1 Lent
C February 17, 2013
Deut.26:1-11 Ps. 91
Rom.10:5-13 Luke 4:1-13
Text:
We begin the season of Lent with the famous
show down between Jesus and Satan. One
wonders how this private temptation of Jesus ever came to textual form but it
has and it ties in with numerology of the Hebrew Scripture. The number 40 is the symbolic number for test
and ordeal and wandering before arriving at an appointed place. 40 years in the wilderness for the people of
Israel. It rained 40 days and night in
the big Flood.
The wilderness is also a symbolic place of
making the lonely vision quest to test one’s calling. Are you really sure you’re supposed to do
this? A vision of vocation and ministry
is tested. “Maybe I shouldn’t have left
the previous familiar place. Maybe I did
not have any choice as circumstances forced me in the liminal state of betwixt
and between, a rite of passage. Maybe I’ve
launch out into the new vision and I’m getting nowhere so in disappointment,
maybe I should quit.” The showdown
between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness happened after his baptism by John
the Baptist, when Jesus was to begin his ministry. In his vision quest in the wilderness one can
find revisited the place of human defeat, namely the current state of the
Garden of Eden.. First Adam failed in
his temptation with the serpent-Satan, the trickster, and as a result the
entire creation was plagued with weeds.
The Garden of Eden was locked off; Shangri-la now but an ancient
myth. Now the dis-harmony with the plant
world was expressed in the weeds that want to grow in our garden of wheat and
fruits and choke off our labor. The Garden
of Eden as a friendly menagerie of animals with Adam being like a Dr. Doolittle
talking with animals and giving them their names, had become the wilderness where
the beasts were predators and humanity is a prey unless human beings can
outsmart the animals who were originally created for eco-harmony and
friendship.
“God, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the
garden.” This was a visionary impulse long before Joni Mitchell wrote a song about
the Woodstock hippie quest for a return to Eden. The entrance of Israel into the Promised Land
flowing with milk and honey was another attempt to get back to the Garden as
are all human attempts at utopia for more perfect societies.
Adam and Christ stand as the totemic
personalities for trying to understand human direction and in the story of
Adam, we find a story that gives us insight about our moral failure. First man and first woman, Adam and Eve are
naively innocent creatures, who succumb to the superior stealthy cunning of the
serpent, and the naïve pair went from being vegetarians to misbehaving
fruitarians and as they say, the rest is history. In the Biblical epic, there was one needed to
progress beyond the state of naiveté and go again to a site of the original
misdirection and that once Garden site has now become the wilderness haunted by
wild beasts. And a second Adam, a hero
had to go in to confront the great trickster.
We in our biblical religion are so used to “externalizing”
all things biblical as having happened out there in the external world. The Greeks use a word, “Topos” to refer to
both physical sites but also literary textual topics. When we read the Bible we are reading about
those “topoi,” those great human topics or literary topographical inner space
sites of human angst and triumph.
Perhaps the temptation of Jesus in the
wilderness highlights most poignantly the notion of word, text and topic. The temptation showdown was essentially an
interior verbal sparring between Jesus and his interior trickster Accuser. They exchanged words and so we had a debate or
forensic discourse, verbal jousting. And
what were they jousting about? They were
essentially jousting about the great text of their known world, the words of
their Bible, the words of the Hebrew Scripture.
The temptation of Christ shows us that Satan knew how to use the
Bible. The words of the Bible as written
could be interpreted in a hundred ways and so Satan was using the words of the
Hebrew Scripture to tempt Jesus to make the word flesh in coming to an actual
deed. The fullness of word being made
flesh occurs when it animates an actual deed.
Just as the serpent trickster of old used flattering words to motivate
Eve and Adam to the deed of eating the forbidden fruit, so too the trickster
and eloquent devil tried to appeal to the good holy book to influence an action
by Jesus.
The temptations of life most often are about
interpretation and timing? Is eating an
apple from the tree bad? Of course not,
it is timing of when the apple can be eaten.
A parent does the same thing with one’s child. Are cookies bad for children, yes and no, it
depends upon the timing of eating for good nutrition. Is bread bad for Jesus or us? Of course not, it has to do with the timing
of throwing Jesus off his schedule of how he understood his relationship with
God his father.
The idolatrous form of self-esteem is the megalomaniac
quest for the kind of fame when a person is dominated to define their very worth
as a person by the number of people who can express devotion or adoration
towards them. Our media society
certainly feeds this distorted view of fame as famous people complain about
invasive paparazzi even while they use all of the distorted fame to get
wealthy. Worship and adore me in exactly
the way that I want you to. And you see
how fame and the events that lead to fame often get labeled as a Faustian
bargain. “Jesus, you are clever enough
to use your wisdom and your charisma and your ability to manipulate people and
become as powerful and as famous as the Caesar, so why don’t you use your
ability to get this kind of fame.” The
plan of God had Jesus becoming famous in the path of counter-logic; by getting
crucified and then returning to countless numbers of people in resurrection
manifestations.
And then there is the temptation trick of
trying to get Jesus to be a fundamentalist literalist. “Throw yourself off the building Jesus because
the Bible says the angels will catch you.”
There was a time and a place for Jesus to die but not by being led into
acting because of a faulty reading of the Bible. Lots of people are led to hurtful prejudice and
acts of injustice because of the way in which they read the Bible. Our world is full of incredible cruel actions
done because of the way that religious people of all religions have been
tempted to read their Holy Books in distorted ways. The temptation of Christ is a witness to us to
be careful in how we seek to understand our Holy Book in our time and if our
interpretation of the Bible does not pass the non-exploitative, love and justice
and common sense smell test, then we need to be careful in the kinds of interpretation
of the Bible that we are acting upon.
The greater point that I would like for us to
understand is that you and I are word constituted in a sea of words. By this I mean our world and self-knowledge
is constructed by the way in which we see or perceive through the word
structures of our life. We use Holy
Books and “higher education” to inform the language lenses through which we see
all of life outside of us and all of who we are inside of us. So we have taken on lots of word usage that
already result in automatic body language acts in our life. Our body language follows the code of how we
have taken on word use in our lives.
So this temptation event of Jesus as a clash
of competing interpretations is crucial in understanding that you and I live on
a sea of words in how we are interpreting the meaning of our lives in each word
and deed. The parts of our life deeds
that are already on automatic in our body rituals sometimes are hard to
interdict and change.
The reason we try to educate and bring into
our lives new word events and new possibility of new interpretations is that we
hope to cure in progressive ways the ignorance that our speech and body habits have
taken on through being informed by less than ideal sources of information.
This is why we are always within a textual
temptation, a word battle for excellence in future speech and action. Jesus won the battle of words against the one
who wanted him to misinterpret and take the wrong actions in his life.
We live the drama of this temptation too,
every moment of our lives. That is why
the “ I.T. phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is relevant to our life of
temptation. What we take in as we live
on this sea of words in some ways become flesh in the actions of our lives and
so we need to be ever mindful of what we are taking in so as to influence what
we will be expressing in the words and deeds of our lives.
Friends, we highlight the temptation of Jesus
today as we have begun Lent, but trust me, you and I are living this dramatic
temptation in our word lives all of the time.
Let us ponder today how we are interpreting and acting out the highest
ideals of our lives today, and let us follow Jesus in finding strategies
against the temptation to “mistime” the words and deeds of our lives. Amen.
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