“It is said, ‘Do
not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Luke 4:13
On this first Sunday in Lent, we pick up where we
left off on the first Sunday after Epiphany; with Jesus being driven into the
wilderness by the Holy Spirit after emerging from John the Baptizer’s water of
repentance and hearing himself declared to be God’s Son in whom God is
well-pleased.
To help us understand today’s Gospel reading, I want
to page ahead and start with how this Lenten story, this journey into the
spring of new life ends. Specifically, I
want to begin with something Pilate said at Jesus’s trial as found in the
Gospel of John.
Pilate, pointing to Jesus after having him scourged;
his flesh torn, his body oozing blood and sweat said, in the common language of
Greek to the crowd demanding Jesus’s crucifixion, “ίδου ό άνθρωποσ,” “Here’s
the man,” or to be contextually precise, “Pay attention to this man;”[1]Pilates
way of saying, “Take a good look at him because this horrific spectacle
standing before you could be you,” which in the Gospel of John becomes the
gospel writer’s nuanced way of saying, “This man is you.”
It is so easy to push aside the fact that during his
earthly ministry this flesh and blood Jesus was exactly like us, in every sense
of the word – A FACT that has been sadly drummed out of us by roughly two thousand years of theology
and bickering over how to define Jesus as being both True God and True Man with
the result that the God part of that equation ended up getting most of the
attention; getting center stage. Even
the New Testament and the Gospels demonstrate the difficulty of putting into
words how this “just-like-us” man is just like us in the light of the
resurrection.
For example, when we come to the Fourth Sunday in
Lent, we will hear Paul say in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, “For our sake
he (God) made him (Jesus) to be sin who knew no sin….”[2] When we hear those word, our minds immediately
embrace the upfront, literal meaning of those word; that Jesus never sinned –
never made a mistake – was sinless, and, in
that respect Jesus of Nazareth was so unlike us, was so un-human because if
anything defines us as humans, it seems to be our flaws more than our virtues.
We need to remember, however, the importance of
historical criticism when reading scripture; that the authors of the New
Testament had particular theological points they were trying to make and
explain in what they wrote and how they wrote it. In addition, we need to remember that Paul
never knew the flesh and blood Jesus of Nazareth. He only knew Jesus as the Risen Christ of God,
which occurred in a vision on his way to Damascus.
Paul would agree, however, that we cannot understand
our connection to the surprising, earth shattering, re-creating big bang event,
we celebrate as Easter unless we can come to grips with the notion that Jesus
is one of us; that in essence, Jesus is
us.
For the moment, let us reflect on our being human in
the light of Jesus being human, as his being truly one of us; as his being
truly one with us. Permit yourself to
imagine, if you will, Jesus before his death and resurrection as having the
same flawed thought processes that we all encounter, moments of egotism,
lustful desires, of falling into temptation, of having doubts, of making mistakes
in judgement, of being lazy, depressed, of being selfish, of sinning; the things
that most religions associate with being human.
After all, “To err is human…
Jesus clearly understood sin from personal
experience. For instance, as a twelve
year old Jesus runs away from Mary and Joseph to teach in the Temple without
telling Mary and Joseph that he was doing so.[3]
Think about that for a moment. I wonder
what Mary and Joseph thought about that after frantically searching for Jesus
for several days or what they said to him when they found him. The Gospel of Luke gives us a hint. Luke tells after that fiasco, Jesus was “obedient”
to Mary and Joseph. What does “obedient”
imply in this context? Which of the Ten
Commandments is Luke implying Jesus violated?
Throughout his ministry, Jesus was seen as doing
those things I asked you to imagine by the people of his day, including his
disciples; that at the time, they did not consider Jesus to be some flawless
perfect human because there were times he acted all too human. Of course, all these instances of
questionable (human) behavior on Jesus’s part get explained away as means
towards facilitating a righteous end or a deeper purpose that is redacted and
understood in the light of Jesus’s resurrection.[4]
Paul was right, however, in saying Jesus of Nazareth
did not know and did not treat sin in the way that most of us have been taught
to understand and treat it. Jesus did
not know sin to be a barrier between God and humankind, between God and
himself, or as a barrier between himself and his fellow human beings that we
have made it and keep making it out to be.
