"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil."
--Luke 4: 1-2a
I was out to dinner with a group of people in a non-church
setting a few nights ago and got asked one of those priestly questions. Out of the blue one of the folks I was
with blurted out: so Jesus’ temptation
in the wilderness…why did it happen after his baptism?! This is what I like to call a coffee hour
question: it’s a clerical question that
you get asked in a social setting, and it usually catches you off-guard. I gave this person an answer, but I wasn't sure whether or not it was the right one. After sitting with this gospel through the week, however, I’ve decided
that the same answer I gave to that person at dinner is the same one I’m going
to give y’all.
An eastern mural's depiction of the Temptation of Jesus.
We find Jesus
having just been baptized by John. God has declared him as God’s Son, and he is
driven into the wilderness, filled with the Holy Spirit. It is out there in the wildnerness that he encounters the devil. The word here is diabalus, which is used for devil,
demon, enemy, or accuser. It’s not
capitalized, so this is not meant to be the end-all-be-all devil with a
vibractated tail and carrying a hay fork.
This is an enemy of God, whose sole purpose is to stand between Jesus
and God, to distract him from what God wants him to do, and to entice him to
follow, not God’s will, but the will of mortals.
So Jesus is presented with three temptations: the first is to always have his fill. Jesus has been fasting out there in the
desert and is no doubt famished. Turn
the stones to bread, the devil says, and you’ll never be without. Jesus refuses. The next temptation is to have authority over
nations. The devil takes him on a mountain and brags that all of these kingdoms
are his and could be Jesus’ if only Jesus worships him. Jesus refuses. And lastly the devil uses Scripture—Psalm 91
to be exact—to convince Jesus that if he tests God and jumps off the pinnacle
of the temple that God will save him.
Jesus refuses. Three
temptations: to always be filled, to
have authority over others, and to put God to the test.
Brothers and sisters, these three temptations, these three
devils—if you will—are still very much alive in the world. We experience them regularly. We are often tempted by a consumer-driven society that tells us we need more and more, and that if we get more, we'll finally satisfy our hunger. Get just the right amount of money and material possessions, and we won't hunger for anything anymore, including God. We see the temptation to power and prestige, as well, especially in our presidential candidates. Just look at what that ambition for power has
done to these folks! Meanwhile, we are tempted to look out only for ourselves, for our own family, friends, and church brethren, and to forget everybody else. That's a temptation to lord over others. And every single one of us has given in to the temptation to test God. We've all prayed to God to give us something, and we've all tried making a deal with God (“if you give me this, I’ll do that for
you.”). These temptations haven’t gone
anywhere. They’re still here, they’re
still lurking, they’re all around us, constantly poking and prodding at us,
doing anything possible to turn our attention away from God, away from God’s
promise of love and mercy.
This, I believe, is why Jesus was tempted after his
baptism. Jesus’ baptism was his first
public act in his ministry—at least in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and
Luke. All three of them say that he
went immediately into the desert to face these temptations. Why now?
Why not when he was younger and may have been more prone to give in to
the devils’ offers? Perhaps it is
because baptism—that public action—was the agent that drove him out there, and
that Spirit that filled him was the same Spirit that rested on him as a dove
and called him “My Son.” Jesus was
tempted after his baptism because this sequence of events in his life mirrors
our own.
We are baptized not for the purpose of staying in the church
where it is safe and friendly. We are
baptized for the purpose of being driven out by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness of this world. It is a world
that is full of temptations, full of devils that seek to undermine the love and
mercy of God in our lives. It is a world
that offers us a quick fix for our problems, a world that says we should gain
power for ourselves at the expense of others, and a world that tries convincing
us that it understands the mind of God when, in fact, it’s as bad at
interpreting the meaning of Scripture as that devil was to Jesus when he missed
the point of Psalm 91. In spite of those
temptations, though, we, like Jesus, have been filled with the Holy Spirit. We, like Jesus, face temptation after
temptation everyday. The devils, they
come and go-waiting for an opportune time to return—but they do not succeed. They cannot succeed. Not so long as we are led by the Holy Spirit,
who calls us God’s Sons and Daughters, and empowers us to face those devils
head-on.
This occurs, though, when we see church for what it really is: the dress-rehearsal for the rest of our lives! Church is not a country club that occasionally mentions Jesus. It's not a gathering of like-minded individuals who've all be baptized and saved and who come together to sing songs and have pot-lucks. Church is a collection of the broken, yet redeemed Body of Christ, called to go out into the wilderness and offer the message that will satisfy the hunger this world faces, so that we may bring the broken into our communities of faith. But this can only happen if we let the Spirit drive us out. It is scary to step out of our comfort zone, but I suspect Jesus was scared by it, as well. With him as our guide, and with the Spirit driving us, we can, in fact, face that scary world and transform it!
Jesus had choices. He could have stayed put and gone back to Nazareth after his baptism. He could have given in to those devils and put his own needs ahead of those of God. He
could have sought only his own power and prestige, but he chose to live out
there in the wilderness, to be a man without a place to lay his head, and to take the position of a servant, so that we might know what real leadership looks like. We have those choices, too. Do we stay cooped up in our cozy church and
look out only for ourselves? Or do we let the
Spirit lead us into the cold, frightening wilderness, into the unloving and unforgiving world, so
that, like our Lord, we can share the Good News of our all-loving and
all-forgiving God? The choice is
ours.