An Opportune Time - Luke 4:1-13 (Lent 1C)
Last week, we ended our last series with the glorification of the Transfiguration of Jesus. But then, the disciples and the Christ came down from the mountain and found the struggling in the valley and where the people are. There were bright lights, and costume changes, and although it didn't say - I bet there may have been a show-stopping song and dance that got lost in the translation over the millennia.
But this week, not only have we gone through the valley and the people who are in need of Jesus, but he followed the Spirit - which is always with him - to the wilderness. Now, you think of wilderness, what comes to mind? I imagine it's like the middle of South Dakota near the Badlands, where there is just a void of humanity. My sister used to live in Saltillo, Mexico, about five hours by car from the Texas border. We flew in through Monterrey, and then it was another two hour drive through the Mexican desert. It was interesting scenery - mainly because it didn't look like Northeast Indiana - not a corn stalk or soybean in sight. There were mountains and cacti, I almost imagined it to be something like the Old West with tumbleweed, although I don't think I ever saw any.
That car ride really gave me some perspective. As we were traveling between two rather large cities, the juxtaposition of the landscape made me think. How would anyone end up here? How do we choose to be somewhere so remote? Just like in the middle of a cornfield here, there were people living in the margins off the highway, in houses most likely off the grid, because that's what they chose.
Coming back around to our scripture, how did Jesus end up in the wilderness? How was a guy like him, who said once he had his disciples that he wanted to be fishers of men - end up in such a place devoid of people? According to the first line of our reading today, Jesus was with the Holy Spirit, so it's not like he was drawn there by anyone else. It's almost like it was something he needed to do. I think there's symbolism in this place. Over the last chapter, in chapter 3, again - there is TRIUMPH with Jesus' baptism, which I preached back in January. But after that, the second half of the chapter before our reading today deals with the genealogy of Jesus. When I was looking through the scripture for the baptism sermon, I thought it was odd Luke would place a genealogy kind of right in the middle of the story. Where the baptism ends in verse 23. Luke says, "Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his public ministry." Skipping the next 15 verses, chapter 4 begins, "Then Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan River, being urged by the spirit out into the barren wastelands of Judea, where Satan tempted him for forty days."
There's a lot to unpack, just in those two sentences. But between those lines, there are fifteen verses of names of people, which right now I'm glad they skipped over, otherwise maybe more than a few of you may be asleep. But the ones that matter right now, for my talk today, are Jesus & Adam. The gospel writer starts with Jesus, and through his PATERNAL line - kind of ironically, since Jesus' father was God, traces him back 44 generations to David. Then, another 32 generations to Adam. To ADAM, the first creation of God!
Stay with me now, I know I might be getting too far down the rabbit hole, but keeping Adam in mind, and then Jesus is taken by the Spirit to a wilderness, in just the way that Adam was lead out of the garden due to the relationship to God being broken. Adam was also tempted by a devil, and even in the first way - Jesus was tempted by food initially. "IF you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread!" Why only one loaf of bread? I mean - I know Jesus is there in the wilderness by himself, but if God is God, couldn't he provide bread for everyone? But I think that the devil was tempting whether Jesus himself to supply his own needs. Notice he is only appealing to Jesus himself... and not to the community. He wanted to separate Jesus from his community, from his people, to focus on himself, to his own identity. But Jesus comes back at him with scripture - being one with the Spirit - It is written, "One does not live by bread alone." This is a callback to Deuteronomy 8:3, which says - more fully, " So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord." Jesus had been humbled - and been allowed to hunger - for food, maybe even for community since he was in the wilderness. Jesus to break the fast also would have been a temptation to disobey the Spirit. The second temptation to rule over all the earth shows that the devil thinks that Jesus wants to be like God - without knowing that he IS God. The last temptation is the devil wanting Jesus to prove his worth to God, just like Adam questions his worth to God. Theologian Rev. Dr. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, put it this way - "In each temptation Jesus is asked to diminish himself in relation to Satan - to 'look selfishly within, to lift him (the devil) up, and to throw himself down."
As much as that might be true, we believe that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. So, Jesus was actually tempted with the possibility of these things. But how? This is a way for the Kingdom to be realized without relationship with God, or without the sacrifice of the Cross. It's a bypass, if you will. We all want the easy road, the one with the least amount of difficulty - it's unfortunately very human. But the self-examination process of Lent is anything but easy. Jesus was taken out of his element, I'm sure taken out of what he wanted to experience, so that he could - maybe just for a moment be more human than ever, hungry, hurting, lonely. And that's when the devil looked to seize the opportunity. Have you had any moments like that? You know you aren't always "living the dream", as people say in small talk... but how many times do we just let those moments hang there without following up. Maybe there's a better time for that. But maybe not.
We think of Jesus taking this time in the desert and the temptation, maybe as a bad thing. Our culture tells us that being tempted is just something that we must overcome, like a bad haircut. But also too many times, it's framed in a way that being tempted is a moral failing, like we don't have enough faith. Here's Jesus, with the Holy Spirit backing him up, STILL BEING TEMPTED. He is not immune to being human. We think of temptation as eating too much, or not being productive enough, or any number of things people struggle with on a daily basis. But judging people and not offering them grace is a takeaway from the message today.
Jesus shows that despite all the things holding him back - his hunger, his loneliness - he still lives intentionally with the Holy Spirit and knowing who He is. Yet, the devil wants to question that identity that God has provided to Jesus alone. But as soon as he is rebuffed and knows that he will not get anywhere with Jesus, he leaves. Has he defeated his aggressor? No - the text says that the enemy waits until another opportune time. So - that makes me wonder: what are the criteria that he would be waiting for? Let’s look at how he came to Jesus this time - the devil thought Jesus was alone, he thought he was weak because he was fasting, he thought removed from his community that Jesus could be bamboozled; run astray. But what the devil didn’t know, because it wasn’t outwardly apparent - Jesus was with the Holy Spirit.
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