Jesus understood through the prophets Isaiah and
Jeremiah that God really didn’t give a hoot about our obsession with sin, was
tired with our inane, placating ways; that God said centuries before Jesus
entered the world stage, “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will
remember their sin no more.”[5]
Jesus’s actions towards others demonstrated his faith in this being God’s
stance on the subject of sin and that God would remain faithful to that stance.
Jesus clearly knew the effect of sin because, like
us, he experienced it. We should not be
surprised by that notion, shocked by it, or offended by it because he clearly
describes the experience of personal sin and the remorse it causes in his most poignant
parable, the Prodigal Son, a corollary to his own experience of running off as
a twelve year old son to do his own thing.[6]
Only a person who experienced sin first-hand, experienced its effects,
experienced the remorse it caused, and experienced the unquestioning
forgiveness and the unconditional love of God could speak about it with such
personal clarity as this man Jesus does in that parable.
Like the father in that story, Jesus never allowed
sin to be a barrier between him and those who came to him. He broke right through it, forgave it before
the thought of asking for forgiveness ever crossed anyone’s mind, and he
virtually came running to the sinner, like the
father in that parable. His
blanket, unconditional bestowal of forgiveness without question on everyone he
ran across was seen as an act of blasphemy worthy of death by the religious
leaders of his day and ultimately, it would serve to condemn him.
This
man – this Jesus forgave and forgave and forgave as a human – as one of us –
until forgiveness became his last pronouncement on the humans who crucified
him.
It is important to understand that fact; that truth,
if one it to understand anything about Christianity. Yes,
to err is human and to forgive is to be truly human.
It is in the moment of his dying breath that Jesus
affirmed his faith in the Father of us all, and it is in that dying moment that
Jesus fully lived into being the Son
that pleased God at his baptism in the Jordan.
It is in that moment that Jesus became the seed of a new creation that
burst to life on Easter morning as the Christ, the reset point of what it truly
means to be a human made in the image of God.
With that said, we can return to the importance of today’s Gospel
reading.
To help contextualize what was at play when the man
Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, I would like to paraphrase another
familiar temptation story found in the Bible:
The
serpent said to Eve, “Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the
garden?” Eve said, “God told us, ‘You
shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden,
neither touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said, “You will not die. God knows that when you eat of it your eyes
will be opened, and you will be like God.”
So Eve ate; and gave some to Adam and he ate.”[7]
The temptation of Jesus, like the temptation of Eve,
was to get both to test God’s word; in essence, to test God. The difference is that Eve, the “mother of
all living things” gave into the temptation, but her seed, Jesus, didn’t. The temptation of Eve resulted in the garden
scene becoming paradise lost and the temptation of Jesus resulted in the wilderness
scene, the cursed land of the first son of God, Adam, becoming the staging
ground for paradise regained.[8]
Jesus remained faithful to God’s word; taking
seriously the admonishment found in the Book of Deuteronomy, “Do not put the
Lord, your God to the test.”[9]
Testing God is the foundation upon which sin is
defined, and, in that respect Jesus did not sin.
In quoting Deuteronomy, Jesus declared that he would
not be swayed by the desire to become like God on the face of this earth, as
Eve was tempted to do, like so many are tempted to do and continue to be
tempted to do. In that moment, Jesus
chose to be a man; a son of Eve and a son of God. In doing so, Jesus affirmed not only for
himself but for us also that being created in God’s image and living into that image is sufficient.
This Jesus of Nazareth offers us no out to avoid
being just like him in every way, because this flesh and blood Son of Man,[10] this
Jesus of Nazareth shows us what a true human looks like and that the realm of
God expressed in and through his humanity is within our reach, if only, like
Jesus, we would let God be God and be the people God intended us to be and
redeemed us to be. As such, we would do
well to heed Pilate’s advice and pay attention to this man – this Jesus.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * *
Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
[1]
John 19:5
[2]
2Corinthians 5:21
[3] Luke
2:41-51
[4]
For example, see Mark 7:24-30; John 11: 1-44(pay attention to verses 4 &5
with 4 explaining 5); Mark 14;3 and John
12:3
[5] See
Isaiah 33:24 and Jeremiah 31:34
[6]
See Luke 15:17-32
[7]
See Genesis 3
[8]
See Luke 3:38
[9]
Deuteronomy 6:16
[10] The
term “Son of Man” when used by Jesus is in keeping with the way the prophet
Ezekiel used it to define himself; simply meaning, I am human.
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