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Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent – February 21, 2010
His body dripping wet from his baptism in the River Jordan, his ears ringing from the sound of the voice from heaven proclaiming, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” Jesus, “full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” No proud grandparents, no photos; Jesus is baptized, proclaimed the Beloved Son of God and then in a wink of an eye, he must prove himself worthy of the title.
Fresh from the cooling, cleansing waters of baptism, fresh from lavish praise from a voice on high, he is led to the stifling winds of the desert, where he will be exposed to another voice, the one of the tempter, one which repeats the very words of God but uses Scripture more as a weapon than as a guide. “If you are the Son of God,” says the devil, “diabolos” in Greek, literally “the slanderer,” then prove it; prove it in a way which would satisfy everyone around you except the holy one who called you in the first place.”
Lent always begins this way. Every year, the Gospel reading for the first Sunday is always an account of Jesus’ battles with temptation in the wilderness; his battle to resist denying his ministry, his call, his sense of who he is.
The word “temptation” is just not adequate to describe this solitary ordeal. We hear temptation and we think of wanting another piece of cake or turning off Public Television in order to indulge in some guilty pleasure. Yielding to temptation, for most of us, is little more than allowing ourselves to have a bit of naughty fun; nothing harmful, mind you, just pleasantly wicked.
“The Lord above made liquor for temptation to see if man could turn away from sin” sings Eliza Doolittle’s father in “My Fair Lady, “But with a little bit of luck, when temptation comes you’ll give right in.” Most of us do. “I can resist everything but temptation,” says Lady Windermere in one of Oscar Wilde’s plays. “Lead me not into temptation,” says a character in a contemporary novel, “I can find the way myself.”
And yet, for some, succumbing to temptation can leave a trail of heartache in its wake; our behaviors don’t just affect us; decisions we make can have consequences that ripple through waves of people.
On Friday, when Tiger Woods made his very public mea culpa, he demonstrated in his carefully constructed comments that he certainly had a lot of culpa to be mea about. “I hurt my wife,” he said, stiffly, “my kids, my mother, my wife’s family, my friends, my foundation, and kids all over the world who admire me.” He also mentioned his sponsors and everyone who works for him. “I have let you down personally and professionally,” he said.
And the reason for all this disappointment and disillusion? “I stopped living by the core values I was taught to believe in,” Woods said, in words that had a kind of therapy speak to them but are still nonetheless true. “I knew my actions were wrong,” he went on, “but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself…I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt I…deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me…Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have far to go to find them.”
Woods said he “ran through the boundaries that a married couple should live by.” He broke the vows he made to his wife; he more than strayed, he veered from the path.
We are all tempted in some way, at some time, to stray from the path we know we should follow; fortunately, we don’t have to make public apologies. Jesus, on the other hand, is tempted not to stray but to abandon his path.
All of us are tempted to do that which we know we should not; Jesus is tempted to do that which he knows he cannot. But, in some way, like Woods, for Jesus to succumb to temptation would mean that his very identity would be destroyed; he would stop living by his core values; his sense of selfhood would be distorted. All his future relationships would be diminished.
If he would have yielded in the desert, he would never have walked the path to Golgotha for our sake. If he had not been tempted in the desert, he would never have been able to walk with us on our own path, to know what we go through. As the Letter to the Hebrews says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” This is the essence of the incarnation. How can we be saved by someone who cannot endure our own temptations? As one commentator has said, “The wonder is not that Jesus was incapable of sinning but that he was able to avoid sinning although he was tempted.”
Tempting as it must have been for him to forgo the cross, he could not do it; he had to be who he was, for the sake of those who follow him, then and now.
Jesus is more than tempted in the wilderness; his very identity as God’s beloved Son, as our beloved Savior, is put to the test. The word translated as “tempted” in our account can also more accurately be translated as “test;” only not the kind that is given in school. This is more like the kind of test that is conducted in a laboratory. The Greek word used is related to the word “empirical,” which means “capable of proof or verification by means of observation or experiment.”
