Testing
Matthew 4:1-11
It was over 50 years ago, not so
long after WWII ended. We were at a family gathering and one of the relatives,
a man whom I did not know, became belligerent. The other men took him outside,
away from the house, and calmed him. Later, when I asked my folks about it,
they told me he had been a POW in a Japanese prison camp during the war. When
he walked into the kitchen and saw the women peeling potatoes and throwing the
peelings into the trash, he came undone. Those years as a POW, with barely
enough food to stay alive, in an humiliating and dehumanizing environment, had
left him broken in mind and spirit.
We all have some basic needs:
·
Food, shelter, and clothing – basic physical needs
that must be met;
·
Love, affirmation, and trust – essential emotional
requirements for mental health;
·
A
sense of power, control, and self-image – these are ego affirming and necessary
for individuation, for moving from dependency to self-sufficiency
These are not bad things in and of themselves but in this
reading, we hear how they were used to tempt – to test – Jesus. This story with
its richness in symbols and meaning, invites our close attention. It speaks to
our individual needs as well as the recurring needs of a church challenged to
find new ways to be God’s presence in Earth.
On an individual level we tend to hear these temptations as
directed toward our own needs – we hear hunger for physical food based on our
own gluttony, we hear the need for assurance of our safety based on our fear of
the our environment, and we hear idolatry based on our own consuming desire to
possess, accumulate, and control.
Now I can personally attest to the possibility of turning
bread into stone – when I first began to try to bake, I quickly found
that conversion to be well within my earliest abilities. Converting stone to
bread, on the other hand, is a very long process we call agriculture. Stone
weathers and submits to the forces of wind, rain, and living organisms that act
to break it down into the mineral component of soil. From that soil, the grain
of wheat draws life and stores energy released to us in the consuming of bread.
The first temptation, on one level, is one of manner rather than matter.
I doubt, however, that food and ego were the primary concerns
for those Jews who have chosen the Way to whom Matthew addresses his words.
Picture their circumstance. It is not so long after the Romans utterly
destroyed Jerusalem, the city set on a hill, and the Temple was literally leveled – not one
stone left standing, the altar smashed, the priests slaughtered. The
destruction of their history and ritual is virtually complete and, although
this tiny group of Messianic Jews has each other, their hopes for the future
were dashed. Matthew speaks into this circumstance with images from Torah, with
mountain top experiences, with Good News of a Living Christ who brings God into
the Temple of our hearts.
I invite you to listen, as you can, with the ears of an early
believer, but also with your own ears in your present circumstance.
First, the setting: Jesus comes up from the baptismal waters
of the River Jordan and is led, by the Holy Spirit of God, into the desert
where is tested by the devil, the Satan – that heavenly being whose purpose is
to accuse, to test, to try the hearts and souls of humans everywhere. There is
purpose in this time of trial. The writer to the Hebrews – the scattered Jews
throughout the Roman Empire – reminds us that:
Although he was a Son, he learned
obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source
of eternal salvation to all who obey him. (Heb 5.8-9)
This obedience is not a self-inflicted discipline of his own
choosing but one to which he is called through the leading of the Spirit of
God.
Affirmed in his calling as God’s beloved by baptism, Jesus,
as one who is fully human, must clarify and examine that call in reflection and
prayer. A calling, a new beginning, is almost never what we conceive it to be
in that abstract place of our imagination. Reality has a way of breaking in on
our dreams with challenges that we can not foresee. Only in testing can we
discover our inner strengths and move past our feelings of inadequacy and our
self-doubts. And it is in the loneliness of the desert place that we face our
greatest tests as we are forced into reflection.
Reflection is a necessary element of any beginning. It is
this period that separates the past from the present. We are shaped by our
history and those who walk before us often direct our early paths but at our
calling to a new life, we must find our way into the future. This can be a
frightening time and in Jesus’ story, it lasts for an intense 40 days and
nights.
Forty, as used in the Bible stories, is the number of
purification and preparation for new beginnings. The rains came for forty days
as God cleansed, erased the old world, saving Noah and his family alone. Forty
days marked the time for embalming Israel after his death in Egypt. Moses, after forty years in the
house of Pharaoh fled to the desert where he dwelt for forty years until God
sent him back to Egypt to lead God’s people out – out through the waters of the
Red Sea, out into the desert. Moses went up the mount and remained there, fasting
for forty days until God spoke in the clouds and gave him the tablets of stone.
