The First Sunday of Lent

It’s an awful dilemma. To have the opportunity to make things right for the moment, but to pay a price that goes far beyond what our account can possibly hold. Jesus was not tempted to do horrible things. We read nothing in the Gospel of Matthew that describes Jesus being tempted with lust for another human being or greed for material possessions that he could never even use. Matthew doesn’t describe Jesus as slothfully cowering before the weight of all the work that was set before him.

Gluttony is obviously not a problem to the man who was famished after forty days in the desert. If Jesus coveted anything, it was a deeper relationship with his Father, not people or things that didn’t belong to him. Although Jesus could become angry at circumstances, his life was not filled with an anger that caused him to reject people, but with a love that caused him to welcome even the despised and those outside the bounds of society. A man overcome with pride, a man sure of his own ability to control his destiny and save the world from sin, would not have asked John to baptize him along with all of the crowds of people coming to repent of their sins.

These "seven deadly sins", as they are known, don’t seem to be the essence of the temptations that Jesus had to overcome. So we might well ask, "What’s the big deal? He wasn’t even tempted by really tough sins!" And there is some truth to the fact that he was not tempted to use people in despicable ways, nor was he tempted to treat people with contempt and cruelty.

To be fair, though, anyone of us would be sorely tempted to eat when we are famished. Food is a basic need, just past breathing, and it would be hard to turn down. However, people have turned down food when they are hungry. Gandhi is one example and there have been many prisoners of conscience who have fasted rather than eat when others are being oppressed. So it is possible. It is not inhuman or other than human. Jesus did not rely only on spiritual nourishment and feel no hunger, he was really hungry and turned down the food only because it cost more than he could pay.

Bread is not bad or evil. If someone offers you bread it is customary to accept it as a kind offer. But it is not just bread that the tempter offers Jesus. Here he is, experiencing hunger as so many people in the world do every day. He could rid not only himself of hunger, but the whole world. Think of it. You and I would no longer have to work for our bread. We would no longer have to sweat to eat. Wouldn’t that be a better world? Jesus apparently thought not.

There is something in the strife that calls us to live in ways that would be foreign if life offered no challenges. If none of us were challenged or were in danger of failing, when would any one of us reach out to help another? It’s almost as if Jesus were offered the chance to put us back in the Garden of Eden, where there was no strife to make bread but food aplenty for all, and he rejected that offer as one that had too high a cost.

And what of miracles and the power of faith? Is faith such a bad thing? I hate to admit that some of my brothers and sisters offer a similar kind of temptation to their congregations. I haven’t heard of anyone being tempted to throw himself off the spire of a cathedral, but I have heard of people being told to reject medicine for common illnesses and simply put themselves in the path of God’s angels through prayer and they will be healed, if their faith is strong enough.

There are two things wrong here. Scripture mentions one, that it is wrong to put God to the test. The other is that the impetus for the healing is quickly turned from God’s power and control of the world to our power and control of God. Let us look at the first, that it is wrong to put God to the test.

The Gospel doesn’t say much about this. Just that it is wrong to test God. What would be the result of God’s showing off his power a little bit to impress us? Isn’t that what happened in the resurrection anyway? Didn’t God pull the strings out from under the natural laws of physics and make Jesus come back to life? First, I want to get the language turned back to the teaching of the church rather than the language of popular agnosticism.

No, God did not make Jesus "come back to life". God did not resuscitate a corpse. God raised Jesus to new life. Paul tells us to understand the resurrection in terms of a seed dying in the ground and being reborn an oak tree, not another seed. We do not and cannot understand either the complexity of resurrection in terms of physics or the simplicity of resurrection in terms of love. It is beyond us.

When we try to put the resurrection into language that our minds can grasp we fail and only come up with ideas that are rejected by most thinking persons. The resurrection is not about reasonableness or rationality. It is about love winning out over all things. Even death. It is about God’s power not being appropriated to crush with strength, but to envelop with love and thereby turn wrong on its head. When God’s love surrounds the most heinous of acts, the actions are open to redemption by the nature of self giving and vulnerability that come with perfect love.

There, I’ve tried to explain it and have probably only succeeded in giving skeptics a different set of questions!

The real problem with testing God is the result. What if God did something incredibly powerful? I mean from a base of strength, not this vulnerable love stuff that turns something on its head, but with lightning bolts and loud noises and the kind of real power that makes people go back into their houses and close the doors in fear. That’s the problem. Fear. God would be the ruler and we would know that he is the ruler but we would have no free choice.

Coercion is not freedom to choose, it is limiting choice. That is why you won’t hear too many hellfire and damnation sermons from me, it would mean that God has given up on love and has resorted to fear. The God I know would never give up on love. The God who became one of us and died on the cross would not resort to fear, but would take fear into his own being and resurrect it with love into trust. I don’t know how, I just know that love turns fear inside out.

Perhaps it has to do with Original Sin as Rabbi Kushner explained it. The Original Sin of not believing that there is enough love to go around is really the fear of not being loved, and when that fear encounters love, real love, it simply vanishes like darkness vanishes in the sunshine.

