Mutual Responsibility for Evil and
Joy
The Rev. George Yandell
February 25, 2007
The First Sunday of Lent
This sermon is also available in audio
In a mystical drama between the powers of good and evil, Jesus is led by God’s spirit to be tempted by Satan. The intimate, seductive offers that Satan makes cut to the core of human identity as created beings—Satan suggests that if Jesus is created as God’s own child, Jesus can make the very stones of the earth transform into bread to soothe his intense hunger after fasting 40 days. Satan urged Jesus to test the saving power of God by attempting suicide. And Satan offers to give Jesus rulership over all the world if he will only worship the fallen angel. Jesus responds to these tests each time by quoting the Hebrew scriptures and saying, “Keeping faith in God, serving God alone, provides all things necessary for life, and saves us.”
Who is telling the story? The gospel writer, in the 3rd person. More intriguing, who is the source for the story? Who could it be? Well, it certainly wasn’t Satan—it would never choose to display a failure on its part. So the source must have been Jesus. What was his point in recounting this dream-like episode from the beginning of his ministry?
In each temptation Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy where Moses is described as receiving the Law from Yahweh on Mt. Sinai. The temptation story is thus a retelling of that ancient story but substituting Jesus for Moses. Just as Moses and Israel were tempted during their 40 years in the wilderness, so Jesus was tempted during his 40 days. Israel was tempted by hunger; they complained loudly to God, and God sent “manna that fell from heaven” each day.
Jesus is tempted by hunger, but refuses to turn stones into bread. Israel was tempted by idolatry and crafted golden calves to worship; Jesus is tempted to worship Satan. Israel as a people succumbed to their temptations, yet Jesus does not. Luke utilizes this story as a way of foreshadowing the kind of life Jesus would lead. (borrowed in part from Acts of Jesus, pp. 41-43, Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, 1999)
This is the great drama into which you and I have been thrust as people of faith. The temptations Satan offered Jesus are temptations we meet every day, in diverse ways. Our course in life is altered, in fact the course of creation is changed, every time we act within the tensions of good and evil now. We are created whole and good, yet also incomplete and flawed. In the gray area in our souls, tugged and tempted, we learn the lesson Jesus learned in the wilds—we learn our need of God.
When I was a little boy, about 4, I played with three brothers who lived down the street from me. The older brother, a year older than I, had gotten a wonderful tin small-scale garage and filling station for Christmas. I loved to play with him, moving the little cars around, pretending to pump gas and tend the station. The toy I was captivated by was a little yellow metal lift, with a lever on the side. When you drove a car onto the lift, and moved the lever, the car raised up so the miniscule attendant could work under it. It gave me great delight.
One day I slipped it into my pocket, and took it home. For a week I played with it alone, hiding it from my little brother. The model car I drove onto it didn’t fit, it wasn’t any fun. More than that, when I’d go to my friend’s house, he missed the lift. A week after stealing it, I slipped it back into the garage. My friend was delighted, but wondered where it had been. I never told him. I started having loads more fun playing as a team with the lift back where it belonged.
Do you and I hear these temptations as only individual to Jesus? Certainly that’s what we centered on in the Ash Wednesday service. But the original Jewish hearers of this story would have immediately thought of Jesus as symbolically representing the whole Jewish people.
It’s all right here, Jesus demonstrated. The polarities of good and evil tug at humans every day. All manner of twists and turns are offered to deter us from fixing our attention on God alone. The church is not exempt from these same desires. Indeed, clear and strange parallels of temptation are going on in the church's life at this very moment.
I hear this message today—Yes, resisting individual temptation is essential to moving on the Way of Jesus. Resisting my personal devils renews us me in moving toward the holy, toward the joy of serving God with my whole self. But it’s tempting, as the collective people of God, to shrug off our mutual responsibility for all those whom God loves. We are the Body of Christ, and have corporate temptations we rarely address.
But if we accept our share of the blame for evil in this world, and work as a people to confess to one another that we do not resist it fully enough, to change our corporate focus, if we claim the ministry of Jesus as our own, then we are partners with God. If we hold each other accountable for living out our forgiveness in works of justice, then we’re getting the deep message of Jesus. If we work to change the structures that allow evil to flourish in our world, then we might just find our actions yield a deeper joy that rests on doing God’s justice as the collective Body of Christ.
There is holy, joyful power in numbers of people working for God’s justice shoulder to shoulder with other followers of the Way of Jesus. It’s lots more rewarding, as I found with my friend. Playing alone didn’t cut it, especially since I’d stolen what belonged to my friend.
The devil expected to have a field day by using these temptations out there in the wilderness with Jesus. But the gospel as Jesus understood it and as we've received it confronts every one of the false priorities that divert us from working as partners with God to make this world a heaven-like place for all. God works to bind us together to share in heaven now.
Jesus is here at table with us, erasing centuries of warfare, teaching
us to discover our common humanity, easing us out of our historic
complacency and into the shared language of love. Love which makes
this gentle, but firm demand of us—"You shall worship the
Lord your God, and God only shall you serve." (Borrowed in part
from Out of Nowhere, 2-22-07, online commentary by Lane Denson)
Copyright ©2007 Calvary Episcopal Church
Gospel Reading:
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led
by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted
by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they
were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are
the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live
by bread alone.’” Then the devil led him up and showed
him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said
to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority;
for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.
If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus
answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’” Then the devil took him to Jerusalem,
and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If
you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’”,
and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will
not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him,
“It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until
an opportune time. NRSV (New Revised Standard Version)