Sermon for March 9, 2025

 March 9, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Luke 4:1-13

First, the good news about this Sunday’s reading:  while we might spend much of our lives looking to Jesus and modeling our behavior after him, this text is not offered to us as a mandate to do 40 days of fasting ourselves.  We are not necessarily called to this Lenten discipline.  The first hearers of the Gospel would have heard the reference to 40 days in the wilderness and caught that allusion to more ancient prophets.

It's important to place the text in the larger context of the life of Jesus and his ministry.  In Luke, Jesus is baptized, and then the Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness.  The devil tempts Jesus, Jesus resists, the devil retreats, and then Jesus returns to society, preaching and teaching, but not doing miracles yet.  Even though the devil has just told Him that he could. Jesus returns to his hometown and declares the prophecy of Isaiah to be fulfilled, and his hometown wants to kill him (you may remember these incidents from the last Sunday in January and the first Sunday in February).  And then he calls followers—and here we are, today, catapulted back to an earlier time in the life of Jesus.  Why?

Well, symbolically, it makes sense to revisit this story for the first Sunday of Lent.  Lent is a season of ash and penitence, not just a day or two after the new year, not just the lead up to our yearly physical, but a full 40 days to reflect upon how we have or have not lived up to being the best person we can be and a time tomake some course corrections.  Lent can be a period that many believers experience as a wilderness time.  Wilderness can be a space of temptation and testing, and that means more than just ignoring the yearning to have a sugar-filled desert or a glass of wine or whatever tempting thing we’ve given up for Lent.  It is easy to follow the temptation to just give up our introspection for any number of reasons or to decide that we have already done all that is necessary because we haven’t failed as spectacularly as others. In this way, Jesus shows us a way to resist the devil and those many temptations, or as the country music Josh Turner would say, a way not to “buy a ticket on that long black train.” 

When we experience a passage like this one, we may not realize the larger lessons for us all.  When Jesus is in the wilderness, it’s clear that he’s talking to Satan or the devil or however one recognizes and names the many faces of evil. The stakes are clear in today’s Gospel text.  However, for many of us, we won’t always recognize the foe that we’re facing. But the temptations that the devil offers Jesus are not very different from the ones that we face.

Many Gospel commentators focus on the nature of the temptations.  Consider turning stones into bread—how wonderful that would be as a practical skill for all of us. All hungry persons could feed themselves without worrying about distribution issues or greed standing in the way.   But the deeper nature of this temptation is that of wanting our physical needs met, and what we’ll do to make sure that we have a roof over our heads and food on the table.  The deeper temptation is to forsake our spiritual lives so that our physical needs are met.  It’s a short slide from taking care of our families to hoarding our resources—the danger is that we lose our souls as we take care of our physical needs.

In our Gospel text, not surprisingly, the devil does not go away after Jesus withstands the first temptation.  The temptations just get stronger, the rewards better.:  Jesus is then tempted with power—to be the ruler of all the kingdoms of the world.  We might say, Of course Jesus can withstand this temptation.  He already knows he’s the one in charge.  But wouldn’t it be nice if the rest of the world knew it too?  That’s what the devil seems to offer.

We still face this temptation today, although it may take different forms.  I don’t know many people who want to be president of the U.S., but it's the rare person I've met who doesn't wrestle with questions of status and earnings and promotions--and the power that comes with better earning potential. Even if we think we are comfortable with the decisions we’ve made, we might feel a pang when we see that young rising star and feel ourselves eclipsed.  

After failing to successfully tempt Jesus’ with food and power, Satan offers Jesus a chance to prove who he says he is, and notice that Satan is now using scripture with a  reference to Psalm 91, the psalm upon which the song “Eagle’s Wings” is based. Satan is essentially saying: If you believe the protection promised in this Psalm, prove it: Jump! 

We face this temptation too, this yearning to channel God’s protective power.  Most of us aren't very patient with God's time scale. We wish God would just hurry up and show us the Divine Plan.  We understand that God is making all things new, but in the meantime, the world feels broken, not beautiful.

We may not see the devil in a physical form, promising us the “world as our oyster” while we forget that we cannot live on oysters alone, but we feel similar temptations every day.  We may not see the devil in physical form asking us to show how much we really trust God, but once we start to think about where we place our faith, we may realize that we’re tempted every day:  tempted to do something unsavory if the ends justify the means, tempted to seize whatever power we can, tempted to  rely on ourselves, not God, tempted to make God prove God’s power to us. Lent sets aside a period for us to do this contemplative work and fortify our resistance against the world’s insistence. 

Just as two weeks ago we got a resistance text that we might not have recognized, here too, we get a resistance text.  Jesus shows us how to stand up to evil, whether it’s the evil of an earthly culture encouraging us to take advantage of all our blessings, seeking power over others, or making poorly calculated mistakes to prove are right in our beliefs.  Jesus answers each temptation with scripture.

Jesus says no to the devil, three different times. Each time, Jesus uses scripture to resist the temptation.  What a simple solution to temptation!  Notice what Jesus does not do.  Jesus doesn’t interact with the devil.  Jesus doesn’t try to show where the logic of the devil’s argument breaks down.  Jesus doesn’t bargain.  Jesus doesn’t try to make a deal with the devil, hoping that more good than brokenness comes out of the deal.  Jesus doesn’t engage in physical violence.  No, Jesus responds with a quote that says no to the devil.  He relies on the spiritual wisdom of those who have gone before him even when evil tries to us the scripture himself to justify deadly behavior.

You might say, “But I don’t have all those texts memorized.”  But you have probably memorized more than you think, although it might be in the form of song, rather than text.  Most of the liturgy that we sing and say every week together use words that come from the Bible.  Many of the hymns that we sing are based on Biblical texts. As Lutherans, we believe that even memorization of the Bible is insufficient understanding outside of community particularly at Lent. This is why we gather here and why in Lent, and sing, “Return to the Lord your God,” and pray not to be lead into temptation. May those and our Lenten reflections be enough. – AMEN