Money, Fame, and Power.

Right after his baptism, Jesus goes into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil.  The devil makes him 3 offers.  One is to turn stones into bread so he could eat.  Another is that he throw himself spectacularly off the top of the Temple, forcing God to send angels to very publicly rescue him.  The last (and they are in a different order in Matthew and Luke), was that he be given ultimate secular power over the nations, that is, be King of the World.

Generalizing “bread" to mean wealth, Jesus pointedly rejects 3 things: money, fame, and power.

These are 3 things we are all taught to pursue all our lives.  They constitute the basis of our whole economy.  We measure our success in life in terms of these 3 categories.  They are what our parents wish for us.  They are what we crave and strive for.

But Jesus insists that to set our lives on these things is toxic.  They are offered to him by the devil, the “father of lies,” the malevolent entity who desires to void Jesus’ messiahship.  Having been unsuccessful at defeating God, his agenda now is to annihilate God’s creation, using humans to do it.  He tempts Jesus with what he tempts all of us: to focus on ourselves, our personal needs and desires, our personal strategies, and even our wish to accomplish good.  The Lord’s rejection of them demonstrates his realization of his Essence as Son of God.  Discipleship means following his example in rejecting these three influences in our lives. 

We cannot continue to pursue money, fame, and power, and also follow Jesus.  Jesus will later say explicitly that we cannot at the same time serve God and money.  To follow Jesus is to stop working for these things and to seek first God’s Kingdom.  Seeking God’s Kingdom begins when we renounce money, fame, and power.  Indeed, this reorientation is the meaning of the repentance that is the beginning of discipleship.  Money, fame, and power are what repentance turns away from.  This turning towards God’s Kingdom is the new mind, the new way of thinking and acting, which is what repentance is about.

Jesus himself goes through his mortal life basically poor, anonymous, and powerless.  He appears to own almost nothing beyond the clothes on his back; he never does anything for money.  While he became perhaps the most famous human in history, he did not pursue fame and was always telling his followers to keep his true identity a secret while he was with them.  And while he exercised power in terms of healing and supernatural events, he rejects the kind of coercive, violent, legal, State power the devil offers.

What does this mean for those of us who are called to be his disciples?  I suspect we need to reexamine our own relationships to these categories and move into living a more simple, anonymous, and powerless life. 

I will explore at what this might look like in future posts.

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