Introduction
Today we come, in our journey through St Luke’s gospel, to the start of the adult life and ministry of Jesus. We have finished with the Christmas stories, last week we met the boy Jesus when he went to the Temple. We know nothing more about his childhood. We don’t know about the friends he made, his religious understanding as a child, we don’t know if he worked with Joseph in the carpenter’s shop. We know nothing – he appears from that hidden world to be baptised by John in the River Jordan. This baptism marks the start of his adult public ministry and is clearly a time when he experienced God in a real, bodily way. From this high point of his baptism, we read that the Holy Spirit led him out into the desert for a period of fasting.
Fasting is one of those spiritual disciplines that we have heard about but probably don’t relish! Many Christians fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday - that is nothing compared to the fasting of the Muslim community during Ramadan. Here we read that Jesus went to fast and pray for forty days in the wilderness. During this period of fasting and prayer the devil appears to tempt Jesus.
This is the first time in the Gospel that we meet the devil. Various demons come along later to be banished by Jesus, but here Jesus encounters the fallen archangel, Lucifer who uses all his wiles to try and tempt Jesus away from following God. The three temptations we read of may not be the only ones as St Luke says “for forty days he was tempted by the devil”, and the first temptation we read of says “he ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry”. Satan decides to go for three areas where Jesus would be most vulnerable; he starts with Jesus physical needs – for food. He goes on to promise power – something anyone who is ambitious to change the world would want - and finally he hits Jesus where it must really hurt – he tries to get him to test God’s love for him. We are tempted in similar ways – to meet our physical desires, to meet our desire for power and ambition, and to test God.
The First Temptation – Food
I don’t know if any of you have ever thought about your relationship with food. As you know I am currently on the Weight Watchers diet which means I have thought long and hard about food, my relationship with it, and how much more I could eat before having to present myself for the day of reckoning on the scales every Tuesday! If I am busy and don’t intend to skip a meal but end up skipping one I don’t really feel hungry. If I am in a rush and haven’t time to eat, it rarely matters. However, if I try to fast for a day I wake up hungry and it gets worse as the day goes on! I rarely manage to fast for a whole day and when I do I am in a foul mood that probably defeats the spiritual good it is supposed to be doing! I cannot imagine how Jesus must have felt in eating nothing for the length of time that St Luke tells us about in today’s reading. After that length of fasting he would be very weak, probably too weak to move very far, he would be nearing death, his bodily functions would have started to slow down, he would have been hallucinating too.
So why did he do it? I grew up in a church that was very suspicious of the body and its needs. For years monks and nuns were encouraged to “mortify” the flesh. Up until the 1960s Catholics were to abstain from meat on Fridays – which is where the tradition of eating fish on Fridays comes from. One was encouraged to give up something for Lent – and it would usually be something one ate or drank. They really encourage you to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Some very religious Catholics have been known to whip themselves to punish the flesh for its selfish desires.
This sounds very strange to modern Christians who have had to relearn to love their bodies, and to see that many of our desires and needs are good and natural. We tend not to encourage people in MCC to mortify their flesh. Traditional Catholic practices are bad because they can lead to self-loathing and masochistic thought patterns. Modern Christianity, especially as seen in many MCCs, can be bad as they don’t encourage us to think about temptation and the fact that not every desire is good for us.
Jesus fasted not because he thought food was bad, but because he wanted to show that one can break free from the various desires – good and bad – of the body. The most basic desire is the desire to eat. So Jesus fasted – we know that he didn’t think food was bad because he is often seen at meals with his friends, he tells parables based around feasts and Jesus instituted the central act of Christian worship in the context of a meal, the Last Supper.
Satan wanted to tempt Jesus by getting him to respond to the natural urges of his body. Satan knew that Jesus was able to re-arrange the atoms in the stones to turn them into bread. Satan knew that Jesus was hungry, more hungry than he had ever been. Satan knew that eating was not a sin, so why would it matter. What harm would be done if he ate that bread.
Often we have similar thought processes when our bodily desires press strongly. Of course it doesn’t matter if we eat that – who cares if we are a bit over weight? Of course we can drink that next glass of alcohol – it helps dull the pain – and alcohol is good for us. Of course I can follow my lusts – I am free to do so, no one is getting hurt are they?
