First Sunday in Lent, March 10, 2019 | 8:00 a.m.

No . . . and Yes!

Lenten Sermon Series: Following Jesus through the Gospel of Matthew

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 91
Matthew 4:1–17

Winter returns a thousand times.
But so does spring. . . .
It’s possible to live through winter.
And when we do, we’re glad,
for there are lessons learned in the winter
that not only cannot be learned in the spring
but must be mastered in order to appreciate the spring.

Renita J. Weems

The temptation of Jesus is a rugged place to begin our Lenten walk! None of us want to accompany Jesus into the wilderness or watch him take on the forces of evil on the pinnacle of the temple. We certainly have little desire to experience his absolute disdain for Satan on the mountaintop. This is rough stuff and actually very unsettling, because we just want to give up a little chocolate or exercise a little more or take up a prayer practice during Lent. Encountering the forces of evil, of fear, or violence to the very nature of the good Lord of life is a heavy load to bear. And yet it is where we begin.

Our scripture lesson today from Matthew’s Gospel comes immediately after the beloved moment of Jesus’ baptism. The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. There he fasted for forty days, and it is in this moment that the three temptations are launched. The wilderness is not the only place where they occur; they also take place on the pinnacle of the temple and a high mountain. All three are so aligned with Matthew’s message. All three remind his audience, the Christian Jewish early faith community, of places where God’s revelation is located. Each of these settings are rife in Israel’s memory.

Jesus faces the first of three temptations in the wilderness. He is led up to the wilderness barely dry from his baptism. Immediately following the high of the Spirit’s touch, his naming by God as beloved, Jesus is led by that same Spirit into another identity—that is as one who is tempted, who is tested. It was as if Jesus’ identity had to be formed by not only his naming in baptism but also in the poverty of the wilderness, because relying on God’s power, God’s infusing presence, God’s awakening light only comes when it is tested.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that Jesus is led to the wilderness right after he is baptized. Interpreters of every age have understood this dynamic: that for new Christians the temptation is strongest just after the exhilaration of the moment of their baptism or their call. In the rhythm of the church year, we have just come through Advent, Christmas, and the revelation of Christ through the light of epiphany. In the story of our spiritual ancestors in our Judeo-Christian history, the pattern moves from captivity to liberation to wilderness to Promised Land. Immediately after the people of Israel were released, they found themselves in the wilderness.

In my own spiritual life I have found myself in moments of amazing highs, when things couldn’t have gone better and the sense that a presence, the presence of God was near and steering the course of my days. But it seems that on the heels of those moments comes the power of something that seeks to drive me to the uncertainty, the fear, the insecurity, the questioning—the wilderness. You might say, oh, that is just the natural rhythm of life, but I have sensed that it is something more akin to the pattern we see in this scripture. The high and then the low, the touch with God and then the touch with emptiness, the flow and the dry.

This is when we are most susceptible to the temptation to run for cover or to grasp for whatever is in front of us—the quick fix, the addiction, the obsessive need to control, the envy of others, or thinking that power and might are the end game. But this is where it gets very interesting, because it is right smack dab in the midst of temptation to power, to control, to assume we are in charge of our lives that our reaching, grasping lives encounter the face of Jesus. He takes on the tempting snares of immediate gratification, of stones turned into bread, and opens the way for a life infused by God, by the very words that proceed from God’s mouth. We are addressed by a God that truly knows us, who knows the deepest longings of our hearts. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” say St. Augustine. Our hearts are plunged into wilderness until God leads us onward.

The second context Jesus is led to is the pinnacle of the temple. Here, the temptation is to the attraction of safety and security. Here the temptation is to use the unseen powers of God as a safety net to keep Jesus from injury and death. But another way to look at this is to see this as the temptation to make a spectacle of religious life and practice. If Jesus had jumped from the cliff and been caught by angels, his celebrity status would have gone through the roof. Instead of his ministry and identity being launched by baptism and his absolute no to all that would dismiss and remove the face of God, he would have been the successful messiah, a cult leader, the media sensation.

This temptation doesn’t stop with Jesus but shows up in the church throughout the ages. As if the message of liberation through Jesus’ message of suffering and love is not enough, the church wants to make Jesus the celebrity, whether it is the faith healings that are seen as proof of God’s way in the world or cults of personality, the golden boys and girls with the magic words and the wooing answers. It is stunning how many of us will follow with blind obedience or be taken in by those who seem so spiritually charming, who have a message of comfort and ease and also assume their absolute right to badger and injure those in their charge, because they are so charming or sexy or say things the way we so wish we could. As one commentator said, “Our heroes do not have to jump off towers; they have only to appear tantalizingly sexy. The blatant exhibitionism can seem irresistible to those who are voiceless and plain” (Feasting on the Word, Year 1, vol. 1).

