Delayed Gratification and the Satanic Voice

1 Lent C    February 14, 2016

Deut.26:1-11    Ps. 91
Rom.10:5-13     Luke 4:1-13

Lectionary Link

  Today is the First Sunday in Lent and our Gospel reading is about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days and nights.

  The season of Lent gets its numerology from the symbolic number of 40 in the Bible.  40 is the number signifying the time of ordeal or the time regarded as the providential discipline of God in bringing people to new spiritual vision and moral and spiritual excellence.

  The Gospel lesson invites us to look clearly at the event of Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness, physically alone but still knowing the voice of an adversary.

  Jesus is driven into the wilderness following his baptism after the voice of God said to him, "You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased."   In this account of the forty days of fasting Jesus is presented as imitating what Moses and Elijah did as well, signifying that spiritual life can sustain one in a way in which the sustenance of food cannot.

  Did Jesus fast from food and water?  Gandhi once fasted from food for 21 days.  To go even 100 hours without water would invite death.  What kind of fast did Jesus have?   Did he go on the John the Baptist diet of locust and honey?  I think what is more crucial about the fast of Jesus is less about it being a fast from food and more about being a fast from the company of other people, other language users.

  We as language users can sometimes get overwhelmed by too much talk and too many language products.  We have developed today to be able to live in the complete inundation of language products in our lives today.

  And sometimes we may want a retreat.  A retreat from people.  A retreat from other language users.  A silent retreat.    Probably all of us at some time have had a craving for silence or alone time.   We may have dabbled with and practiced meditation.

  One of the first things that we find out when we try to meditate or to observe silence is that when we take ourselves away from other language users, we cannot escape language.  You can take the language user out of the company of other language users, but you cannot take the language out of the language user.    We crave silence and yet we seem to carry a boom box of voices around in our heads.  And sometime those voices are hard to silence.

  You and I are inundated by word and language through and through.  The environment which we see is thoroughly coded by our internal interpretive grids through which we see the world.  And we are grounded in word itself, since we have this perpetual conversation always going in within us.  Some of us are actually honest about this by apparently openly talking to ourselves.  Why are we always talking and to whom are we talking?  Are we but an internal echo producer assuming the echoing voices are really another person who has listened to our words present in our thoughts run amok, or our day dreams or our fantasies or our wishes and imaginations or visualizations?  We can't stop being language users and we cannot stop the variety of voices which sound within us even though our interior life is supposed to be silent.

  Even when we sleep, we activate our language.  Freud taught us that the unconscious had its own language.

  To be human is to have language and to be coded by our language environments and so our language in many way, has us more than we have it, though we appear at times to have some freedom in how we articulate language products in speech and writing and body language acts.

  Jesus fasted...from people, from other language users.   But the information that we have about the fast of Jesus indicates that he could not fast from the arising of the Satanic voice to a place of being heard by him.

  A deliberate fast is the way in which we can simulate a crisis.  When we are sick and deprived and when we suffer significant loss, we experience real crises.  And we often are not properly prepared for the crises of loss which can come to us.

  The fast of Jesus meant that he deprived himself of the company of other people for comfort or fellowship and he deprived himself of food to simulate the conditions of a crisis.  A crisis can open up the interior life to be vulnerable to the arising of many kinds of interior voices.  And these voices can be quite unnerving, even frightening and they can be attended by the worst kinds of moods which cloud the possibility of hopeful and optimistic viewing of our circumstances.

  Jesus alone and fasting became vulnerable to the arising of the Satanic Voice.  Satan is the accuser.  Satan is a personal voice, who attains interior personal status when he becomes the gathering of all negative word fragments from one's memory to become a unified interior agent.  And this unified agent begins to make one's thoughts and emotions work against the well-being of one's life.  The Satanic voice is a parasite that lives and thrives on the memory of all that is bad and negative.  The Satanic voice gathers in a time of crisis.  A crisis is like a magnet that can attract the formation of accusing voices and it seems to have personal presence because it has agency to control and cause us to have behaviors which are not beneficial to us.  The internal accusations of that arise within a crisis are not very trustworthy because they cause us to make poor decisions and act out on bad and faulty information.