The Hebrews wandered in the desert for forty years, getting Egypt out of their hearts and minds. There
they all died and a new generation, those who were truly dead to Egypt, enter the land of promise, under
the leadership of Joshua, Yeshua.
Elijah fasted for forty days as he made his way to the
mountain after the angel of the Lord lifted him from his pit of despair and
self-pity and called him to take up the mantle of leadership amongst the
faithful in Israel. Jonah, after three days in the
belly of the fish, completes his call to Nineveh and announces a forty day window for
their repentance and restoration – even as it gripes his spirit that they might
actually accept this loving gift from God. And forty days marks the period of
time that Jesus would appear to his disciples following his resurrection,
before his ascension from the Mount of Olives.
Forty days is a very long time with nothing to eat, nothing
to drink, no entertainment, no distraction from thoughts and imaginings, of
isolation and forced reflection. I have to wonder what Jesus did for those
forty days -- prayer, meditation, increased clarity of
vision, heightened awareness of what he was called to?
On first glance, the desert seems a barren, empty place but
I’m sure that the desert began to come alive to Jesus. Overlooked life often
abounds in what appears a deserted place. In the midst of abundance, we tend to
overlook the least of things but, in a relatively barren place, the small
things become significant. While his hunger, expressed in the temptation to
turn stones into bread is recognizable on a natural level, it also speaks to a
need to feed on God’s word, God’s living word.
The first temptation is one that relates to our desire to
have. Symbolized by our desire to eat, to find succor and strength, to remove
the hurt in the belly, we are reminded of the first temptation of Adam and Eve.
It was in eating the fruit of the tree that sin entered because of disobedience.
And Jesus begins to learn, to demonstrate obedience by refusing to eat.
The tablets of stone given to Moses represented a token of
the love of God for a people but over time became a frozen symbol of
self-righteous attempts to manipulate God.
And so it is with all the symbols of this temptation experience. The
tablets, the Temple, even Mount Zion, atop which Jerusalem sat are all but tokens, pointing to
God who dwells, not in things but in human hearts. Jesus’ responses point us to that reality, to
the place where we experience the beginning of new life in him.
The forty days of Lent to which we are called, led by the
Spirit of God, is for us an offering, a time of beginning again. To borrow
Paul’s words to the Philippians from last Sunday’s reading, “forgetting what
lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the
goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”
We are invited to come out of Egypt, to walk apart from the world for a
short season. Life is not, after all, about having an abundance of food and
drink, about our comfort and safety, about our ego and pride.
In 1937, at his second inaugural address, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, rather than extolling the accomplishments of his first term, said,
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. It is not
in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it in hope – because the
nation seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out.”
We tend to want to paint over our shortcomings, our failures, our shadow side –
and with bright colors at that. But only
as we submit ourselves to discipline – to challenges that reveal our darkest
side – can we hope to grow and move forward in our calling to love God and to
love the world – that is inclusive love. In the discipline of the desert, we
face the truth of our needs and our helplessness and can find hope for our
lives in a God who is present with us.
Surely fasting from those things that pleasure us and satisfy
our physical appetites, whether food or drink or entertainment or a myriad
other ways in which we find ourselves attached, addicted as it were to the
symbolic fish, cucumbers, the leeks and onions of Egypt, is essential to
discovering what hold those things have over us. But until we become desperate
in our spiritual hunger for the word of God, the Living Word of God, we will
remain in a constant state of dissatisfaction, of malnourishment in the midst
of plenty. It is from our dissatisfaction that fear and a need to control can
arise providing fertile ground for sin to grow.
In The Revealing Christ, a Lenten book written in
1935, our then Presiding Bishop, James DeWolf Perry, wrote, “The struggle for
salvation begins as a battleground between self-indulgence and self-denial,
between self-aggrandizement and humility, between world conquest and
self-conquest.”
Lent is a time to reflect and clarify, to break with what
lies behind and look to the promise of something yet to come. It is an
adventure into the ever-growing realm of new life in Christ. Let us submit to
that discipline to which the Spirit of God is calling each of us and with the
Psalmist, we shall say,
Purge me
from my sin, and I shall be pure; *
wash me,
and I shall be clean indeed.
Make me
hear of joy and gladness, *
that the
body you have broken may rejoice.
Amen.
The
Rev. John Dryden Burton
Lent
I
St.
James’, Eureka Springs
February 10, 2008
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