Gen 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7 Ps.51:1-13
Rom. 5:12-21 Matt. 4:1-11
Lectionary Link
Was Jesus so unique and a one of a kind person, that he could be called abnormal? Is superlative excellence abnormal?
Was Jesus a prodigy like Mozart who had abilities which could not be accounted for in normal developmental human theory?
Was he the most positive version of savant syndrome, such that there was no one like him? Was he so different that he stood out and his superior qualities drew both love and perhaps jealous anger and hatred?
What sayings of some people in the Gospel are recorded about Jesus? Some said he was mad. Some said he was a sinner. Some said he was a glutton. Some said he drank too much. Some said that he had made a bargain with the devil to be able to cast out demons. The religious leader did not think he was ritual law compliant. They thought that he was blasphemous because he made himself equal to God.
Jesus was so different from his contemporaries, many became of but two parties, those who adored him and those who despised him.
Those who loved Jesus presented him as a great hero within the landscape of the lives of those in Palestine. How did they present their hero? As a healer, as a wisdom teacher, as a prophet, as a futurist, as one who was a whisperer of people and nature. He could whisper tortured souls to peace and calm by giving them power to still the inward forces of accusation and self destruction. He could whisper nature to calm seas and storms seemingly making nature events to cease to threaten human lives.
Jesus was presented as a hero in the external lives of the people with whom he had contact. He was presented as someone in conflict with hypocrisy, sickness, and the demonic results of the devil.
The Gospels are presented as a witness to what had happened to St. Paul and many others within the Jesus Movement. Paul and many others had had mystical interior encounters with the Risen Christ. These encounters were so interiorly real that St. Paul wrote, "We don't fight against flesh and blood, in effect, not against things external, but against principalities and powers of darkness..."
In effect, Paul was proclaiming that things do not change on the outside unless we first bring into a new order the arrangement of our lives on our insides. And because of our habitual orientation to uncontrolled forces of our desires, we find ourselves acting out our interior losses to our shadow forces.
Because of the reality of needing inner self-control, the church choose to anchor the beginning of Lent with a presentation of Jesus in the wilderness being tempted by the devil.
First is it a very thematic presentation: St. Paul called Jesus the second Adam. The first Adam was humanity presented as ruining our very good world by losing the battle to the interior serpent agent, the trickster, the great accuser, chaotic one, and the diabolical one who rends apart the proper relation between our outer and inner lives.
Jesus as the Second Adam, following his baptism when he is declared to be God's unique child, is compelled by God's Good Spirit to inhabit the wilderness, the place of this world that had become paradise lost.
If humanity is to prevail in the interior parallel world which is the creating crucible for everything we do in our outer world, then we need a Hero of the interior world, an exemplar of the self control of good timing and God's timing for what we do with our lives.
The perfect Eden was the goodness of everything created for right use in right timing. The serpent within everyone tricks us, tempts us in the states of our naïveté and gets us to perpetually throw off the good timing our lives. And we find ourselves habitually trapped in doing the good things given to us in our lives in the wrong time for the wrong reasons.
It is good for us to have food, clothing, and shelter. But how should we have them? Is it good for 1% of the world to have more than 50 % of the rest of the world? How is it that we have failed in the proper timing of access to food, clothing, and shelter. "Take food, clothing, and shelter for yourselves, and do it right now and take as much as you can, without regard to anyone else." The serpent tempts Jesus and us to do the supernatural act for ourselves in a perpetual selfish NOW. But Jesus resisted and said, "Food is good as are the necessities for life, but not now for merely selfish convenience. The necessities of life are governed by God's higher word of all things for all people in their proper, time, place, and amounts. So heed the higher words of self-control from God."
It is good for us to have self esteem. Before the wilderness event, Jesus had heard the heavenly voice at this baptism say, "you are my Son the beloved, with you I am well pleased." But what did the serpent of narcissism say, "Jesus, you need endless praise, worship, from all the people of the earth telling you that you are greatest. You only can have proper esteem if you have excessive fame and glory." And Jesus essentially said, "The God of glory, the creator, just called me the beloved Child. Who can give me more esteem than that?" Jesus, the people whisperer, shows us the way of esteem. Fame and glory are such shallow drugs in our world but they can have deeply harming formative results. Our lives become made or broken by what people say about us. We know how determining such words can be in our lives especially if we had denigrating words said to us by formative people in our lives. We also know that we can try to chase our security by continually trying to have our "fifteen minutes" of fame, over and over again in a perpetual search for an elusive esteem. The words that Jesus heard at his baptism, are the words whispered to us in our baptismal lives, "you are my beloved children, with you I am well pleased." But we are more likely to allow our lives to be dictated by the fame and shame words by the people around us until following Christ, we can arrive at the maturity of accepting ourselves first and foremost as beloved Children of God. This is how we worship God and God alone, by accepting our identity as children of God.
And what is the final need of human life? It is to have good death. In effect, the serpent as an interior voice asked Jesus to jump to his death even while quoting the Psalms to him about the angels breaking his fall. The church believed that the death of Jesus on the Cross was made to be God's timing for the death of Jesus. And Jesus would not be tempted to dying before the probabilities of the political and religious situation in Palestine brought him to death. And because of his goodness, his death accrued to it the meaning of a good death. His good death was a life lived for others. His good death was a transitional portal for his Risen Life to become endlessly known to others. His good death became mystical power for Paul and others to identify with as having the power to defeat the selfish self and allow the Spirit of resurrection to a new life to become known.
The church proclaims Jesus as the hero of the interior life. We look for the Risen Christ within us to confront the wildness of our lives to bring a new creative order out of the chaos of disordered probabilities. Jesus as our inward hero gives us a path to bring the goodness of what is probable into the forefront of our lives in our perpetual fight to overcome evil with good.
Today we are offered Jesus Christ as the hero of our interior life and the guide for our Lenten journey in excellence. Amen.
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