All these are temptations we face. There is nothing wrong with eating – but eating to excess is bad for us. There is nothing wrong with drinking, but drinking to excess is bad for us and those who love us. There is nothing wrong with finding someone else attractive – but seeing that person simply as an object of lust dehumanises that person and ourselves.
Jesus responds to Satan by quoting from the Bible – from spiritual principles that have been proved to work, and he reminded Satan that food alone is not enough to live on, that spirituality is important. Satan is beaten so he tries again.
The Second Temptation – Ambition
The second temptation is more subtle. The temptation to give into Jesus’ bodily desires hasn’t worked so now Satan is a bit more clever. He knows that Jesus wants to change things. He knows that the Jews are expecting a Messiah – he knows his Scripture enough to understand that a Messiah was promised. He probably has come to see that Jesus was that Messiah but, like everyone else he may not have fully understood what Messiahship meant. Satan had burning ambition – he was expelled from Heaven for wanting a place better than that which was assigned to him. So he fails to realise that others may not have the same ambitions as him.
However, he finds a weak spot in Jesus, he offers him the kingdoms of the world. Imagine the good that Jesus could do, the pain he could end, the people he could reach, the healings, the miracles and the teaching. He would be a kind of political messiah it was true, but he could have made such a difference. But the foundation on which all this good could be done was dangerous, as he would have to bow his knee to Satan. He would have to see evil as being the most powerful force in the world, instead of good. His ambition must have been powerful, but he realised that one cannot allow evil to flourish, even in the name of good.
We are often tempted by ambition. At work, at home. We all want to earn more money, to get a job, to get a better job, to want the best for those we love as well as for ourselves.
My father recently got in contact with me. We haven’t met since I was 14 and we communicate very infrequently. I sent him an email last week and I got a good response. He was asking about my work. Instead of being happy that I am quite content with my work, he was urging me to “go for promotion”. I had to email back to say that we don’t really do promotion in MCC! I suppose he meant well.
Sometimes our ambition to do something different, even our ambition to do good, makes us want to take short cuts, to do the wrong things to get a right result. We have all been tempted to lie in order to do something good.
Jesus' temptation was the same, but of a vastly greater magnitude. In order to do so much good he would have to do something wrong – in this case worship Satan and acknowledge evil as the primary force. This he wouldn’t do, and again quotes Scripture reminding Satan that God alone is the one whom we are to worship.
The Third Temptation – Testing God
After this the worst temptation came. Satan realises that Jesus is quoting Scriptures at him and so he does what many religious people do – he quotes Scriptures to try and suit his own purposes. He reminds Jesus that in the Psalms it is written that God would command his angels to come and protect Jesus, and he takes him to the Highest point of the Temple in Jerusalem – the House of God on earth.
Jesus must have felt very alone and very abandoned by God. He was busy fasting, he had experienced God so well at his baptism just a few days earlier, and now he was left with Satan, so smooth talking, so reasonable, making such little suggestions, where was God.
Often we feel abandoned by God. We want God to do things on command for us. We want God to be a kind of cosmic slot machine where we pull the handle and get the jackpot. We demand an instant result, a vision, a prophecy, a special message. When we don’t get those things we get despondent. If worship doesn’t give us the “hit” or the “feeling” we want, we get critical. Our culture wants instant results and we often want the same from our faith.
Jesus must have been yearning for God to show him by some sign that he was still loved, still part of the divine plan. But Jesus resists this most assiduous temptation by reminding Satan of the command not to test God.
We need to remind ourselves not to put God to the test, not to demand a vision, a special message, a sign, but to simply follow where we are called to go – to be missionaries in our own culture.
Conclusion
Jesus was tempted in the same way that we are. He was tempted to get distracted by responding to physical desires and needs. He was tempted to get distracted from his mission by doing the wrong thing to get the right results and he was tempted to put God to the test. Jesus managed to resist these temptations by his firm understanding of what the Bible says and by the closeness of his relationship with God. We can do the same. We can increase our knowledge of and use of the Bible through using our daily devotionals, through taking part in our Bible study days and through reading and understanding the Bible more faithfully. We can develop our relationship with God by spending some time each day in prayer. In these ways we can, like Jesus, resist the temptations that come our way.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.