What of the second reason not to test faith by putting ourselves in dangerous situations? As I said earlier, the problem becomes one of control. We know that miracles happen, and we know that Jesus was involved in miracles in people’s lives. What we don’t know is how those things happen. Like the resurrection, they are acts that seem to turn things on their heads.

Just when we believe that we are praying out of faith we find ourselves bartering with God to change or fix something. If we simply believe, then it will happen. Or if I visualize it, it will come true. And while there are positive aspects to these, they are fraught with danger if we come to expect that we control the universe by our thoughts. However well meaning the prayer, if it seeks to wrest control from God, even to do good, it is the kind of temptation that Jesus was faced with.

The third temptation is but another example of something good being corrupted. Jesus is asked to take control of all the kingdoms of the world. Thereby he could bring about justice. Surely we would all be better off if Jesus ruled the world’s kingdoms. Who could argue with that? Jesus could. The price was too high. The price to bring about justice was to give in to injustice.

Ruling the kingdoms of the world with power and great might would certainly change the way things work, but not for the better. Jesus could have made everyone do the "right" thing, but not even Jesus can force us to love one another. As Fr. Casey said, "It is not about being right, it is about being in love." Jesus could have ruled the world and been a Messiah like David was a Messiah, and that is the whole problem that we are faced with today.

The question was never, "Is Jesus the Messiah?" That wasn’t the question for the tempter we call Satan and it’s not a question for us. We know Jesus is the Messiah and so did the writers of the Gospel. The question is "What kind of Messiah is Jesus going to be?"

We are faced as well with that question. We don’t have to ask ourselves if we are people of faith. For that matter, Jews don’t have to ask if they are Jews, Muslims don’t have to ask if they are Muslims and Christians don’t have to ask if they are Christians. However, we all have to ask, "What kind of Jew or Christian or Muslim will I be?"

It seems to me to be the harder question. I do feel for those people who have yet to find a way to God, those who are still asking questions that can only be answered by faith but are cut off from the answer because they choose to deny faith has a place in the world. Perhaps their questions will lead them to faith. Once we find any faith, we must respond to the task of finding the essence of that faith.

Is God a God of fear or a God of trust? While it is possible to fear God in the sense of having respect for his creating ourselves and the universe, while it is possible to feel a sense of awe and complete wonder at the magnificence and powerful presence of God and to know that we are utterly nothing without him, it is possible to know that this same God desires only the best for us even at great cost to himself. If God wanted us truly to fear him, he would desire only the best for himself at great cost to us.

Jesus chose the kind of Messiah he was going to be that day in the desert. We have to choose what kind of Christians we will be as we ponder how to respond to our own temptations. Like Jesus, the temptations may look like they are bringing about good. If I control this person’s life I can make better choices for them and thus make life better for us all. Let me put this in an all too familiar situation.

Osama bin Laden and his compatriots believe that they are working toward a good thing and that their means are justified by the good ends. Most of us cannot even begin to understand how they could be so incredibly mistaken. How could anyone believe that good can come out of destroying lives of innocent people? Yet, we find ourselves and our allies accused of similar atrocities, though in lesser magnitude. Some of our leaders have used the same rhetoric that has been used by those who seek to destroy us and simply changed the faces and names of who is "evil" and who is "good", but have forgotten to ask what it means to be good.

These are hard questions and I admit to you that I don’t have any easy answers. I know that we must continue to ask not whether we have a leadership role in the world, but "what kind of leader are we going to be?"

I also know that we cannot begin to answer that question until those of us who are Christian, or Muslim or Jew have answered for ourselves what it means to be a Christian or Muslim or Jew. And we may come up with different answers! Christ leads Christians to answers that we know are not always easy. Christ leads us to look further than the immediate good and reconcile the immediate with the eternal. Jesus could have been a great Messiah in the way that David was, but he wouldn’t have been the Messiah that God called him to be. He wouldn’t have been the Incarnate Word of God.

In the same way, I don’t have to ask if I am a father. I know the answer to that. What I have to ask is "what kind of father am I going to be?" Am I going to be the kind of father that wants his children to be safe, so never lets them play outside with other children? I don’t want to be that kind of father. I want my children to grow, trust and become helpful people in this life. Do I want my children protected from dangerous people, in this country, in this community and around the world? Of course I do. Does that mean that we have to actively search for and stop the people who would seek to do us harm? We could try to shut ourselves off from the world, but that would be like not letting my little girls go out and play at the park, not a very appealing answer. If we live in the world we have to deal with all of the people in the world, whether in our community or around the globe.

There are no easy answers. That is what today’s lesson is about in both Genesis and Matthew. There are hard questions of "what kind of Messiah did Jesus choose to be?" and thus, "what kind of Christians are we called to be?"

What we do know is that we have an example to follow. Jesus shows us that the way to struggle with temptation is to remember who we are and whose we are. We are beloved children of God, God’s heirs to spread the good news of freedom to the captive and nourishment to the hungry. What kind of Messiah did Jesus choose to be? The kind that knew his Father’s love would conquer sin and death. And then he went to his death on the cross.

What kind of Christian will I choose to be? +