Gospel Matthew 4:1-11 First Sunday of Lent 2011 At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry. The tempter approached and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread. He said in reply, It is written: One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you and with their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone. Jesus answered him, Again it is written, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test. Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, "All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me. At this, Jesus said to him, Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve. Then the devil left him and, behold, angels came and ministered to him. 1
If Lent is anything like Jesus time in the desert, it can be a dangerous time and place. It can be dangerous because, like Jesus, we may have to face our demons. According Matthew s gospel Jesus went into the desert and fasted forty days and forty nights. The book of Exodus tells us that that is exactly what Moses did before He received the Ten Commandments (34:27-28). The number forty is significant because it evokes numerous significant events associated with judgment and testing in the Old Testament. The obvious intent of this testing story in the gospel is to place Jesus within the pattern of the prophets and the story of Israel in the wilderness. Jesus had just come through the waters of baptism, like Israel centuries before had crossed the Red Sea out of Egyptian slavery. Now Jesus enters the desert to face, in forty days and forty nights, the equivalent of Israel s forty years in the desert. In this period of fasting, Jesus enters a place where He can be confronted by diabolos, the devil, literally the one who overthrows. Before He can begin His work, His mission, Jesus has to face from the very start the possibility of being overthrown. He has to face the whispering voices in His life, those voices that could distort His true vocation, those voices that could turn Him away from the road that God was calling Him to travel. The backdrop to this confrontation was precisely Jesus baptism in the Jordan and His great moment of vision, when He so dramatically experienced a sense of God s calling and God s love for Him -the heavens were torn open and He knows Himself to be God s beloved Son. Despite this very concrete confirmation of His vocation, Jesus still 2
must face the voices that could turn Him away from doing what God had always wanted Israel to do- to bring light to the world. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews assures us that this was no pretend testing; it was real. He tells us that though Jesus was Son, he still had to learn obedience through what He was to suffer (5:8) and that, like us, He was tempted in every respect (4:15). The first two tests in the desert play on the very strength Jesus had received at His baptism when He heard the words, You are my Son, my beloved One! Very well, the demonic voice whispers, if you are God s son, surely God can t want you to go hungry when You have the power to get food for yourself. You are one of the elite; You don t need to be hungry now; Your fast is over. And if you are God s son, surely God will do what He says that He will do in the Psalms- He will give His angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands, they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone. (Psalm 91:11). Come on, Jesus, you know that you want people to see who you are; God must want that too. Go ahead and do something spectacular, something dramatic, like jumping off the temple. People will come flocking to you. Isn t that what you want? Isn t that what God wants? When neither of these tests works, the voice then drops all the covers and comes cleanjust forget about God, then, Jesus. Turn to the one who can give you power and greatness. That s what this is all about, after all, isn t it?. It can all be yours. You just have to forget about that Voice that told you that you were His beloved Son. I ll make you my beloved son! 3
What is going on in this story? Famished and weakened from his fast, Jesus, in a sense, invites to stand right in front of Him what has the power to divert Him from His mission. Like wise men and women of every age, He knows that before He fights the battle out there, He has to face the enemy in here. He has to invite into His consciousness what has the possibility to overthrow Him- the diabolical- to then stare it in the face, and to engage it. Unless He faces His demons, unless He faces what has the power to overthrow Him, now, before His work begins, and unless He wins at least an initial victory of them, then He will meet them again suddenly, and He could be overwhelmed by them. To each of the three tests, Jesus responds with the words of sacred scripture: 1. One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God. 2. You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test. 3. The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve. Jesus is committed to living off God s Word, to trusting God, without setting up trick tests to put God on the spot. He is committed to loving and serving God as the One who is His source and His goal, the One whom He knows as His Father. The tester will finally leave Him, but he doesn t give up after he has been routed by Jesus there in the desert. He isn t finished with the Messiah. He appears to Him in various ways throughout the three-year ministry. Jesus will meet the tempter again in various guises: 4
1) in the form of his enemies, the Pharisees and Sadducees who come to test Him- the same word used to describe what the evil one did in the desert(16:1), 2) in the form of His closest disciple, Peter, who tells Him that He must change His mind about going the way of suffering and crucifixion (16:22)- Jesus even calls Peter Satan, 3) in the form of the priests and bystanders who at the cross repeat the words of the tester in the desert- if you are God s Son, then come down from the cross. The voices that Jesus confronts in the desert- voices that would distract Him from His central vocation- surface over and over again in His ministry. Each time He wins a victory over them; He doesn t allow them to divert Him. He knows these voices. In the desert, he had heard them loud and clear, and there He confronted them head on. If there is anything this desert testing story teaches us, it should be that we must not turn our backs on our own demons, on that which has the power to overthrow us. We must not try to ignore those things which are capable of diverting us from our own vocations. We must not pretend that they do not exist. Otherwise, when we least expect it, they will surely emerge and turn us aside from the path of servanthood, from the path of being the sons and daughters of God. If we have heard God s voice welcoming us as His children, then we will certainly also hear the whispering voices of the one who would overthrow us. 5
Lent is precisely a time for naming, and identifying,and confronting those things which have the most power to sidetrack us and divert us from the calling and vocation that each of us has been given in baptism. And as God s children, we are entitled to use the same defence as the Son of God himself. We need to store sacred scripture in our own hearts, as Jesus did, and learn how to use it. We need to keep our eyes on God, as Jesus did, and learn how to trust Him. We need to remember our calling to bring God s light into the world, as Jesus did, and learn how to say no to the voices that would lure us back into the darkness. Lent is indeed a dangerous time! Sources N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone (part 1) (2004) Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins. A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (2005) 6