Authority.

Luke 4:31-44

I.

            Having received a remarkably bad welcome in his home-town of Nazareth, Jesus presses on to other places in Galilee.  He goes to a town on the lake called Capernaum, and when the Sabbath comes, he sits down again in the synagogue to teach.  Luke doesn’t yet tell us much more about the content of Jesus’ preaching.  All we can assume is that it must have had themes similar to what he said in Nazareth. 

            The people are astounded because he speaks with “authority,” which means that what he says, happens.  His words make things happen; they’re not just words.  They change the world. 

            As an example of this, Luke recounts the story of “a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon.”  Whatever kind of spirit this is, it does not exclude the man from the synagogue.  But while there, hearing Jesus preach his good news of liberation and release, the man starts heckling him.  “Let us alone!” he shouts.  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?”

            Something about Jesus’ message deeply offends and frightens this man.  It is this very question that may have been the subtext of his rejection in Nazareth.  We know this question will be burdening the minds of the Pharisees and the High Priest later on.  The establishment is deeply afraid that Jesus’ message and activity would be their destruction.

            Superficially, their fear is that Jesus’ preaching of liberation, release, and reversal, might cause enough unrest in the population that the Romans would come and clamp down on them.  But deeper down, this man with the demon expresses the fear that Jesus is bringing dangerous change to their own Jewish communities. 

            Jesus speaks with authority.  It is one thing when preachers read from Isaiah, or the Passover story, and use it to complain about their situation.  Everyone nods in agreement, vents some steam, and then quietly goes home.  Nothing changes.  As long as liberation, release, and reversal remain words, preferably old words written down long ago, then they can be domesticated and tamed and ignored. 

            But when someone shows up and it starts occurring to people that these words can actually happen, they can become flesh, they can be realized in history, they can change relationships….  Well, that’s different.  That possibility wakes up the demons of complacency and defeatism that have quietly taken over people souls.  That becomes a threat to the status quo, and it inspires this man to speak up. 

            “Leave us be!  You with your fancy ideas and hopeless dreams.  Things are fine the way they are!  Leave well-enough alone!  Don’t upset the apple-cart!  It could be a lot worse, you know.  You don’t have anything to do with us.  Go back to Nazareth!  Have you come to destroy us?”

II.

            Notice that he pretends that he’s speaking for everyone.  And to some degree he is.  He expresses the fear that many have that change is too hard; that it is in fact fatal.  And it is. 

            Psychologically, change means dying to our old self so our new self, our deepest and truest self, can be born.  Politically and economically, change means overturning one order so a new and more humane and benign order may emerge, an order Jesus refers to as the Kingdom of God.  Jesus has not come to destroy the people, but he has come to destroy the prisons which have limited their freedom.  These are interior prisons like disease and possession, as well as fear, anger, and shame and hatred.  And Jesus threatens exterior prisons as well: indebtedness, coercion, exploitation, and oppression, not to mention actual prisons of stone and iron.

            Then the man with the demon says, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God!”  At which point Jesus decides the man has said enough, and rebukes him.  Jesus knows that this is another temptation from the same source at the temptations he withstood in the wilderness.  The demon wants Jesus to accept that title, “Holy One of God” from him, with all its baggage, assumptions, and prejudices.

            It is as if the man says, “Who do you think you are?  The Holy One of God?”  Or as if he meant it ironically, speaking to everyone: “Check out the supposed ‘Holy One of God’… a carpenter from Nazareth, of all places.”

            Jesus has no time for theological arguments.  He does not at this point sit down and go through the passages in the Scriptures that refer to him.  He does not accept the title of Holy One of God from this possessed man.

            He simply instructs the demon to come out of him.  He does not address the man, but the malevolent force that possesses the man.  He addresses the man’s bondage, his slavery, his disease as if it was something inside of him that has a hold on him.

            The demon throws the man on the ground, and departs, leaving him in his right mind.  No ceremonies, no incantations, no elaborate ritual for the man to accomplish… Jesus doesn’t wield a staff like Gandalf driving the spirit of Saruman out of King Theoden (in the second Lord of the Rings movie).  Jesus doesn’t even touch the guy.  He just addresses the evil power and it departs, leaving the man free.  The one who was so worried about the dire consequences of the kind of change Jesus promises to bring, is the one who first experiences those very changes… and he experiences them as liberation, healing, renewal, and release.

III.

