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Mark A. Lewis,
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MLewis@secaucus.org
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Temptation:
Pulling us away from God
Reflections on the
lessons for the First Sunday of Lent
4 March 2001
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Deuteronomy 26:5-11 / Psalm
91:9-15
Romans 10:8b-13 / Luke
4:1-13
I'm a few years into a period of my life where I'm not very interested in Lent. For various reasons. One: I used to be -- years ago -- so very wrapped up in Lent that I may have gotten my craw full of acting out personal penitence for awhile. Another: I get quite agitated when I see the enthusiasm with which hordes of people thrill to embrace personal humiliation and pay practically no attention at all to Jesus' message of God 's unconditional love for all.
Ash Wednesday is the high holy day for that kind of thinking. "If I just do more, just grovel enough, then God won't dare stiff me when I need something." I guess that's what some people think. Lots of people it seems. I had a lunch meeting with some parishioners last Wednesday and I couldn't get a parking place within blocks of Immaculate Conception Church. I don't remember crowds like that on Easter. It made me very cranky at lunch. The others ordered vegetable soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, I ordered a BLT -- and wished for a 16 oz. porterhouse steak.
But, very matter-of-factly, lunch over and on our way home -- one of my companions simply remarked that she does indeed find some meaning in a certain measure of ritual fasting. And if she sees it there -- believe me -- it's there. And so I'm back on talking myself into Lent again.
That's one of the wonderful things about the church. Over many years and many changes -- if a person balances community, and tradition, and contemplation, and study of scripture -- the church teaches us some things that can't be learned anywhere else. Nowhere else at all.
This week a friend asked me what my advice was for solving a very specific problem she had -- a problem with her outlook on life. I answered "Go to church for years and years and years."
"I don't have time for that," she answered.
Then I don't have a better answer for you, I thought.
Well, enough about me. Let's talk about the readings. There are two great temptation stories that have influenced the art, music, and literature of western culture. The first account is the ordeal of Jesus of Nazareth, tempted in the wilderness by the devil after his baptism and before the start of his public ministry. The second influential story is the tale of a German astrologer named Doctor Faustus who, when tempted by the devil, sold his soul for knowledge and power.
In the scriptural story, Jesus conquers an evil tempter -- a tempter associated through language with something Hebrew thought calls the yezer hara, the evil inclination in every person to press for control through ultimate knowledge and power. That old theme goes all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden.
In the second account -- and there was indeed a real historical Faust, a self-proclaimed sorcerer, well-known among humanist scholars all over sixteenth century Europe. That Faust died about 1540, having accumulated a scandalous theological reputation. He attributed his successes in magic and alchemy to the devil, whom Faust called his "crony." This swaggering accounts for the posthumous story that he had made a pact with the devil -- sold his soul for diabolical secrets.
The legend of Doctor Faustus began -- after the real Faust was out of the picture -- with a collection of occult folktales about him, published in the 1587 equivalent of the National Enquirer. The price of Faust's pact with evil -- the tales made plain -- was eternal damnation and they described hell so fearfully -- with its fire and brimstone and horned red demons -- that generations of Christians believed it literally. Millions still do.
The legend of Faust has inspired artists of all kinds. The seventeenth-century playwright Christopher Marlowe. Three centuries of puppet shows around the theme. The nineteenth-century poetry of Goethe. Berlioz and Gounod wrote operas. Thomas Mann, a 1947 novel metaphorically connecting Faust with the Nazi atrocities. But in the last half-century, we haven't heard much about Faust.
It's the earlier temptation story of Jesus of Nazareth that still commands attention. All over the world, Christians still meditate on Jesus' experience in the wilderness as they begin Lent's yearly journey toward Easter. In the story as told in Luke's Gospel, Jesus who was filled by the Holy Spirit at his baptism was then led by that same Spirit into the wilderness.
In ancient literature, a holy person is often tested before undertaking a great mission and a "wilderness" was always a good testing ground. Desolate places were thought to be the haunts of "dancing goat-demons," inhabited by wild animals like hyenas and buzzards, and "howling creatures." Lilith, the storm demon -- said to have been a magical transmogrification of Adam's first wife, before Eve -- lurked between tempests in abandoned places. [Now if that doesn't start telling you something about the kind of truth you find in art versus the thinner soup of literalism, then I don't know what will.]
