503. Our Great Temptations in the Desert

While there can be no doubt that the Church’s Lectionary was perfectly  chosen and arranged by the Fathers or whoever did it… … here’s another of the big mistakes they made. The story of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness is fundamental to our understanding of the Christian life. So when do we read it?  On the Tuesday after the Sunday after the Theophany, of all times, when very few will read it and even fewer will hear it. Granted, there are so many significant stories in the Gospels that it was hard to choose only 52 for Sundays. I wish we could go over to the three-year cycle of readings, like most Western liturgical churches now have, but the chances of that happening here are about 75% less than zero.

So let’s talk about Christ’s great Temptations here. Thereby at least eight or nine hundred of us will hear the story –  or rather read it. Then we’ll talk about it and the odd title I’ve give it above. Here is the story, as appointed in the Church’s Lectionary for this past Tuesday. I’ve taken the text from the Greek Archdiocese. You might want to stand up to read this:

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PRIEST: Wisdom. Arise.

Let us hear the Holy Gospel.

Peace be with all.

( And with your spirit. )

The reading is from the holy Gospel according to Luke.

Let us be attentive.

( Glory to You, O Lord, glory to You. )

Luke. 4:1 – 15

At that time Jesus returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command the stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” And the devil took him up, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I will give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’” And he took him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you, to guard you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and a report concerning him went out through all the surrounding country. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.“

CHOIR

Glory to You, O Lord, glory to You

Long Prologue

How do we come to know this story? Obviously because Christ told it to His disciples.

In the narrative of Our Lord’s life, this episode took place immediately after His Baptism.  Notice at the beginning that it was the Holy Spirit Who led Him out to be tempted by the devil. That seems very odd at first. Was it a good thing for Him to be tempted? Yes, it was. Before He began His ministry, He needed to face and conquer these Great Temptations that otherwise would nag Him all through it. He needed to “set the tone” of His work now, at the beginning – in the desert where he would deal with them and their source face to face, with no distractions to escape to. He was tempted in the desert for “forty” days – a symbol of “sufficient”, I think – “and afterwards he was hungry”. I should think so!

Why did I title this Post “Our Great Temptations…?” Because as we go through the desert of this life (and it can be a very barren and desolate and confusing place sometimes – that’s no secret) each of us is also subject to the same demonic temptations. Listen carefully: these are your temptations and mine, all through our lives, especially of people who have power and authority, as almost all of us do in one way or another, if only over ourselves. Here Jesus leads us through them and shows us how to conquer them.

This immediately raises an issue: Christ taught us to pray “Our Father… lead us not into temptation.” But does He allow the devil to tempt us? Obviously He does. Temptations comes at us frequently. Why does God allow this? For the same reason He allowed the devil to “have a go” at Jesus. So He, and we with Him, can conquer them.

Was Jesus really tempted? Yes.

We know how much He was tempted on  Holy Thursday night in the Garden, how much He wanted to escape what was now upon Him – till finally He said “Not My will be done, but Thine be done”.

At the end of the story of the Great Temptations, is says the devil withdrew “until an opportune time”. We don’t know when that “time” was, nor can we even begin to imagine what temptations God Incarnate was subjected to all through His thirty three years. Try to imagine Jesus as a fully human teen-age boy. I’ve wondered what would have happened if God the Son had sinned. I think the whole moral foundation of the cosmos would have crumbled. I don’t even want to think about it. However, thought it all, He was faithful. “We do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”  Hebrews 4:15

Note something strange in the phrasing of the temptations. Each time the devil begins “If you are the Son of God…” Was he testing Jesus’ own Self-awareness, so he could destroy Him at the beginning? Or was the devil himself not sure He was the Son of God, and was trying to find out? In the Gospel accounts elsewhere, the demons cry: “We know Who you are: the Son of God.” Yet the Vesperal Stichera which begin our Holy Saturday Divine Liturgy have Satan crying (I paraphrase): “I accepted a man and received God. He has destroyed my kingdom. He has released my captives. If only I had known…” All we cay say is that now he knows.

Let’s begin.

The First Temptation

“Command this stone to become bread.” It was symbolic. “Go for the “bread”, for material things. Use Your power to gain any material thing You might want for Yourself. Jesus could have lived in comfort, like the King He was and is, forever. Or even just settle down somewhere, have someplace to come home to every night. Every human being wants a place to call home, He already could see what lay ahead of Him: a lifetime of wandering. “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”  Luke 9:58  I do not know what the modern “Prosperity Gospel” people make of this. They certainly aren’t following the actual Jesus of the Gospels

Or He could have had food enough to feed every poor or starving person in the world, eliminate every famine – and beyond that provide clothing and shelter for the poor, all of them. He had that power. What a temptation that must have been. Why didn’t He go for it? “Jesus answered him with a quotation from the Scriptures: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” Deuteronomy 8:3  There is more to life than a nice house and a full stomach. Christ fed the multitudes twice in the wilderness, but He had come above all to fill humanity’s deepest needs. love, forgiveness, eternal life.