            It is interesting that Jesus does not address the man directly, but talks to the demon, the evil power within him, as if they are two different entities, because they are.  Jesus wants the man to dissociate himself from the source of his own fear, pain, and anger.  He brings the man home by getting him to stand outside of himself, and he does this by addressing the other entity within him. 

            Sometimes the only way we can get free of what holds us down is by realizing that it is something else within us that is doing this to us, and beginning to talk about that other entity in the third-person.  Because that’s not who we truly are.  It does not have to be as dramatic and cinematic as in The Exorcist.  But the simple realization that who I truly am in my deepest most original place is not defined by the defenses my fear has built around me, is truly liberating.  When we stop identifying with the fear, anger, and shame, that bind us, and identify instead with this true and blessed self deep within us, that’s when healing can happen.  Jesus comes to unlock and set free our true selves.

            This display flabbergasts the bystanders.  By a few mere words Jesus cures bigoted, paranoid, angry Uncle Jacob who is getting up from the floor with a smile on his face for the first time in decades.  “What kind of utterance is this?  For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits and out they come!”

            After worship, Jesus goes to visit the house of a man named Simon, who lives in Capernaum.  The people had asked him whether he could go and heal Simon’s mother-in-law who had a high fever.  Jesus rebukes the fever!  He talks to the fever as if it were a person, just like he talked to the demon!  Imagine if you had the flu and you go to the doctor’s office and the doctor starts verbally rebuking the fever.  Or she starts scolding the viruses invading your body.  What a strange thing!

            Jesus is trying to tell us that we are not our disease.  We are not our illness.  We are not our addiction, or our handicap, or our sins, or our failures, brokenness, weakness, or pain.  That’s not us.  Whatever is binding us, Jesus will talk to it like it is some thing else, a parasite maybe, an alien presence, a different entity. 

            You are not made for isolation, discomfort, despair, and sadness.  You are made for community, service, joy, and blessing.  As soon as the fever departs from Simon’s mother-in-law, she gets up to show hospitality to her guests.  That’s the kind of thing we are here for.  That’s what these foreign invaders keep us from doing.

IV.

            Jesus is demonstrating in his actions and relationships the liberation he proclaimed in Nazareth, demonstrated in the wilderness, and heard his mother sing about since before he was born.  He’s not just preaching freedom; he is setting people free.  There is nothing more dangerous to a closed, oppressive system than free people.  What Jesus does for individuals, he is also doing for the whole captive, conquered nation… speaking of foreign invaders.  Indeed, in his resurrection his work of liberation and release is extended to the whole creation.

            The activities described here all take place on one day.  It is a Sabbath day.  It is the day of the week that Jesus deliberately chooses to make particularly spectacular demonstrations of his Messiahship.  The Sabbath is God’s day.  There is no better time to bear witness to the truth of God’s saving power.  There is no better day to exhibit God’s liberating, redeeming, releasing, reversing power than the Sabbath, which is the day of God’s shalom, God’s peace. 

            No matter how corrupted his own society got, they always retained this special day when God could break in.  The authorities tried to domesticate and tame and control the Sabbath, but Jesus shows that they cannot.  The Sabbath belongs to God.

            As the sun sets and the Sabbath ends, Jesus continues to heal and free all kinds of people.  The demons keep trying to define him.  They say “You are the Son of God!” which he is; but being the Son of God is something that he will determine and enact, not they.  It is interesting to me that the demons have such good theology.  Their doctrine is impeccable.  Yet Jesus rebukes them and does not allow them to speak.

            Because if you’re holding someone in bondage, as these demons are, confessing Jesus as Lord is empty and meaningless at best.  At worst it is a cynical attempt to adopt and usurp, and so defile, the holiness of Jesus by association.  It would be like slave-owners or drug-pushers or dictators or torturers, or other wielders of gratuitous and self-serving violence against the earth and people, proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah.  Because when people hear this they could conclude that if Jesus’ lordship is anything like the lordship exercised by these tyrants they want no part of it.  That’s what the demons want.  They want people thinking that Jesus’ lordship is just like theirs.

            But Jesus’ lordship is not anything enslaving demons would enjoy or profit from, so their identifying him as Messiah, while doctrinally correct, is done in the service of evil.

V.

            Jesus apparently heals people all night.  At dawn he manages to detach himself from the crowds and find a deserted place to pray.  He’s got voices proclaiming him the Son of God, he’s got people dancing for joy who couldn’t walk before, he’s got an exploding reputation as a healer and exorcist.  It is an environment rife with temptations.  He has to get away from it.

