March 6, 2022 + Smithtown.
I.
In the gospel for today we meet the devil, Satan, the Adversary. He is an angel who rebelled against God and gets thrown out of heaven. Realizing that he cannot defeat God, he sets himself to do the next best thing: destroy what God has made and loves, which is to say, God's beautiful creation. And he discovers that the best way to achieve this is to enlist and manipulate the creatures God has placed at the center of the garden: humans. The devil's plan is to play on our innate egocentric fear and desire so that we are driven to destroy creation and ourselves in the process.
The devil is a mythic personification of the energy at work in the human soul that is always whispering in our ears the kind of words with which he coaxes Jesus here in this story. We can easily recognize and dismiss as a cartoon villain the figure of a red guy with horns, pitchfork, and a long tail. But the inclination in our hearts that he represents is in fact much more dangerous and insidious. For through our fear and desire, we become convinced that we are separate from each other, and inspired to do violence in the world in the form of sins like gluttony, greed, lust, envy, resentment, and so on.
I might suggest that he has so far been wildly successful.
The devil’s words to Jesus are very strong because they make perfect sense to us. That path always seems considerably more appealing and reasonable than the usually pretty counter-intuitive and annoyingly demanding words we get from God.
When we act out of a reflexive impulse to benefit ourselves, when we gratify our own fear and desire, when we act out of a sense of self-righteousness, we are listening and caving in to the temptations of this dissipating, destructive, consuming energy. As long as we are about only what we perceive as good for us as individuals, or even as families and communities, races, nations, or other exclusive categories, we are not about what God wants.
God, on the other hand, would have us to do what is good for everybody, for the whole community of creation. But this is a perspective we have largely lost.
Jesus is truly human. And it is the chronic and endemic self-centeredness of humans that Jesus has to combat in the wilderness with these temptations. Here Jesus gives us the pattern for discipleship and for a healthy human life together. His point is that we have to turn away from these attractive temptations, and turn instead to God the Creator and the vision of God's Kingdom or Commonwealth of peace, justice, compassion, and joy.
These three temptations boil down to the three cravings that dominate our lives when we are under the sway of our ego: they are: first, money or wealth, represented by the temptation about bread; second, the temptation to wield worldly, coercive power; and finally, the temptation to fame, represented by the dare to test God by leaping from the top of the Temple.
II.
The first temptation is that Jesus turn a rock into a loaf of bread. It is not unreasonable. He has just fasted for a month and a half. A sandwich would have sounded good. He had reached his forty-day goal. It wouldn’t make any symbolic sense to fast for forty-one days. We know the arguments here: Why should he not do something for himself? He isn’t any good to anyone if he starves to death in the desert. He needs to keep his strength up for the sake of all who depend on him.
The devil appeals first to Jesus’ gut, his stomach, his need for nourishment. It is always weak spot for humans. Food is a matter of physical survival. Consuming is a part of life, from microorganisms to whales. We all eat and process nutrients to live. Bread is a metaphor for any kind of food. And over the course of time we have made it stand even more broadly for all kinds of wealth, especially money. We even talk like this, referring to money as "bread" or "dough."
The first temptation is really, then, about wealth. It is the urge to acquire the resources to support and feed ourselves in the manner to which we would like to become accustomed. Whenever we do something "for the money," we are succumbing to this temptation.
In the second of the temptations, the devil offers Jesus the might and authority of all the kingdoms of the world: political, military, judiciary, and executive power. This is the kind of coercive force that is exercised by armies, police, and courts. It is the kind of power where you can fine, or imprison, or even legally kill someone who transgresses your will. It is for almost all of humanity the only kind of power that matters. It is the power to make someone do what we want.
This is the temptation of politics. And in a democracy we all are concerned with it. We all want the power to make the world a better place... mainly for us, of course. We are expected to vote for and enact laws that serve our self-interest.
We cave in to this temptation when we imagine that problems can be solved by laws, violence, or brute force, whether it be with ourselves, our families, our communities, or our world. It imagines that deterrence and retribution, punishment and reward, will-power and threats will ever somehow succeed in making the world a better place.
For the third temptation, the devil plays on the human desire to be attractive, popular, entertaining, beloved, admired, and even famous. To get people to like us we will gladly put on a show, whether we are famous rock stars, amazing athletes, brilliant artists or scholars, or just sprucing ourselves up for a date or a party, or even just a trip to the store. "The things we do for love," as one old pop song put it.
So the Adversary bids Jesus put on a spectacular show, publicly taking a swan dive off the top of the Temple in Jerusalem. The idea is that God will be compelled to send angels to keep God's Son from getting smashed on the pavement. Satan even helpfully quotes the Bible, Psalm 91, in support of this idea, which reminds us that the ego can always have a Scripture verse ready to support its agenda.
Such a public miracle would get a great deal of attention. He would win the imaginations and hearts of the people. More importantly, Jesus would demonstrate that God is at his disposal like a really powerful genie. Jesus would be saying, “Stick with me because God is obviously on my side!"
