Entering the Wilderness

First Sunday in Lent
Luke 4:1-13

This story is not about us learning to overcome temptation. This story is about what it means to be the beloved Son of God. Jesus enters this wilderness alone, hair still damp from his baptism, and is tempted by the devil in every way that we are. But he does not enter into this wilderness to show us how to get through it. We cannot get through it. Jesus enters the wilderness to pull us out of it. 

Each of these temptations he faces in his encounters with the devil throughout these forty days could hardly be called temptations for us. We don’t even struggle with whether or not we ought to reach for these things, to grasp for what the devil offers. We don’t struggle with them because we have commercials to tell us that it’s a good idea to do these things. We have foreign policies, marketplaces, and defense budgets that just take these temptations as practical advice. This wilderness is not a place we are passing through; we’ve just decided to call it home. 

Perhaps I don’t have the power to change stones into bread, but I crave the security of limitless resources. I don’t want to need, and I will do a whole lot in order to secure my future, stock my freezer, and do it as cheaply as I can. We will starve farmworkers and day-laborers who pick our food so it can be cheap; We will overuse land and kill the soil with a single crop like corn for the sake of cheap, efficient food. Without regard for the well-being of the laborer, the land, or even our bodies. 

Food is only the beginning of this quest for unlimited resources. The same can be said for money, land, energy, and any other exploited gift of this good earth. We are constantly reaching past our humanity to become something more, something inhuman. In all of this, I am grasping beyond my limits, telling stones to become bread to fill my bigger barns. 

But when Jesus is confronted with this wilderness that has become our home, when he hears this tempting offer I have taken again and again, when “Son of God” is called into question by the tempter, he will resist what we cannot. He will not forsake his humanity by overstepping its limits, breaking solidarity with us. Jesus will not take for himself what so many need. He will indeed multiply loaves; but he will do it for the hungry masses, and it will come from meek the offering of a faithful child. It will be for the many, not for the one. 

Jesus knows that bread is costly; he will know its cost by resisting this temptation, and he will know its cost as he later shares it with his friends in the upper room. He will receive his bread from those who welcome him into their home, from the hospitality of tax collectors and sinners, of friends and enemies. How could he appreciate their hospitality if he were to fall to this temptation? He chooses humanity. He will receive companionship with his bread, for “One does not live by bread alone.” 

We chase the second temptation – that of instant authority and influence – through force and coercion. In personal relationships, I find myself wishing to manipulate and maneuver in order to do what I’d like to do and get done what I’d like to get done without the bother of the other person changing my plans or my path. In larger groups and among world powers, the strategy often gets more violent. We don’t have to use our imaginations to see that world leaders like to bypass negotiations and move straight to coercive displays of force to make a point and the move pieces on the board. Negotiation is “inefficient,” as is the slow work of collaboration and consensus in our personal relationships. We want results now.  We push beyond the gifts of our humanity, – relationship, sharing, building trust, diverse perspectives, unique stories – and by coercion and violence we grasp at authority and influence. 

But again, Jesus will not sell his soul for this authority. Jesus will do the slow, hard work of making peace, for the peacemakers will inherit the Kingdom of God. Kingdoms won by coercion, by forced submission, are too well-known to the people with whom Jesus will minister. He will not repeat the inhumanity of these empires that have come before. He will embrace his humanity and that of the people he encounters. The Son of God will build the Kingdom from the ground up rather than from the top down, for that is the way of God with us. 

We have gone to great lengths to be totally protected: we’ve built nuclear arsenals, massive defense programs, we incarcerate massive amounts of people – even the non-violent offenders, just to be cautious, and please don’t talk about guns. We may not have angels catching us when we fall, but we’ve made up for it in all these things and more in our attempt to simply be invulnerable, without weakness, to be protected without limit. But in doing so, we have set ourselves against our neighbors in fear, seeing them as inhuman so that I can be beyond human, which is, incidentally, also inhuman.  

Our limits are constantly tested, and we press beyond our limit on a regular basis. We push our bodies to the point of exhaustion, hoping that it will all be worth it in the end or believing that the sacrifice we make is necessary for moving up in the world, getting the better job, having a smaller waistline, buying the right car, living in the right neighborhood. We hope these angels will catch us as we jump into endless, hard work. And these are the images we’re fed, too. So people are working two jobs, sixty to eighty hours a week to pay rent, child care, and student loans for that particularly padded angel of higher education. I push beyond my humanity in the hope that I will be caught on the way down.

But Jesus will once again resist the temptation we cannot. He will not put God to the test by disregarding his humanity. Jesus will enter a tiresome and difficult ministry, and so Jesus will surround himself with friends, he will eat meals and party with people, he will go off in solitude to rest and pray. He will tell people that the laborers in the vineyard should be paid a living wage regardless of their hours worked because they are people who need food and shelter. He will not neglect the limits of his humanity. 

If Jesus were to give in to these temptations, Jesus would give up his humanity. He entered into our limit, and he does what we cannot do with our limit: he accepts it. He resists these temptations to reach beyond the limits of being human, and he emerges from the wilderness into a ministry that reveals the glory of humanity as we could never imagine – as we are intended to be as creatures called “good” from the very beginning. While we are hung up on surpassing our humanity, God is embracing it once again in Jesus, resisting all those things that seduce us every single day in our lives, in our nation, and in our world.