            But the people search for him and finally find him and try to make him set up a permanent presence in Capernaum.  But he refuses.  “I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose,” he says.

            This is a mass movement Jesus is building.  He is sent by God to the people.  So that is where he goes.  His movement is light and flexible.  It would be three centuries before it would occur to his followers that they should own buildings.  Buildings have the annoying habit of staying in one place.  Jesus’ ministry is on the move.  It is wild and undomesticated; how could anything energized by the Holy Spirit be otherwise?  Did you ever notice how much of Jesus’ ministry happens outdoors, in fields, on mountains, on roads, on beaches, in boats?         

            Jesus’ movement is about liberation and release.  It is the demons who want to tie him down to theological categories, and it is the people who want him to stay in one place.  But Jesus?  He may be found taking refuge in the deserted, wild, untamed places.

            He calls us out of our prisons and boxes.  He frees us from the demons that would bind us.  He delivers us from memories and habits, addictions and decay.  He liberates us from oppression and debt, and sin and death.  He redeems us from the fear, anger, and shame that would define us.  He is about this profound freedom for joyful obedience to the God of love.

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Breath of God.

Luke 4:15-30.

I.

            After his encounter with the Adversary, Jesus returns to Galilee and begins preaching in local synagogues.  He comes into the town where his family lived when he was growing up: Nazareth.  We do not know how long he has been gone.  Perhaps it was only a few weeks before that he left to go down to his cousin’s John’s ministry at the Jordan River.  Some wonder if he hadn’t been away a lot longer, given the fact that people have to confirm with each other who he is.

            In Nazareth he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as usual.  He must have been invited to preach by the President of the synagogue, because, after the reading from the Torah scroll, he is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he stands up to read from it. 

            He unrolls the scroll until nearly the end, and he reads some verses from chapters 58 and 61.  Then he gives the scroll back to the attendant, and sits down to teach.  Rabbis and Jesus almost always sat down with everyone else when they were going to teach.  And after a pause for effect, he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

            He says that because he understands himself to be anointed by God for these very same purposes declared by Isaiah.  If these verses from Scripture look ahead to the work of the Messiah, Jesus is saying that we need look no further.  He is the One who is coming to accomplish this ministry.  He is the One who has come to “bring good news to the poor,” “proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, [and]
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

            Jesus chooses these verses to describe what his ministry is going to be.  It is of great importance that these are the verses he picks.  They are not random.  They were probably not the lectionary reading from the Haftarah for that day.  He chooses these verses deliberately, and Luke just as deliberately tells us about it. 

            Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth is “the end of the beginning” of the gospel.  These verses from Isaiah lay out the theme, direction, and purpose of Jesus’ ministry… and his rude reception by his own people foreshadows his eventual fate in Jerusalem.  They bring together everything that has happened so far, especially his mother’s hymn about him scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away empty.  Now it’s not just something his mother told him; now he is reading this job description in the book of the prophet Isaiah and embracing it for himself.

II.

            It begins with the Holy Spirit.  The tenor of Jesus’ ministry is not something he dreamed up and chose for himself; it is an expression of God’s Spirit.  The word we translate as “spirit” also means “wind” or “breath.”  It sounds just a little different and tangible to say “the Lord’s breath is upon me.”  That reminds us that it was the breath of God that spread over the waters of chaos at the creation, and the breath of God that animates Adam and brings him to life.  It’s much more personal and less abstract than language about a “spirit.”  Some scholars even feel that the name of God might not have had any vowels at all, but was intended to be whispered, pronounced with the breath alone.

            God’s Breath is the breath of life.  God’s Spirit brings life like the breath that comes into the dry bones in Ezekiel 37.  Everything that lives breathes.  And the character of our breathing determines the quality of our life.

            Jesus is anointed with God’s Spirit, God’s Breath, at his baptism, which is ratified by the Voice and the dove, and confirmed at his successful passing of the devil’s tests.  He is the functional agent of God, embodying God’s Word and being infused and empowered and energized by God’s Breath.