III.
In all three of these, Jesus of all people could easily have reasoned that he is being given a chance to do immense good. For if he does nourish himself, grab ultimate political power, and win people over, he would be in a position to make so many lives better and the whole world a more just and equitable place. He could feed the world, end injustice and poverty, and be the most admired and respected person of all time. Isn't that what the Messiah is supposed to do, anyway? He just needs to accept it from the one offering it to him. How many of us would turn down a deal like this?
It is easy to dismiss these temptations as being specific to Jesus and his own personal mission as Messiah, but not really applicable to us. After all, we are hardly going to literally turn stone into bread, or be offered the job of planetary monarch, or be asked to perform a spectacular public miracle.
At the same time, Jesus models a response to three things we all crave, that factor in the life of each of us, and that serve to divide us and destroy creation. Not only do we personally crave money, power, and fame, our whole society is set up to encourage us to crave them. Our whole economy is based on our seeking these things. Acquiring them is the very definition and measure of success!
Bob Dylan once sang about how we all have to "serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody." It makes a huge difference whom we serve.
We convince ourselves that freedom means not serving anybody, that we are independent and autonomous, with unalienable rights. But the fact is that what we have been trained to call "freedom," is in reality an enslavement to the demands of our own ego, and that is the Adversary's grip on our souls. The Apostle Paul says we are thus enslaved, to "the flesh," which is our false self, our egocentric self, in which we are dominated by our fear and our desire for self-preservation and self-gratification. It denies our interconnectedness and interdependence.
To counter these cravings, Jesus does not command us simply to abstain from these things, cold-turkey, as we say. He doesn't say to avoid these things. For that is often still a self-righteous violence which draws attention to ourselves. Masochistic self-destruction also plays into the ego's game. Rather, Jesus says we should lose them; we should obey God and give them up, which is different. Because we can only give up what we first acknowledge to have received.
Realizing that all we have is a gift from God, and appropriately giving thanks, we then obey God by sharing, giving away, and contributing what we have to the common good. We participate in and even facilitate the flow of God's goodness and benefits into the world. Jesus does not want us to have these things, but he does want us to receive them... so we can give them away.
Later in his career, Jesus will make bread to feed five-thousand people apparently from nothing; he's not against providing bread. Neither is he against wealth per se. He tells the rich people he meets to give their wealth away to those who need it, then come and follow him. We respond to God's Word by sharing. Instead of gaining and hoarding what we want, we offer it up and give it away.
It is the same with power. We receive it in order to relinquish it and spread it around, not to wield it against others. We intentionally cultivate equity by identifying with, empowering, and serving the powerless, which is what Jesus exemplifies in his ministry, especially in healing.
And finally, in terms of the kind of admiration and approval we crave, Jesus would have us reflect that to others by treating everyone, even our enemies, with love, forgiveness, affirmation, blessing, and by doing for them the good things we want for ourselves.
IV.
Jesus models a change in the orientation of our lives so that we are not about what comes to us that we keep, store, save, hoard, own, control, or benefit from. He responds to each temptation by referring back to God, the only One we should serve. Human life is about shining the light of God into the world. It is not about serving ourselves, but serving God, which means serving others, beginning with those most in need.
Only this attitude and approach is sustainable. Only caring for and serving each other, fostering equality and equity, only compassion and non-violence, only forgiveness, service, and sacrifice will save us.
There is an existential urgency here that we cannot ignore. Right now in history we are at a tipping point along so many scales, from the deepening climate crisis that we are completely unable to address by normal ways of thinking, to a deteriorating geo-political order, to a republic edging from polarization towards disintegration. The pandemic has shaken our trust in a lot of authorities, traditions, and assumptions.
The greatest urgency is that humans must reverse the direction of our consciousness itself, away from the toxic attitude that life is about what we get for ourselves. That voice wants to kill us and this planet. We need instead to move according to the affirmation that we are put here to do good with and for each other. We are not individuals so much as participants in networks of intertwined, interactive, interdependent, mutually supportive communities, and the more we take just for ourselves the more surely we doom ourselves, and the world. In Jesus Christ the "us" we care about gets expanded universally to include all creation and all people.
These temptations are the summary of Jesus' whole teaching. He will enact and embody this teaching in the rest of his ministry, culminating in the giving of his own life for the life of the world on the cross, and pouring that life into our own lives in his resurrection. The Church is supposed to be that place where this life is blowing, and shining, and blasting, and spraying into the world, it is supposed to be a womb from which grace emerges, a place where we witness by our actions to the truth that to follow and serve God is life, joy, peace, and love.
The truth is that our lives are knitted and woven together with everyone and everything God has made. We are all parts of each other to build each other up. In Christ, God sends us into the world as his witnesses, his emissaries, his agents of blessing, shining God's goodness into the world, for all.
+++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment