The Nuances of Temptations and Trials

1 Lent B      February 21, 2021
Gen. 9:8-17           Ps    25:1-9  
1 Peter 3:18-22         Mark 1:9-13

Lectionary Link

The first Sunday of Lent introduces to us the temptation of Jesus Christ for forty days in the wilderness.  I think that it useful to consider the symbolic importance of this for the New Testament writers, and also how the later church came to assign forty days to the season of Lent.

What did Paul say about temptation?  No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

In the Epistles of Hebrews it is written: For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.

The New Testament writers believed that Jesus was Emmanuel, God with us.  And God was with us authentically because he was tested as we are, and yet he remained completely faithful to his Father.

St. Paul calls Jesus the second Adam.  Adam got blamed for the human fate of sin because in his naivete, he and Eve got tricked by the manifestation of Satan in the Garden of Eden, the wily serpent.

The second Adam, Jesus arrived in the state of humanity being evicted from the Garden of Eden.  Jesus did not have a perfect environment to deal with the trickster; he was summoned by the Spirit of God after his baptism into the lonely wilderness with the wild beasts.  He fasted for 40 days and his inner life was made completely vulnerable to the accusing and persuasive powers of this very slick crooked lawyer, the devil, a parasite that could form upon the inner life of Jesus, and all people.

The Gospel writers believed that Jesus was a hero in his time of trial so that he provided for all who followed him, the example, but also the one who as the Risen Christ would be the higher power accessible to all people in their time of trial.

We may be forgiven if we are confused about the notions of temptation and trial.  In the traditional "Our Father," we say, "And lead us not into temptation."  And in the contemporary translation of the "Our Father," we say, "Save us from the time of trial."  The one Greek word is translated by two different English words, temptation and trial, and these words have different nuances in English.

Temptation seems to mean that we can easily be tricked into coveting, or wrongly focusing and acting out upon wrongly directed desire.  We know that moral life involves learning delayed gratification and impulse control.  Laws exist to teach us what the practice of delayed gratification and impulse control.

So what does temptation involve?  It involves mistiming.  Sin is essentially, doing something at the wrong time or for the wrong number of times.  The other Gospel accounts of the temptation of Jesus indicate that Satan tried to get Jesus to mistime his obedience to God regarding food or physical need, fame or glory and how he would die.  "Throw yourself off the pinnacle of the temple;the angels will catch you."  Temptation in our English language refers to human ability to handle impulse control and that involves human choice.

The word trial has a different meaning.  Trial means tests or ordeals which face us over which we have no choice.  The pandemic is a trial.  The current severe cold weather in Texas and the South is a trial.  

I think the way trial and temptation get conflated is that we can understand the entire human condition of living in the imperfect conditions of sin which is experienced in the significant events of social and natural disharmony as being the big trial of life itself.

The state of sinful conditions is the trial of living and within this state of disharmony, we can be willfully out of control, but also events in nature can be totally out of our control and force us to lose our faith in God who is good and well-disposed towards us.

We have fires, earthquakes, hurricane, freezing cold, the pandemic, people living in poverty, racial injustice and Noah experienced the flood.  Noah went through the trial and in the end received the gift of a rainbow which essentially was saying, "I, God do not personally destroy through nature but I share freedom with everyone and everything which accounts for the conditions of harmony and disharmony."

God lays out the conditions of freedom to allow all manner of wonderful harmonies and terrible disharmonies.  The condition of freedom is the big test.  And we have to learn how to prevail in the varieties of little tests which face us in the specific circumstances of our lives.  We have the freedom of self-control so as not to mistime what we do and say in our lives.

And we have the promise that God in Christ has gone through the biggest human test of all, the test of death.  In fact, the Epistle of Peter states that Jesus became an evangelist to the spirits in the grave, so that Jesus used the experience of death itself to let God's salvation be known.

The temptation and trial of Jesus is presented to us because the Gospel is that God is with us completely in everything, including death itself.  Death itself and our deaths will be only another occasion for the salvation God.

Let us look to Jesus as we can know him now to be the higher power of the Risen Christ to give us impulse control to regulate the timing of the words and deeds of our lives.  And let us know that Jesus has gone to death and back to identify fully with the trial of human experience.

As we pray, deliver us from temptation and save us from the time of trial, let us know that it does not mean being exempt from temptation or trials; what it means is that we can always come out of temptation and out of the trial into a fuller experience of salvation.  Why, because we are simply following Jesus who leads us through everything.  Amen.