            And when you have the Breath of God upon and within you it is not neutral; it is not immaterial; it does not leave you unchanged.  It gives you a purpose, a destiny, a direction, a mission.  It gives you very specific super-powers, which Isaiah and Jesus sum up as: to bring good news to the poor; to proclaim release to the captives,
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

            And it’s not just Jesus and Isaiah, although that certainly would have been enough.  But it is all the prophets who receive the same Breath, the same Spirit.  And it is all the Scriptures that are “God-breathed,” that is, written by people inspired by this same Breath/Spirit upon them.  The Torah, with its laws enabling the people to live in peace, justice, and equality; the Psalms, in which the people join their own breath to God’s in song, it’s all inspired because it all expresses these values reiterated by Jesus and Isaiah.

            The Breath of God moving in the world has everywhere and always the same effects.  These effects are so consistent that we can even see by where these things are happening the work of God’s Breath or Spirit.  Later, in chapter 7, Jesus will say just this.  You know I am who I say I am because of the kind of work I am doing: people are being liberated, healed, and empowered; people are even being raised from the dead!  That’s the sign of God’s Breath at work.

III.

            What does “good news to the poor” mean?  What do you think it means?  What would be good news to you if you were poor?  That the insecurity, the hunger, the humiliation, the exposure, the deprivation, the liability to disease, and the powerlessness of being poor are all lifted.  Good news is the assurance that you will receive what you need to live.  The good news is the promise that now you are a part of a community that will provide for you.

            When Jesus and Isaiah proclaim release to captives, it means freedom from all the things that would bind us.  This can be literal incarceration… and that reminds me of possibly the most obscene scandal in America today which is the high rate of incarceration, a rate far higher than any other nation in the world: over 700 people for every 100K; we have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners, a circumstance I attribute to a perfect storm of racism, lobbying by both for-profit prison companies and correctional officer unions, a dysfunctional and corrupt legal system, and misinformed vindictiveness on the part of many in the population.  It costs far more to keep a person locked up than to put them through college.  The vast majority are incarcerated for non-violent crimes. 

            There are other kinds of bondage as well: including chemical addictions and being bound by bad habits and bad ideas.  Proclaiming release – and by the way the word for “release” is the same word used for “forgive” – is not merely verbal, but active.  God wants people free.  Release from slavery is the beginning of biblical faith.

            Recovery of sight to the blind may be taken literally; Jesus heals many who couldn’t see.  But there are people who are figuratively blind as well, who do not perceive the truth, who are being led astray and leading others astray.  Jesus comes to heal our defective vision also in terms of our worldview and the way we see and know things.

            And letting the oppressed go free reiterates Jesus’ recognition that God advocates freedom.  The freedom God advocates is for those victimized by the excessive application and abuse of freedom by others.  For God, “freedom” never means the ability to restrict or limit the freedom of others, as if I am not free unless I can force you to do what I want.

            Freedom means not being oppressed by those who have more power and wealth than you do.  It means being free from the delusion that I have the right to take away someone else’s freedom because I can.

IV.

            But it is the proclamation of “the year of the Lord’s favor” that is the culmination of Isaiah’s and Jesus’ words.  It refers to the institution of the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25, a time when all debts were to be canceled, and all property revert to its original families of ownership.  It was, to say the least, not a popular idea among wealthy creditors.  But it was very good news for most people in Jesus’ day who were victims of a system that kept them in crushing indebtedness.  Jubilee was designed by God to prevent too much wealth accruing among too few people.  Sound familiar?

            Everyone in this room prays daily for this Jubilee to happen.  Jesus put it explicitly in his exemplary prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  That is a prayer for Jubilee.  This was so threatening to the wealthy imperial, institutional church that they changed the words to the more vague “trespasses.”

            But when Jesus talks about freedom, one big thing he means is freedom from debt. 

            Well, this sermon impresses people in Nazareth.  Jesus was a very effective public speaker.  They’re not even completely sure he is the same person as the one they used to know.  “Is this not Joseph’s son?” they ask each other.

            This very question appears to annoy Jesus to the point where he seems almost deliberately to alienate them.  He goes on to accuse them of only being interested in him for his entertainment value, predicting that they will not accept him.  Then he gives two examples of Old Testament prophets who performed miracles, but for foreigners, not Israelites.

            What was so disturbing about them questioning whether he was Joseph’s son?  We know whose Son he is; but they did not have the advantage of having read the first 3 and a third chapters of Luke’s book. 

            “Joseph’s son” had no business boldly proclaiming that he is personally fulfilling Scripture.  He certainly had no basis for the rather revolutionary declarations he repeats from Isaiah.  Joseph’s son would be more responsible, he would take over the carpentry business, and get over the delusions that he is the Messiah, or something.

