Matthew 4:1-11
First Sunday of Lent
During the Sundays of Lent we are going to be exploring what can happen when we meet Jesus. Starting next week, we will read stories from the Gospel of John about people whose lives were changed when they encounter Jesus; people who were given a new start, who were healed, loved, and even raised from the dead. In reading these stories, we will ask if such changes are possible for us when we meet Jesus.
Today, we start with two questions that begs: Who is Jesus and how do we meet him?
Obviously, we spend our lifetime trying to answer the question of who Jesus was and is. Such a question surely cannot be answered satisfactorily in one sermon. But today we get a glimpse of one piece of the puzzle in the temptation story.
The author of Matthew announces in the first sentence of his gospel who he thinks Jesus is: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,” he writes. The Messiah. The anointed one. Which might seem clear enough. But Matthew spends the whole rest of his gospel telling us what kind of Messiah Jesus would be. And in the end, we find out it is a most surprising kind of Messiah.
After 40 days and nights in the wilderness, Jesus is tempted with three of the greatest temptations for people who are expected to change the world – and the Messiah was definitely expected to change the world. The power to create resources for others out of nothing – in this case resources feed the world. The power to get people to follow you. And the power to live forever.
Jesus resists each of these temptations. Satan tells Jesus he has the power to make bread from stones – to make food materialize out of essentially nothing. He could feed the hungry any time he wanted. But Jesus refuses this. Then Satan tells Jesus he can be the ruler the people need – finally they could have a faithful, just, merciful ruler who looks out for the oppressed and poor. As a ruler, the one with all the power, he could affect in such positive ways the day to day lives of all the people who lived in his kingdom. He could use political power for good. Jesus rejects this. Finally Satan tells Jesus he can save himself from his own death – he can rule forever. Never again would the people have to experience the suffering that comes from corrupt rulers. Never again would their welfare be sacrificed to the king’s greed. Jesus, the Messiah, could rule forever and ever. But again, Jesus says “no.”
Jesus is not against feeding people, making people’s lives better, or even staying alive. It is not really these things he rejects. The thing he rejects is the power – a God-like power where one can do whatever they please. Instead, Jesus chooses to be human…human like you and me. This Messiah would redeem people by becoming one of them. This is a Messiah not of a palace, but of the cross. Jesus is the Messiah not because he is a miracle-worker (though he is that), or a great teacher (though he is), or a good man (though he is). Jesus is the Messiah because he chose limitation, suffering, solidarity, and in the end the cross.
Who was Jesus? Jesus was the one who could have taken all power to himself, even in service of saving the world, but chose instead to become human. It’s the great irony of our faith. Remember what happened in Genesis with Adam and Eve: At first they lived lives of immortality, but the serpent tempted them – told them they could be more like God by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. And they succumbed to the temptation. As a result, according to our earliest faith ancestors – those who wrote the book of Genesis – they became limited human beings. They caused the fall of humanity. By trying to be God, they became human – subject to limitations, pain, suffering, and death.
Jesus also was tempted with the chance to be God, but he chose to be a limited human being – subject to pain, suffering, and death. As a result, we now call him divine and say that he saved humanity. Jesus believed there was more saving power in being one of us, than in being a god-human, using power over us to somehow make our lives better.
As we read the stories from the Gospel of John over the next few weeks, we will see Jesus perform miracles, heal people, and teach people. But that’s not what matters most when these characters met Jesus. There were other miracle-workers, other teachers, other healers in Jesus’ day. That was not unique. What made Jesus unique was that even though he had the option to become God, he did not. People found him powerful because he gave up power. Jesus was a God who rejected God-hood, a Messiah who rejected Messiahship, and the Son of God who instead chose to be the Son of Humanity.
That is the who. The Jesus we meet is the one who in, in the wilderness, rejected being God in favor of being one of us. But we are separated from this person by 2000 years. How in the world do we meet him today? Nicodemus, the woman at the well, a blind man, Lazarus and his sisters – we will read their stories, and see how their encounters with Jesus affect them, but they actually met him…in person. But what good are they to us when we can’t meet Jesus in person like they did. We can talk about meeting Jesus in the risen Christ, or through the Holy Spirit, but for most of us, that is a bit nebulous.