As for us: The whole system of the modern world is designed to fill our material needs (and wants and desires), and to tempt us to believe that when we finally get that Mercedes and that elegant house, then we will be completely happy and fulfilled. Some people get that and then wonder what’s missing? so they buy more stuff. Only a few begin to search for something deeper,

Well, hooray and thank God for a warm house, say I, writing on this cold winter day in Wisconsin, and thank God also that by His mercy our pantry is full. That’s good. We need “bread”. But people need more than “bread”. And that’s why we who have more than we need should give generously to support 1 International Orthodox Christian Charities, who provide for peoples’ material needs in many places in this battered world,  And we should also support 2 the Orthodox Christian Mission Center, as they provide for peoples’ spiritual needs, spreading our holy Faith in many places around the world. Do this out of obedience and love. But do it also just to prove to yourself that you have not fallen for the First Temptation.

The Second Temptation

The devil took Jesus up and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and said “To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I will give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.”

Power! over the whole world.  Could the devil have fulfilled what he promised here? Does he have authority over all the kingdoms of the world? As we look at the history of the past hundred years or so, I think we could make a good case for it: World War I, the Great Depression, the rise of Communism and Nazi-ism, World War II, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, all the starving and battered people, all the refugees desperately trying to escape poverty and violence. The pictures coming out of Gaza, the inhumane treatment of multtiudes of innocent people. And the government of the first great democracy in the world now tied up in knots, eating itself apart from the inside. And death, “the last enemy to be destroyed” which still gets us all. 1 Corinthians 15:26  We just “laid away” another beloved parishioner at Saint Nicholas yesterday.) Under the circumstance it was the better thing. But I hate it!

Sometimes it feels like the devil is really in charge here.

However, the devil is also a liar. He can stir up a lot of trouble, but he does not rule this world. Christ called him the “prince of this world”  John 12:31“, in Greek”το ἄρχων·τοῦ κόσμου”, “the ruler of the cosmos”, which widens his influence but reduces his power . The devil is not “το  βασιλεύς”, the king, the emperor of the cosmos. Jesus Himself, with His Father and the Holy Spirit, rule this world. And if Jesus of Nazareth had fallen for this temptation, He would turned against Himself, destroyed Himself.

To Satan’s (and everyone elses’) utter astonishment, Christ turned the tables on the him and voluntarily became powerless. He allowed Himself to be executed, and so He entered death and began to conquer death, the final enemy, from the inside, and led us who must die through death and out into the Light, so that we should never more fear death. “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

Let’s go back a step. How has Christ won His disciples in this life? Not by conquering them and forcing them, so that we must follow Him, like it or not. No. He chosen to win us to Himself by His love, allowing us by our free will to choose Him, or not – to choose His Light over the darkness, or not. And it is working. He began with only twelve disciples – and now, look!

Our Temptation: Satan does not offer us the world. But He does offer us the temptation of power, to “control”. Of course parents and teachers and priests and presidents and generals are given a degree of authority, so that they can control their flock, whatever it may be. But any good parent or teacher or priest (or president, I guess) knows that their flock are best controlled not by threat but by love, by caring about them. Whip your kids into order, bully or manipulate people into shape, and first chance they get they’ll reject you and what you stand for. “What the world needs now is love, sweet love”. At least that’s how Jesus did it.

The Third Temptation

“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you, to guard you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’

Ah, the devil is getting wise. Now he quotes Scriptures back at Him: Psalm 91:11-12. Take note! When someone says “The Bible says…”, be very cautious. After all, “The Bible” doesn’t say anything. “People” say things, quoting the Bible, either in context or not, accurately or inaccurarately, either for good or for ill. Verses from the Bible can be – and have been, and still are  – twisted to mean almost anything.

In  this case, Jesus was being tempted to make a public show of Who He is. This He steadfastly refused ro do throughout His ministry. Have you noticed that most of His wonders * – beginning with changing the water to wine at the wedding in Cana – were performed secretly. His few public wonders were for a purpose: for example, to show the Pharisees that it was right to heal on the Sabbath.

• The word “miracle” is not found in the New Testament.

“When some of the scribes and Pharisees said, ‘Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.’ He answered and said to them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’”  Matthew 12:38-40

“When Herod saw Jesus, he was greatly pleased, because for a long time he had been wanting to see him. From what he had heard about him, he hoped to see him perform a sign of some sort. He plied him with many questions, but Jesus gave him no answer.“ Luke 23-8-9

Christ’s temptation here is our temptation exactly. Don’t play games with God. Don’t make a show of your religion. Now, I don’t suppose many here present are tempted to throw yourselves off the Empire State Building to prove to the world that God will save you.  Usually it’s more like: “God, I’m about to do something stupid, but I trust you to get me out of it.” Or simply “God, if You do ‘this’ for me, I’ll do ‘that’ for You” – or the other way ‘round –  tit for tat, as if we were on equal terms with God, or as if God exists to serve us. Good things should be done not to make a bargain with God, but because they are the right thing to do, because Jesus commands them.

A principle: Any who make a show of performing “miracles” or doing good things are not true followers of Jesus Christ. Avoid them. (Yes, I am thinking of what we can see online.)

I was about to write a snappy summation, when it occurred to me that our Lord Jesus has already done it.

“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven.  Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.  But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.” Matthew 6:1-4

Short Conclusion

“And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee.”

If we can resist these great temptations, we also will go out into our world with the power of the Spirit.

Next Week: The Seven Deadly Sins and their results

Week after Next: I can’t believe it – we’re heading towards Lent already.