With this Sunday’s temptation text (March 13), we begin a season of review of our life together as faith communities, families, and individuals. The church, which is the body of the resurrected Christ, is asked by Matthew’s text to be honest about motives and honest about the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. This is a not a time for a seminar on being Christian, or morbid introspection, but is a time for ongoing prayer and grappling with the ways “the devil” in us and around us is ever tempting us to take neither God nor our common-union seriously. The aim of this “retreat” is not shame and judgment but just the opposite: heading into Easter as healthy, joyous, vital Christian communities, alive with the awareness of the presence of the Christ.
In The Hidden Power of the Gospels, there are helpful reminders about dia-bol. Etymologically dia-bol suggests a “throwing across”, and by extension, situations and inclinations that amount to a “devilish” attempt to obstruct, confuse, or accuse. In common understanding, apparently even with the Greek, diabol was the term for devil, with an allusive sense to disturbing forces of evil beyond our knowledge and control.
The temptations of Jesus, as presented in Matthew’s gospel, are written for a church facing profound change, chaos, and loss. In such a situation, the temptations of the Christ are also the temptations of the church. Diabol is all too real.
First Temptation: Go ahead, make some bread! In the pattern of the first path, dealing with profound change, temptation one for Jesus is to misuse who he is for self-centered purposes. Why is that? The very human Jesus is now identified also as God’s Beloved Son. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to get clear on that profound identification, one that for him changed everything. Notice that the diabol does not dispute who Jesus is, but simply raises the sly question, “if you are the Son of God…”. Does being the beloved of God change everything for us?
Often diabol’s first subtle ploy is to confuse or distract from, or question, our essential place in the scheme of things. Are we in Christ now or are we not? Are we the body of Christ? If so, whispers diabol, then why shouldn’t we be given what we want, especially in scary times of change? But, Church does not live by balanced budgets, growing numbers, elegant or jazzy liturgies, or the absence of change and suffering. Church lives “by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Christ (and church as koinonia) as the marriage of the divine and the human, is a common-union more important than anything else. Any short term, self-serving gain, is truly a long term loss. The living Word of God is our life and hope and strength.
Second Temptation: Make your test God’s test! Climb up to the pinnacle of things religious and then show off! This is a crass sort of throwing something across our path as we wind our way amid the ruins and wilderness of the world. Seek glory! Seek miracles! Escape the chaos and confusion, by scaling the ladder of pretension, and then jump into “glory”, assuming God will take care of you!
Ouch, this one hurts, as we consider the pathetic falls and collapse of too many proud religious leaders and churches. Risking in it all for acclaim and glory, leaping into the cynical world with a pretense of faithfulness to God, foolish narcissists only confirm again and again the basis for cynicism. Lent is a good time to be reminded of our own folly, the way we “test” God in the midst of loss and confusion instead of worshiping the Holy One. Test God enough and one day we may find that we are worshiping only ourselves and the adoration we temporarily receive from others. And thus the “leap of faith” turns out to be a leap into spiritual bankruptcy and death.
Jesus, and hopefully the church of the Risen One, keeps it simple—not easy, to be sure, but simple and focused: “You shall not test the Lord your God.” Why test God when God gives us God’s very self? Or isn’t God enough for us?
Third Temptation: Become General Manager of the Universe! It’s easy! All we have to do is let diabol put asunder what God has brought together. In playing God (oh, the splendor of the nations and of the emperors’ powers!) Christians and the church are often led astray by the trappings of power and glory and thereby divorce God by forsaking the common-union God shares with us. In these times of the shaking of the foundations, in this era in which the human world seems to be shifting on its axis, when fear and trepidation rise in our hearts, pay attention, oh Church, to the faith of our Leader: “Worship and serve God alone.”
Of course, we cannot do this on our own. The gift of baptism is the gift of living in the resurrected Christ, and it is in the embrace of Christ’s steadfast faith (not our belief system) that we live, and move, and have our being. This is something far beyond mere religion.
I have a hunch that is what St Paul was getting at in his answer to the church’s struggle with diabol, an answer appropriate whenever we are tempted to lust after power and glory on either the world’s or religion’s terms by exalting the law over the gospel: “The life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God”. (Gal. 2:20)
I hope this Lenten retreat on which we now embark will mean for us such a simple and deeply humble answer: from beginning to end, it’s all about God.
And then the angels come and wait on us: in this wilderness world, a foretaste of the feast to come.
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