This spectacle mentality also shows up in the corporate life of our faith, where we see our church attendance numbers falling off, worry that we are deemed irrelevant by the powers that be in our world, realize that the gospel message doesn’t seem to cut it in the corporate board rooms or the surgical suite. And the temptation is to try the fancy, attractive, sensational ways that might draw in more young families and young adults to church or put the person with the palatable message in the chambers of power. But it is Jesus who stops us at the door and reminds us that the true power of God is manifested in vulnerability and there is a cost to discipleship—indeed, Jesus goes to the cross, for God’s sake and ours, and through the deepest vulnerability and ugliness.

Which leads us to the last place where the temptations occurred: the mountain. In the range of biblical accounts the mountain is the thin place between heaven and earth. Matthew’s Christian Jewish congregation certainly would have realized that the mountain was a setting of dominion and power. Is it any surprise that revelations to Moses, Elijah, and so many more biblical leaders occurred on the mountain? So here, when Jesus’ ministry is launching and his identity is erupting with authority and genius, the mountain is the third place where the testing occurs.

It is here that the stakes are incredibly high, because this is where the engagement between the vast domain of the principalities and powers, the proximity of Christian faith with political power, becomes dangerous. Those hearing the story of Jesus’ third temptation would quickly know that the temptation really was about Rome and how blurred the line can be between God’s power and that of the state. They may have wondered why Jesus couldn’t bend a little for a lot of gain.

Unless we are in positions of great power, great gain, absolute mad in our chasing fortune, we likely will not be standing on the high mountains with a vast landscape and offered the chance to rule it all. But we do have our small fiefdoms in which we are tempted to compromise here and shift there just to make the balance sheet work, to be a realist about “the world.”

From our twenty-first-century view, we know that when Christianity moved from a resistant force, an alternative way—Way—to a state religion with the conversion of Constantine, the term Christendom was a dominant force. With the suffix –dom, or “domination,” tacked on to Christian, the place of the church in history radically changed. An institution—Christianity—suddenly was a state religion. The assumption in this temptation is that anyone, even Jesus, would grab the gift of power, would want to be powerful, because this is where the movers and shakers dwell. This is what business in the big leagues is about.

And you know what? Jesus flat out rejects the terms the devil sets out: “You shall not tempt the Lord your God! Get lost, buddy!” Jesus knows that we cannot cozy up to the culture, because the culture is built on achievement, power, and control. And his realm, the realm of God, is founded on the power of love, which lovers know is only fully known in our utter vulnerability. Christ’s realm is launched with his heart aligned with only the life-giving power of the living God, and sometimes that power shows up in unexpected ways.

I knew a student who, upon college graduation, decided to spend some months traveling across the USA. She had experienced two heartbreaking moments in college, one with the loss of her mother to cancer and the second, the World Trade Towers catastrophe. On her post-college travel quest she decided to ask people she encountered two questions: what in the world breaks your heart and what in the world heals your heart? The quest had at its core both her own brokenness and also the way that our vulnerability and brokenness might just heal not only her own heart but also the very heart of the world. In some ways, this was Jesus’ encounter with his own vulnerability and also his claim for deep and abiding love for the whole world. Though the student found some compelling responses to her question, the risk she took to even pose the question awakened surprising joy and deep peace.

When we find ourselves in the wilderness, where we may experience the absence of God, when all we see is the hopelessness of the world, where the faltering voice of faith seems so weak and ridiculous, the call of Jesus is to lean on him, keep our eyes focused on him. Or if we find ourselves taken to the pinnacles of the city, the places where we await a spectacle like a mystical meeting, a cheap healing, the promise of prosperity in exchange for our allegiance to its grab on our reliance on God, or the assurance through our efforts we will be the ones to keep the church alive as if it is ours to save, the call is to stop the trains and trust God, who holds the world in God’s hands.

And if we do go to the mountaintop, where the impulse is for control and dominance, we should remember Jesus’ direct encounter with the forces of evil and deception. It is Jesus who comes alongside us and only asks that we ready ourselves for God’s equipping, fortifying trust in you to do none other than take up your cross and follow him. The way to the cross is wresting control and holding the way open to God and God alone.

The invitation in this Lenten walk is to encounter the shadowy places or the steep terrain of mountain encounters in our lives. It is in these places that we can face up and hold the way open to be addressed by God, who brings a flurry and flutter of angels with bread, wine, and abundance. Amen.