Jesus ate nothing during those days, and when the time was up he was hungry. The Devil, playing on his hunger, gave him a test: “Since you’re God’s Son, command this stone to turn into a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered by quoting scripture: “It takes more than bread to really live.”
Fr. Richard Rohr says of this text, “This temptation of Christ is likely our need to be immediately impressive and effective, successful (to others). It is our natural desire to look good…You can be a very popular and successful person when you operate at this level, and you will easily think very well of yourself. That is why Jesus has to face that temptation first, to move us beyond what we first want to what we really need. In refusing to be immediately successful, in refusing to respond to people’s immediate requests, Jesus says, Go deeper. What do you really desire?”
Temptation is such a hard word to preach on. Our popular imagination immediately goes to either something “racy” where the talk is all about sex, power, and drugs (or whatever folks find most provocative) or some “LIE!” I note with interest how much we love to use that word “lie”. 99% of the times I have heard people accuse another of lying it is in fact just a mistake, someone trying to sound certain to others and being wrong. But for some reason our reaction to such a common practice of being a “know-it-all” is to shout “LIE!” But temptation is more than sex, more than drugs and more than lying. In this story of Jesus and the Confuser (Clarence Jordan’s translation of the Greek word we often refer to as Devil) we are not witnessing some conversation about petty deceit but rather a fundamental question of meaning.
What is life all about, what are the goals, the mission, the behaviours, the relationships, that make life worth living? Is it about success, control or power, as the Confuser offers or is it the abundance of God’s covenant, a covenant we hear about from Genesis to Exodus, from Jesus at the Banquet Table to Jesus finding room for everyone in our eternal home. The promise is “enough”, the offer is to give us what we need, not what we want, and the temptation is to pass over what is ‘given” for “more” so that we feed that insecurity that so often rears its doubtful head.
The Confuser attempts to sow mistrust: you do not have enough; how do you know God is trustworthy? In each case Jesus replies with Scripture. Over the years people have made a great deal about that, inviting us to respond to life’s challenges by remembering or quoting Bible verses. And while there may be something to that, I wonder if it’s not so much that Jesus quotes Scripture to deflect temptation as it is that Jesus finds in Scripture the words to give voice to his trust. Because at the heart of each reply is Jesus’ absolute trust in – and dependence on – God for his identity and future.
But to the degree that we allow our natural insecurity to lead us to mistrust God, we are open to the possibility, appeal, and temptation of the proposition that it is all up to us, that God is not able to provide and so we’d better take matters into our own hands. But of course it’s not enough just to say that. Indeed, just saying that can make people feel worse, precisely we know we do not trust God as we should. So this Lent I’d like to invite us also to practice trust. Because trust, like anything else, is strengthened through practice, consider lifting up to God what you find hardest to trust about faith. What is it that makes you doubt God’s abundance, pushing you to find solace in success, power and control?
I believe most people find faith in understanding God as the one who gives life, who sets up certain expectations. But our faith flounders when we imagine how the “rules” get enforced, God does not seem reliable either to reward the just or punish the wicked. That’s why we love rules so much and find religious piety so attractive, simplifying and personalizing faith makes things feel more “fair”. I know that trying to figure out the larger picture is harder, trying to understand the presence of God in others and other places just seems complicated. So we condense it all to us, to what we know and what we experience. If we can boil down faith to “don’t lie, don’t swear, don’t use drugs, don’t cheat” that gives us the power to say “I made it”. We even hope it gives us a passage way to eternal life.
I get it. The early church did refer to themselves as “people of the Way”. Finding a pathway to something makes a lot of sense. But consider this, what if we changed our expectations, what if what we wanted changed, then would we trust God more? In other words if what we expect from God is to be rewarded with a long life, a wealthy life, a popular life, we are bound to wonder why God is not holding up God’s end of the holy bargain. But if the covenant is rather that God offers us abundance in Creation, in each other, in solitude and prayer, what might that assumption do to our lack of trust, to our temptation to want “more”?
I sometimes feel that in the current climate change challenge we collectively face an existential question of who we are and whom we belong to. If we live like we need more than we could possibly ever use and this pattern creates a sick and exhausted planet isn’t that a temptation we are failing to reject? Canada has the fourth highest ecological footprint per person, after only Luxembourg, Australia and the United States. If everyone on Earth lived as Canadians do, it would take 4.7 Earths to sustain global consumption. You can look in the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief that you don’t lie or cheat as much as the people you read about on facebook or you can look in the same mirror and wonder why you don’t trust God the Creator enough to live within the covenant we were offered in Genesis.
Now I know there are other pressing concerns that fuel our doubts. Why is there suffering at all? Why do we face such heartaches when loved ones die, when injustices are all too pervasive, when the innocent and just live in fear and hardship and the wicked and unjust prosper? You may think this a cop-out but that is one holy mystery I cannot explain. What I do know is that living within the covenant fills me with trust and faith in a purpose and meaning for my life I cannot find in other “kingdoms”.
Trust is at the heart of our relationship with God and with each other. It’s not always easy, and when it is missing temptation is regularly just outside our door. For this very reason we need the support of the community to grow in our ability to trust and live out of a sense of abundance and courage rather than scarcity and fear. According to sociologist Rodney Stark, author of “The Rise of Christianity”, the early church grew in spite of being an illegal gathering within the Roman Empire and it did so in large part because its members operated according to different assumptions than the society around them. The social, economic, and religious outcasts were welcome as “family” within the local house churches. Regularly people with diseases came to live with healthier and wealthier citizens and were cared for until their death. Yes there were unexpected miracles and healings, thus increasing faith and trust. But more often than not the sick died and the poor did not immediately grow rich. And faith and trust abounded…
And here is the really interesting part of this story, the rich joined in the same growing numbers as the poor. What did people like Lydia gain from this radical shift in lifestyle and attitude? She found purpose and meaning within the covenant of abundance and trust. Within these houses of faith there was “enough”, enough food, enough love and enough life. There was no need for power or control or wealth, believers trusted that within this framework of kingdom relationships there was “enough” and the temptations receded.
I invite us all to consider what it is we need to be fulfilled and why it is we so often feel the need to go out and find more, more than we need, more than community, more than our beautiful God-given planet can sustain. This Lent I invite you to go deeper than rules or piety and ask yourself the fundamental question, what do you need to be happy and why we feel the need to be tempted by other things. Isn’t it time for us to learn, to live, to say “enough is enough”.
Amen.