            Responding to this, Jesus basically says, “You don’t own me.  You don’t define me.  I am not bound to what you remember or expect of me.  I don’t expect you to get what this is all about.  I refuse to live in your little box.  Elijah and Elisha did not consider themselves private miracle workers only for their own people.  Their ministry was to everyone, and so is mine.  Deal with it.”

V.

            Maybe Jesus wants to make sure they hear him correctly.  His ministry of liberation and justice is not just for them.  He does not come to free only Galileans or Jews.  He is coming to free everyone.  He is not here just to perform miraculous acts of healing for individuals. 

            Luke is trying to answer one of the biggest questions of his own time: if this guy is the Jewish Messiah, how come so many Jews do not follow him?  Luke suggests that it was because Jesus’ mission was far wider and inclusive and transformative than his own people could imagine.  “Joseph’s son” was one thing.  But it is hard for people to accept as God’s Son someone they remember as a 2-year old, or a teenager.

            The message for us is that following Jesus means being animated by the same Breath of God, to do the same kind of mission: bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release or forgiveness to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
letting the oppressed go free, and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, when all debts are canceled.  None of those things has even been particularly popular with people who are not poor, incarcerated, blind, or in debt. 

            None of those things makes sense either if we think we own Jesus, know Jesus, define Jesus, control Jesus, or imagine he is just “Joseph’s son,” a local boy, one of “our people,” completely bound and determined by his, and our, social context.  That may be our self-serving fantasies about the “historical Jesus,” or the equally self-serving, sentimental, domesticated, unthreatening image of Jesus as the upholder of the status quo we may have received from sermons or in Sunday School.

            That is when we hear him saying to us, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’  And you will say, ‘Do here also the things that we have heard you did 2-thousand years ago.  Entertain us with some miracles!’  Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in their own home town.  Maybe my miracles are for those who really need them.  Maybe what I require from you is discipleship.” 

            And maybe discipleship means bringing the good news to someone else, someone whom we have decided doesn’t deserve it, someone who isn’t like us.  Maybe we think the captives are where they belong and the oppressed had it coming.  Maybe we wonder how someone else’s blindness got to be our problem.  Maybe we’re benefiting too handsomely from having people indebted to us to imagine that should change.

            Or, maybe, the Breath of God will blow through and over us too, and we will realize that what Jesus was anointed to do, we are anointed to do as well.  Maybe we, who have been baptized into his Name, will realize that we are his Body, and that God has equipped us to be his people.

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The Adversary.

Luke 4:1-13

I.

                  Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit out into the desert by himself.  And he stays there for forty days.  Anyone hearing this story would have been reminded of the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness, where they were also tested.

                  The wilderness has always been the place where people would go to wrestle with their demons, to encounter God, to test themselves or be tested by the elements.  God brought the people through Sinai for forty years to test them and build them into a coherent nation.  The Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness also for testing.  It is as if God wants to replicate the experience of the ancient Israelites now in the life of this one Israelite.  Only this time the results will be different.

                  Israel caved in to temptation at almost every turn, culminating in the disaster with the Golden Calf.  As a consequence, God, while staying with them, also maintained a healthy distance from them.  The Lord continued to lead them, but from far enough away so that they were not consumed and destroyed by God’s holiness.  God always had to call prophets to bridge that distance and bring the people the Word.

                  How will this time be different?

                  Jesus is confronted by Satan or the devil.  This figure has turned up several times before in Scripture, usually as a heavenly Accuser or Adversary charged with testing the faith of people.  Satan kind of represents the self-centered urges and desires within us that tend to drag us into unhealth and death, and inspire us to do violence in the world.  He is the voice that suggests that we should not do things God’s way, but our own way, and as such he is the power of sin within us that drags us down into death. 

                  The devil’s words are very strong in all our lives because, as we shall see, they make perfect sense to us.  Satan’s path is always considerably more appealing and apparently reasonable than the usually pretty counter-intuitive and demanding words we get from God.

                  So when Jesus says to the rich young ruler in Mark, “Sell all you have the give the proceeds to the poor,” maybe he thinks, “No, that can’t be right.  The poor are so lazy, they’d only waste the money.  Wouldn’t it be better if I hired the poor to work in my factory?  Then they’d be working for their money and I would make a profit too.  Everybody benefits!”  It makes perfect sense to us; but it’s not what God says.  When we don’t do what God wants and do instead things that make more sense to us, mainly because they benefit us, we are listening and caving in to the temptations of Satan.  We only see what’s good for us.  God sees and commands what is good for everybody.

