
I know what I probably would have done had I been in Jesus’s shoes — and it’s definitely not what Jesus did. So, in the spirit of Heavy Mystery Time, here’s my fourth and final question: What is the point of this weird little story?
If you’d somehow lost track of time and heard this passage being read aloud in church, you could bank on the fact that it was the first Sunday in Lent because one of the accounts of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness (from Matthew, Mark or Luke) is always the Gospel text for this particular day. And this makes sense since Jesus’s forty day stint in the wilderness is the inspiration for the forty day Lenten season that we observe.
Mark’s account of the temptation is the shortest of the three (just two lines, to be exact) and it contains no description of either the specific temptations that Jesus faces or his conversations with the devil. The challenges that Jesus receives from the devil are basically the same in Matthew and Luke, but the order in which they appear and the language used to describe them are different. It’s impossible to say which version is accurate and we’ll probably never know what really happened out there in the wilderness because, as you may have noticed, no one was there except for Jesus and the devil.
Matthew goes from bread and stones in the desert to the temple to a mountaintop. Luke reverses Matthew’s second and third temptations, having the final one take place in the temple (as you also may have noticed, Luke’s Gospel both begins and ends at the temple). The temple, of course, was the center of Jewish worship and Luke is trying to emphasize that Jesus is the new temple, the new center of worship — a truth that seems to be acknowledged by the devil himself in way he poses the first and last challenges here.
“If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here…”
If you are the Son of God.
Jesus is the Son of God, and we already know this because God said so at Jesus’s baptism, which takes place right before this story. And the devil knows it too. You see, despite the way the devil frames it here, the issue isn’t really whether Jesus is God’s Son; the issue is what it truly means for Jesus to be God’s Son. The devil presents Jesus with an alternative view of what being God’s Son could be like — and that’s the theme of all three temptations in a nutshell.
I can’t help but wonder whether Jesus found any of these possibilities enticing, even if just for a moment. Did he think, “Imagine all the people I could feed (including myself) with stones turned into bread”? Did he think, “This world would be a better place if I were king of all”? I can’t really say for sure, but I can see how it would have been tempting. Because a temptation isn’t much of a temptation if it isn’t actually tempting, is it?
But Jesus doesn’t give in. He’s hungry, but he trusts that God will provide; he’s offered dominion over all, but he trusts in God’s reign; he has the chance to put God to the test, but he chooses to trust God instead. This is the point of this story: Jesus never stops living his life in light of the principle of “not my will, but thine.” And Jesus’s unwavering trust in God is pretty incredible to think about — especially during this Lenten season as we walk with intention through our own wildernesses, however so defined.
We have to remember, however, that this story of the temptation of Jesus is about Jesus, and it’s about God, and it is about Jesus’s relationship with God; it is not so much about us. I cringe a little when I think about how many sermons have been preached, are being preached and will be preached based upon the underlying premise that Jesus resisted the devil’s temptations, so you can do it too.
I mean sure, every once in a great while we manage to get it right; we prove ourselves capable of resisting some sort of earthly enticement. And I’m definitely not saying that we shouldn’t even try. But we also need to be honest because we — even at our very best — could not possibly manage to do what Jesus does here. Jesus is Jesus, and God is God, and we are neither.
Once someone I know— someone who fully understands what I do here — told me that she had decided to give up coffee for Lent; she figured it wouldn’t to be too challenging since she didn’t actually drink coffee. But as flippant as her statement might seem, there is profound theological truth in it.
Resisting the things that we crave — and by that I don’t just mean relatively small temptations like chocolate or caffeine, but rather big temptations such as comfort and power and self-preservation — is really hard for us humans; and it is, I dare say, virtually impossible for us to do consistently throughout our lives. And so Lent is not a time to think about our ability to be like Jesus; it’s a time for acknowledging our inability to be like Jesus. And it is a time to stand in awe of — and be grateful for — the fact that Jesus was Jesus.
The devil, though he beats a hasty retreat from Jesus, doesn’t really ever leave us in order to return at a more opportune time because with us it is always an opportune time. This is why we need Jesus. Maybe we should stop pretending we’re something we’re not (masters of the universe) and actually accept ourselves for who we are (imperfect beings in need of God’s grace).
Even though we are imperfect, God still believes we are worthwhile; despite all of humanity’s ugliness, God still finds us beautiful; amidst all of our brokenness, God still sees us as being worth saving. Even though we so often fail to love God and to love each other as we love ourselves — as God has told us to do over and over and over again — we are always the recipients of God’s love. There is no question about that.