  The accusing Satanic voice that became heard by Jesus taunted him about making stones into bread to fix his hunger during his fast.  The accusing Satanic voice said to Jesus that he was so special that he could leap from a high place and not crash to the ground because the angels would take care of God's chosen one, just as was promised by the Psalmist.  And the Satanic voice appealed to the megalomaniacal impulse in everyone which is the desire for the unlimited esteem of fame and glory of endless public adoration.

  The times of crisis make people vulnerable to the Satanic voices.  The Satanic voices invite people to act out upon delusional ideas and ideas which have no basis in commonsense empirical reality.  Satanic voices can tempt us to act in unreasonable ways.

  Jesus fasted from food and from people as a method of simulating crisis, and sure enough the accusing Satanic voice arose to challenge him to act in irrational ways and to act in ways which would be disobedient to God his Father.  The Satanic voices tried to get Jesus to change the calling and direction of his life.

  How is it that the Satanic voice can arise?  We as humans are taught that we function best by having a very short time between human need arising and human needs being fulfilled.  We do not like delay in the gratification of our needs.  Fasting is an attempt to increase the time between having human need and having the gratification of a human need.

  One of the difference between a young child and a person growing into adulthood is learning how to handle the time of delayed gratification.

  Delayed gratification can be regarded to be a loss in life which can help make us vulnerable to the voices which arise in the wake of such profound need.  And those voices can lead us astray if we have not learned to structure the delay in gratification.

  Let us take heart today from the temptations of Jesus.  Jesus experienced actual accusing voices in his life to be vulnerable to those voices gaining a significant concrescence into the person of Satan to confront his interior life.  The Gospels tell us that during his life, Jesus was accused of being mad, he was accused of being in league with Beelzebub, the devil and Satan.  He was accused of being one who loved to hang out with notorious sinners; he was said to be a drunkard.  He was accused of being suicidal, a heretic, of being disobedient to his parents, of not being friend of God, a political rebel, a breaker of the Mosaic law and a pretender to throne of Caesar.   Jesus had the opportunity to hear plenty of negative voices in his life to have them come back to him as the voice of the accusing Satan when he simulated the time of crisis through his voluntary fast. 

  Jesus is shown to us to be a hero in his battle with the Satanic voice.  The Satanic voice tempted him to be very literal and to act out upon things that would cause him harm or make him look crazy and suicidal.

   There are many fanciful things that can occur to us in dreams and day dreams and fits of anger or depression, things which we should not act out upon because they do not partake of good commonsense and reasonable choices.  What we learn from the temptation of Jesus is that he was empowered to orchestrate the interior voices of his life.  He was able to channel delayed gratification into effective resistance in refusing to act out upon unhealthy voices which could be active agents of chaos.

  At the end of his temptation Jesus found the ministry of the angelic voices.  These were the messengers of faith and hope and obedience to God.  These are the voices of affirmation which can arise to counter the negative voice of Satan.

  You and I need constant encouragement in orchestrating and taming the voices which can arise in us.  Forceful voices can arise within us in momentary events of delayed gratification and we can be made into reactionary people.  We can let the Satanic voice make us into passive aggressive people, angry people, or addicted people who are tempted not to be able to tolerate any delay in immediate gratification. 

  During Lent, we are given the opportunity to embrace some disciplines which help us deal with the ever present issue of delayed gratification.  We can delay our gratification by helping other people who have delayed gratification forced upon them by their conditions of life.  If we can be devoted to helping gratify the needs of others, we may find help in our own lives to learn to tame the negative Satanic voices which live as parasites off of the memories of the extreme times in our lives when gratification was in some way significantly delayed.

  May God grant us a holy Lent as we train ourselves further in dealing with the human issue of delayed gratification.  May we be given strength to resist the Satanic voices which arise to tempt us to leave good reason.  May be we given strength to resist acting out upon things that derive from the agency of a mood induced by the negative memories of extreme delayed gratification and the rise of a Satanic taunting voice.

  Let us be strong and bold in our resistance, particularly when the Satanic voice accuses us of not yet being perfect.  Such an accusation is only effective if we had such an illusion in the first place.  One of the most effective ways of dispelling the Satanic voice, is to say, "The question of me being perfect was never the issue; but I am perfectible, and I can get better with God’s help, so be gone Satan."

  May God bless us all and let us be inspired that Jesus has resisted the Satanic voice, and so can we through the power of God's Holy Spirit.  Amen.