So, Wednesday was all about sin; today is all about the temptation to sin. Have at ye!
Luke 4:1-13; Romans 10:8b-13; Psalm 91:1-2,9-16; Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Today, for our first Sunday in Lent, we get to read about Jesus’ temptation. It’s one of the events that’s mentioned in three of the four gospels (all but John), though in Mark it’s a rather brief mention. Matthew’s and Luke’s account each have a little different order, but the context is the same: Satan shows up and tries to get Jesus to sin.
In each account, Jesus is baptized by John and then, led by the Spirit, goes out to the desert for forty days where he is tempted. By the by, it’s from this forty days of temptation that led to Lent being 40 days long (excluding Sundays because Sundays are “mini-Easters” in the midst of Lent; Lent is actually 46 days long if you count Sundays). Part of this experience was not eating for those forty days, so that, in a grand Biblical understatement, “at the end of them he was hungry.”
So the devil shows up with the most basic of temptations: “Hey Jesus, I bet you’re real hungry. If you’re really God’s son, you can totally turn those stones into bread have something to eat.” Now, if it were me, I’d be done right there. Forty days of not eating would make me a very cranky person, and I would be all over some bread. But Jesus, of course, countered by quoting the Bible, “Man does not live on bread alone.”
The next temptation was a little more subtle. The devil took Jesus to a high place and showed Jesus the whole world saying, “All of this has been given to me, if you want it, it’s yours. Just bow down and worship me.” Now here’s where the subtlety comes in; the devil was basically trying to get Jesus to skip the cross. We know that after his ascension, Jesus sits at the right hand of God, and as we say in the creed, “he will come again to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Jesus is on track to rule everything already, but that path goes through the cross. So the devil offers Jesus a shortcut. Luckily for everyone, Jesus doesn’t bite and responds, “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”
The third temptation is another that offers Jesus a bit of a shortcut, though not as clever as the second. The devil says, “If you’re really God’s son, take a leap off the top of the temple. Scripture says no harm will come to you; the angels will rescue you.” The other side of this temptation is that, because Jesus would have launched himself from the top of the temple, a whole bunch of people would see it and realize he was God’s son. Jesus, still undeterred, says “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Then it says that the devil left Jesus until an opportune time. Now that’s an interesting line that only shows up in Luke’s gospel. Satan and his “employees” show up quite often for the rest of the gospel, culminating in Jesus’ final trial in the Garden of Gethsemane. But even in the Garden, Jesus didn’t stray from the path God had laid out for him.
As we go through our lives, we always find ourselves facing different kinds of temptations. Yet we don’t worship a God who has never been tempted – instead it says in the book of Hebrews that Jesus was tempted in every way, and because of it he can help us when we are tempted. It’s why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
So when temptation comes along, it helps us to know that we’re not alone. It also helps to know that, as Paul reminds us in our reading from Romans (quoting the prophet Joel), “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
God even wants us to turn to him when we’re tempted. In Psalm 91, we read, “’Because he loves me,’ says the Lord, ‘I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him.” When we’re tempted, the best thing for us to do is to turn to God, asking him to bring us through it. And even if we fall into temptation, we know that he’ll forgive us and strengthen us for the next time.