II.

                  The first temptation Jesus has to face is that he make a loaf of bread from a stone.  It is not unreasonable.  He has just fasted for a month and a half.  A sandwich would have sounded good.  He had reached his 40-day goal.  It wouldn’t make any sense to fast for 41 days.  Why should he not do something for himself?  He isn’t any good to anyone if he starves to death in the desert.  He’s a leader!  He’s going to have a lot of people depending on him.  He needs to keep his strength up for their sake. 

                  The devil appeals first to Jesus’ gut, his stomach, his need for nourishment.  It is an effective place to attack humans.  Food is important, obviously.  It is a matter of survival.  Anyone who has seriously fasted or even gone on a diet knows that our bodies are hardwired to eat.  Not eating, when food is available, is very challenging.

                  If someone keeps food from us against our will, that can generate anger.  Even when someone out of love denies you salt, sugar, fat, carbs, or whatever it is you’re not supposed to have, we can get impatient and upset with them, or with the doctor who gave us these rules.

                  The devil says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, then morphing a stone into a loaf of bread should not be a problem.”  He is tempting Jesus to prove to himself who he is, to try out his powers, take them out for a test drive, to verify what he can do, to demonstrate that he really is who the voice at his baptism said he is.

                  Think of all the hungry people Jesus could feed with this stone-to-bread thing!  Are you going to let them stay hungry because of a dispute over a theological point?  Caesar maintains his power by doling out bread; think of all the good Jesus could do were he to become the source of bread for the world.

                  But Jesus says no.  His ministry is not going to be about bread, or the economic growth that bread often stands for.  And he quotes Scripture.  “One does not live by bread alone.”  He has to say no to the demands of his belly, in order to say yes to the call of God.  He has to decline to feed the false self we all have called our ego.  Instead he chooses to feed his higher, truer, deeper identity as Son of God.  That identity gets fed not with bread, but with obedience.

                  Jesus isn’t saying don’t feed people, don’t provide for human needs.  He spends most of his career doing that.  He is saying that whatever we do, do it in obedience to God, not our own will.  Left up to us, feeding people generally happens in a self-interested way.  We will do it if it benefits us and doesn’t threaten our own bread supply.

                  But Jesus says to do what God wills first, without worrying about your personal bread supply.

III.    

                  The key to all the temptations is who is doing the tempting.  Jesus will conjure enough bread from thin air to feed 5,000 people later in his ministry.  It’s not about the bread so much as whom you are serving. 

                  The Adversary comes to us as a steady voice inside our soul simply telling us whatever self-serving word we want to hear.  It plays on and stokes our fear, anger, and shame, turning us into adversaries and accusers of each other.  And, as we know, that happens all the time.

                  We may frame it in terms of God versus Satan.  But the way we experience it is as God verses… ourselves.  The devil is only telling Jesus what normal humans tell themselves.  He is playing on Jesus’ needs, desires, hopes, dreams, and fantasies.  He’s even tempting him with a standard vision of what the Bible says the Messiah is supposed to do.

                  We see this in the second of the temptations.  The devil offers Jesus the glory and authority of all the kingdoms of the world: political, military, judiciary, executive power.  This is the kind of power that is enforced by armies, police, and courts.  It is the kind of power where you can fine, or imprison, or even legally kill someone who transgresses your will.  It is for almost all of humanity the only kind of power that matters.  It is what our minds worship as “power.”

                  Think of all the good Jesus could do if he were Emperor of the whole world!  He’d have way more power than a mere President or Prime-Minister, even more than an ordinary king, even more than Caesar himself!  He could really get things done!

                  Isn’t this the usual rendition of what the Messiah was supposed to do?  Raise an army, kick out the Romans, establish God’s Law in Israel again?  If this new Messiah is supposed to be for all people, even the Gentiles, doesn’t that mean coming to rule over the whole world?

                  No, says Jesus.  He renounces that kind of power.  He rejects the power to force people to do things, or not to do them.  He doesn’t use the legal system of his time.  Neither does he gather an army, or even advocate the use of weapons of any kind. 

