The First Sunday of Lent, Year A
Matthew 4:1-11
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
“After Jesus was baptized in the
Jordan River, God led him to the desert. Jesus was all alone without any food
for 40 days. He prayed to God for help, but it was still really hard to be in
the wilderness.”[1]
That’s how my favorite children’s
Bible begins its version of our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. I love that
line: “it was still really hard to be in the wilderness.” That’s this story in
a nutshell, isn’t it? And when I think about it from that perspective, it makes
sense why we always hear this story on the First Sunday of Lent, when we’re at
the beginning of our own forty day journey in the wilderness, at least
metaphorically. It’s a reminder that, while things are probably fine right now,
and whatever discipline we’ve taken on for Lent seems easy, it’s not going to
stay that way. A couple weeks from now, that won’t be the case. I’m going to be
looking for excuses to set my discipline aside. I need that reminder that
things will get tough.
The fact is, we all go through
wilderness periods in our life, and not just in Lent. There are going to be
times when our spiritual life feels dry like a desert, when it feels like God
doesn’t hear our prayers, and when the Tempter sidles up to us and whispers in
our ear, “If…”
Did you notice that? The Tempter
speaks to Jesus in conditional statements, and only in conditional statements. A
lot can hang on an if. “If you love me…” “If you cared…” “If you were a good
son or daughter…” “If you were more like your sister or brother…” “If… if… if…”
Ifs hurt. I think that’s why the Tempter is so fond of them. Ifs chip away at
our very sense of self, of who we are. And it’s easy to start to let them
infect our thoughts, isn’t it? “If I were a loving spouse…” “If I were a good
son…” “If I were smarter… prettier… stronger… thinner… taller… better…” “If…
if… if…”
I think it can be easy to get
caught up in how fantastic this story sounds, and miss the point. It’s easy for
me to say, “I haven’t had this sort of mystical experience of temptation, so
this can’t possibly to have anything to do with my life.” I think the Devil has
a lot to do with that. When we hear that word, it’s hard not to think of some
grotesque supernatural figure wielding a pitchfork, like we have in our stained
glass window by the Smith Room. We like this idea of the Devil as a
personification of evil. That’s easy to deal with; easy to dismiss. But I don’t
think that’s what Matthew had in mind. Matthew, before he became one of Jesus’
disciples, had spent his life seeking God according to the promises and
commands of the Hebrew Bible, and the Hebrew Bible doesn’t present the devil as
some sort of evil supernatural being. In fact, the Greek words that Matthew
picks to describe the devil are actually really impersonal. He’s “the Tempter”
or “the Accuser.” And in the Hebrew Bible, the Accuser is just that: an angel
whose job was to accuse human beings of wrong doing in the divine court, sort
of like a heavenly DA. The Hebrew word for accuser, “Satan,” is a title, not a
person.
The devil, the Accuser, in this
story isn’t some pitch-fork wielding Prince of Darkness, he's that nagging
whisper in the back of Jesus’ mind, the one that tells him that God couldn’t
possibly love a human being like him. And while I’ve never had some sort of
mystical experience where the Accuser took me up to a very high mountain, I
have heard that whisper of doubt. Have you? Have you lain awake at night
wondering, how can I possibly be good enough? Have you had someone tell you
that you’ll never amount to anything, never make the team, never understand
algebra, never get into a good college? That is the whisper of the Accuser, and
that is what Jesus heard in the wilderness.
This story isn’t about the devil; it's
about Jesus having an identity crisis. Each of these three temptations that
Jesus faces directly relates to an expectation that the people of God had about
what sort of person God’s messiah would be. Some people
thought that the messiah would be a new Moses, providing bread
for hungry people, just like Moses asked God for
manna in the wilderness. Some people thought
that the messiah would appear in the Temple, reforming the
sacred worship of the Lord God of Israel, and correcting
what they perceived as corrupt practices. Some people
thought that the messiah would reestablish the kingdom of Israel, overthrowing
the brutal and oppressive Roman Empire, and reestablishing
the Kingdom of David. People prayed desperately for
these things, none of which was, necessarily, bad.
And so, the Accuser slipped up behind Jesus and whispered,
“If you are the Son of God… be who the people want you to
be.”
That’s the sort of doubt that keeps me
up at night. “If God really loves you, then why doesn’t everything work out all
right? Maybe God doesn’t really love you. Maybe God wouldn’t love a failure
like you. Maybe God couldn’t love a failure like you.” Have you ever been
there? Did you catch how our reading began this morning? “After Jesus was
baptized…” Immediately after, in fact. After Jesus saw the heavens opened and
the Holy Spirit descending as a dove and heard a voice from heaven saying, “This
is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” After all this, Jesus
still has doubts. He still has fears. But he doesn’t listen to them. He doesn’t
let them rule his life. And he doesn’t let them rule our lives either. Each of
us, at our baptism, received the same assurance of God’s love for us. In that
moment, God declared each of us God’s beloved child, something that we were
before we went into those waters, but now we had that identity confirmed. The
answer to those doubts that our Accuser whispers to each of us is Jesus’
answer: “I am God’s beloved child. Away with you!” It’s still very hard, at
times, to be in the wilderness,
but, in those moments of crisis, Jesus
gives us the grace to claim our identity as God’s beloved child, assuring us,
that whatever dark night of the soul we might go through, God will never leave
us or forsake us, God will never take back that declaration God made at our
baptism: “You are my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.” Amen.
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