As used here, “Temptation” is an experiment to find something out. Each of Jesus’ temptations today is there to illustrate his fidelity to the words he heard as he came up out of the river. His temptation is to act in violation of his ministry, to behave in ways contrary to what God expected from him.
In other words, Satan, the tempter, tries to tempt him away from himself. The stronger the trial, the greater the temptation, the more who Jesus is becomes apparent.
Isn’t it that way with us? In times of crisis, times of rigorous testing, who and what we really are come to the surface. Temptation is central to Jesus’ ministry, just as it is central to our prayer life. Every week, if not more often, we pray not to be led into temptation. Jesus’ temptation began in the wilderness but it certainly does not end there; he will be tested his whole life, by his adversaries, by his friends, by himself.
Later on in Matthew the Pharisees will ask him to show them a sign from heaven to prove that he is who he says he is. They will try to trip him up with questions regarding the law and whether or not it is proper to pay taxes to the emperor. Still later, he will be tested by a lawyer who asks him which commandment is the greatest. Such temptations are easily overcome; such tests are easily passed.
It’s usually easier to resist our enemies than our friends, isn’t it? It’s usually easier to resist a temptation that so clearly has the deceiver’s hands behind it. But we are not always tempted in such obvious ways; the voice calling to us soothes more than it scares. Far too often our tempters seem only to have our best interest at heart.
Jesus knows this as well.
When Peter hears Jesus saying that “he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed,” Peter cries, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Jesus answers “Get behind me, Satan.” Sometimes, when the temptation is too great, the only thing to do is just to turn your back on it and keep going in the way you know is right.
We can resist temptation from those who seek us ill; we can resist temptation from those who seek us well. Such temptations come from the outside; we can defend ourselves against them or we can ignore them. Hardest of all to resist is the temptation that comes from deep inside: from our fear of abandonment, our fear of pain, our fear that the path we’ve chosen and the trust we’ve expended may have been a mistake.
When Jesus and his followers near the end of their journey they stop at a place called Gethsemane. Jesus, says Matthew, “began to be grieved and agitated.” He said to Peter and the two sons of Zebedee – the very first disciples he called by the shore so long ago – “’I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here and stay awake with me.’ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’”
When he comes back to his disciples, he finds them asleep. Once again, he is alone, tempted, tested. It’s been a long road and there is still one more hill to climb. Triumph will indeed come, but it is a long, long way off.
“Jesus walked this lonesome valley,” says the old American spiritual. “He had to walk it by himself; O, nobody else could walk it for him, he had to walk it by himself.”
We’ve got some walking to do ourselves, through lonesome valleys and crowded streets. “O nobody else can walk it for us,” the hymn goes on. “We have to walk it by ourselves.” Yes, no one can walk the path for us; still, we do not walk it alone. The way has been cleared for us; a cloud of witnesses surrounds us; a savior sustains us. As we walk we notice that the valleys and roads are filled with souls who are tested as we are, who want what we have, someone to help carry their weight, someone to help them bear their own trials.
“One of the signs of passing youth,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” Yes, the way is filled with other human beings just like us; it’s amazing how our trials are eased when another’s are taken on. It’s amazing how even our basest temptations can be transformed when we bring to mind what we have been taught by those who have shown us the path to follow.
It’s never too late to call those truths to mind. At the end of his 13 minute long remarks, Woods said that he had a lot of work to do to address his temptations and to put his transgressions right. “Part of following this path for me,” he said, “is Buddhism,” a faith, he said, which “teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.”
Well, now is the time to get back on track. Trials, testing, temptations will come; they are part of the human condition. Know this, though, whenever the trials come, our path will be a little smoother, our nights will be a little shorter, and our way will be a little less lonely, if we remember who and what we are, God’s beloved children saved by God’s beloved Son.