                  The cost of such power is to worship Satan.  Jesus refuses to do this.  Coercive power, the use of threats and violence, applying main force against people in an attempt to compel virtue doesn’t work.  It is based on fear, and it only makes things worse because that kind of power is inherently and necessarily corrupting.

                  The church has caved to this temptation repeatedly and often.  To do so separates us from our Lord and discredits us in the eyes of the world.  The church as an agent of violence and coercion is not the church of Jesus Christ.

IV.

                  For the third temptation, the devil plays on the human desire to be popular, well-liked, beloved, and even famous.  Jesus is supposed to put on a spectacular show, enlisting his Father as a kind of supporting actor.  Indeed, he is supposed to force his Father’s hand; God is supposed to suspend the laws of nature for him.  The idea is that Jesus will throw himself off the top of the Temple in Jerusalem and God will send angels to protect him, in fulfillment of Psalm 91.  Satan helpfully quotes the Bible in support of this idea.

                  Presumably such a spectacular public miracle would get a great deal of attention.  He would be utterly unique.  He would win the hearts of the people.  More importantly, Jesus would demonstrate that God needs him.  God is at his disposal like a really powerful genie.  Jesus would be saying, “God loves me and so should you!”

                  Jesus retorts with another quotation from Deuteronomy: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” 

                  The church does this all the time; so do Christians.  We test God when we assume that God is here to serve, protect, cater to, comfort, and otherwise support us.  So that when something bad happens we treat God like a customer service representative of a company that has failed us.  “How could you allow this?”  “Where were you?”  “I am not satisfied with your performance.”  “I want a refund.” 

                  Apparently when we do dumb or unwise things, or even when we are subject to the unfairnesses and liabilities of life, we expect God to show up with miracles… because we’re worth it, I suppose?  And when our life does hit the pavement, and angels don’t materialize to keep us from getting so much as a scuffed foot, we conclude that there is no God.

                  Because, we complain: “God didn’t meet all my needs.  God didn’t make me the best.  God didn’t make me special.”

                  But the whole point of trusting God is that God is in control and you accommodate yourself to what God wants, not the other way around.  Your job is to obey God and follow God’s instructions.  It is not God’s job to bail you out of every predicament you get yourself into.  Rather, God has shown us that the way through our predicaments, the way through our brokenness and failures, the way through our diseases and griefs, is by seeing our lives shaped by God.  It is by letting God’s Word, Jesus Christ, remake us, reform us, renew us, and restore us.     

                 

V.

                  All of these temptations have to do with putting yourself ahead of God in your life.  That’s what the devil says to each of us.  “You know better.”  “Your hunger, your desire for fame, your craving of power… these are what are important.”  “God wants you to be happy!”

                  Well, God does want us to be happy – but not by our own standards and definitions of happiness.  We define happiness too often in terms of how much we have accumulated for ourselves.  But God defines happiness in terms of how much of what God has given us we give away to others.  Our happiness comes in submitting to God’s will.  Our true happiness is found in letting go of our old selves that may so easily be tempted to grab for more.  For when we let go of that false self, we find the true self God has already placed deep within us.

                  Jesus does not perform any miracles in validating his calling as Messiah.  God validates him because he is strong enough not to have to rely on miracles.  The devil wants him to be self-centered.  “You’re the Son of God, of course it’s all about you!”  But Jesus reveals himself as Messiah not by self-promotion, ambitious drive, or sheer will-power.  Just the opposite.  He does it by perfect obedience to God’s Word.  It is an obedience so perfect he allowed very little of the mortal, historical Jesus of Nazareth to get in the way of the Messiah, the Son of God shining in him.  And the people noticed that. 

                  Everyone else who came to John for baptism was happy if their sins got washed away in the waters of the Jordan.  But when Jesus emerges from the water, his whole ego had fallen away, and he assumed his truest and deepest identity as the Son of God.  The temptations prove that.  No one still enslaved to their broken and sinful ego answers those questions the way Jesus does.

                  And because he rejects these things in their corrupted human form, they are able to flow through him into the world in their true and blessed form.  For in his poverty he brings us true wealth, and in his weakness he brings us true power, and in his simplicity he brings us true uniqueness.

                  What Jesus does here we must do as individuals and as a church.  We have to put ourselves in God’s hands, seeking first and only God’s will and reign, rejecting offers of wealth, power, and fame, and not seeking those things at all.  For in Christ all goodness and blessing and healing are given to us to flow through us into the lives of others, enriching the life of the whole world.

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