In the ancient world, prolonged fasting was understood to be an appropriate means of purification in preparing for a mission. Jesus' contemporaries would have simply presumed that a long period of fasting might lead to dramatic visions and conversations with otherworldly personages. They would also not have been surprised at a period of fasting for forty days and forty nights, a biblical literary convention indicating, symbolically, "a long time". After all, according to tradition, Noah's flood lasted for the same period; Moses fasted for the forty days and nights he was on Sinai; Elijah maintained the same long fast at Horeb.
After Jesus gets good and hungry, the tempter puts the first challenge. Appropriately enough, the first temptation is about food. All three temptations are cast by a personification of evil called the devil (Greek, diabolos, Hebrew, satan) and answered by Jesus with scriptural quotations.
"Jesus, if you really are 'the Son of God'," encouraged the tempter, "command this stone to become a loaf of bread."
And Jesus answers quoting Deuteronomy "It is written, human beings shall not live by bread alone."
The tempter was challenging Jesus in two ways. If Jesus made a loaf of bread for himself after breaking the fast, he would not be relying on God's provisions to be sufficient for all his needs. And in specifying a single loaf from a single stone, the temptation is for Jesus to think only of himself. Luke seems to indicate that the temptation was to satisfy personal hunger through magic and Jesus' response affirms that there is much more to life with God than meeting physical needs. In fact, that turns out to be the point of all the temptations.
In the second test, the adversary "led him up" and showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world.
"Worship me," said the devil, "and it will all be yours."
Jesus quotes the Bible again "Worship the Lord your God, and serve only God," answered Jesus.
The same deal that was offered to Jesus was later proposed to Faust who, his contemporaries claimed, accepted the bargain. In return for power and knowledge, Faust did worship the false god of control and power through insider knowledge and thereby hitched his soul to a glittering, but empty, promise.
Then the devil took Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and challenged him to throw himself off in order to test God's promise of protection.
Now the tempter is quoting the Bible, Psalm 91 which we just said.
Not to be outdone, Jesus fires back from Deuteronomy. "It is written," said Jesus, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."
Tradition says that the site of the temptation was on the southeast corner of the Temple wall where the drop off to the valley below was the very greatest. This time the challenger asked Jesus to test the promises of God. This part of the story foreshadows the crucifixion, the most extreme time when Jesus would truly be tempted to call on God for special favors. But Jesus firmly does not test God's promises and the devil abruptly departs to wait for another chance, the "opportune time".
All today's readings -- and I know I've shortchanged most of them -- remind the church at the beginning of a period of common self-examination that the purpose of the religious life is to seek and serve God in the world, not to set ourselves up as securely as we can in privileged isolation. Luke's story -- actually the story appears in all three of the story-telling gospels -- isn't rocket science. But it apparently needs to be told and retold countless times around the world and over the centuries. The yezer hara, that sinful and seductive yearning for manipulative knowledge, material goods, and one-sided power that is portrayed by the figure of the devil in these texts, is clearly a part of human nature, one to be carefully watched and reined in at our soul's peril.
Thomas Cook, in his novel The City When It Rains, wrote of the power of lesser things to replace human dignity and purpose.
"At dinner, everyone [was] situated around a large rectangular table . bought from an Upper East Side antique gallery. And the purity of the grain, its smooth, effortless flow, gave a strange comfort to the entire room. For a moment, Corman imagined himself living among such lovely things. It was as if elegant, expensive things were what life offered in place of that distant, ineffable richness which began to seem unattainable as time wore on and disappointments accumulated. And so after a while, you joined in a conspiracy with things that gave you comfort, style, prestige, a sense of being more than you really were, having more than you really had. It was perfectly natural, and the trick was simply to forget that there was anything else at all."
But Jesus came to tell us that forgetting like that comes straight from the devil. The crucial trick of human life is to remember who you are and what you're here for.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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