So what does it mean for us to meet Jesus? Well, clearly we meet Jesus in the bible. That is a foundational principle of our faith tradition. We believe the bible gives us meaningful access, by describing who Jesus was – the stories of his birth, his words and actions, the stories of his death and resurrection. These things may not be history in the sense that we are used to, but we get a picture of the Jesus of our faith, and that is one way we meet Jesus.
We also do meet Jesus because some of those stories are stories about people just like us. When we can identify with a character in the gospels, we can imagine what it was like to be healed by Jesus, for example, and so we have an idea of what it means to be healed today. We read about someone who couldn’t walk being lowered on a mat through a roof and set down right in front of Jesus. There are times we feel like we can’t get up, can’t walk spiritually, can’t get through our day. When Jesus tells the man to get up off his mat and walk, we can wonder what it was about Jesus – about the encounter – that made that possible, and then apply it to our own crippled state.
But I think our best gift in scripture is that we see how the authors met and were affected by Jesus. It’s our best gift, because they were essentially in the same position as us. Paul, and the gospel writers did not know Jesus first hand. We see we have hope of being changed because these writers were changed – and they only met Jesus in stories. They wrote decades after his death, and had only second hand accounts to draw from. Yet somehow they met Jesus in a way that changed their life. If that encounter – whatever it meant for them – hadn’t been life changing, we wouldn’t have the bible we have. Not only can we look at the stories themselves to see who Jesus was and is, but we can look at how the authors told the stories, what meaning they made of them.
There are many faith traditions out there, and most are full of meaning and provide stories and practices that can lead people to transformation. But we have chosen this one – not because it is best, or the only valid choice – but because it’s compelling to us. And Jesus stands at the center of our stories. So let’s really choose it. I worry that in our well-intentioned efforts to not diminish another faith tradition, we don’t look for and experience the true power of Jesus. It is as if saying he is powerful is saying others have to find him as powerful as we do. But that is of course not the case. I think the value of any faith tradition comes in part from its adherents entering as fully as possible into its stories and beliefs.
The gospel writers allowed the stories of their faith, the stories about Jesus, to change them. And they wrote about Jesus in hopes that others would be changed as well. And because their own experience was that it was more than just the facts about the historical Jesus that affected them, they used myths, stories, folk lore and poetry to try to bring that transcendent encounter with Jesus to others.
Look at our story this morning: the temptation. This is clearly not an historical account of something. In fact, according to the story itself, no one was present with Jesus for this experience – except Satan – and it doesn’t seem likely that he passed on the story of his failures. There is no such thing as an eye witness account here. It’s a myth, full of metaphor and symbolism, meant to help us meet the Jesus the gospel writers met. We don’t have to see the stories as literal to be affected by them. In fact, trying to read them all as literal, historical accounts will likely get in the way – because they weren’t written that way. We don’t have to meet a literal Jesus to be changed by him, which is good because we can no more literally meet Jesus than the gospel writers could.
We meet Jesus the same way the authors of our sacred texts did: through myth, story, metaphor, symbolism. It’s when we open ourselves to this kind of encounter that the Holy Spirit does work within us to allow the possibility of transformation. Our job is to trust that there is truth in these stories – not just good ideas, or good literature – but truth.
We have chosen a faith built on paradox: Power comes through weakness, life through death, healing through humility, greatness through service. If we believe there is truth in this, I think it would truly change how we see the world, and what we choose to do. Jesus is the revelation of these paradoxes, Jesus is the revelation of a God who loves us in unexpected ways, Jesus is the symbol of what it means to be most fully human, Jesus shows us the way to live out these radical, subversive, counter-cultural paradoxes. Let’s open ourselves up to encounters with these stories, with Jesus, and with the divine power that can completely change our lives. Amen.
