Genesis 3:1-21; 2 Corinthians 6:1-10; St Matthew 4:1-11
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
“So there I was, standing in a hotel lobby with a strange woman, a throbbing heartbeat, and a guilty conscience.” That’s how evangelical theologian Russell Moore begins his book, Tried and Tempted. The situation is not as bad as it sounds, he assures us, “But,” he says, “in a lot of ways it was even worse.”
He had been during through a terrible rainstorm with his wife and four children. They hadn’t gotten as far as he’d hoped, but it was time to stop for the night. They pulled into a chain hotel and he went in alone to see if there were rooms available.
Behind the desk was a young woman, dimples in her cheeks, and as she tossed her hair back while checking the computer for a room, she reminded him of an old college girlfriend. She teased him about his soaking hair and giggled at his jokes as they made easy banter. “It felt like I was in college again,” he writes. “I didn’t have to judge disputes over who had whose toys or explain how predestination and free will work together in the Bible. I didn’t have to pay a mortgage or tell a faculty member he couldn’t have a raise. And I liked it.”
“Just then I heard a word I never thought would terrify me, but it did, just that once. I heard ‘Daddy.’” He had completely forgotten about his family waiting for him outside in the van. They were on their way into the lobby, his three year-old son riding the luggage cart, being pushed by his older brother. Suddenly his voice and body language toward the clerk became very businesslike.
On the way up to the room he reassured himself that he’d done nothing wrong. Nothing had happened. But, just for a moment, he’d forgotten who he was. “Husband. Pastor. Son. Christian. Daddy. I was struck by the thought, it starts like this, doesn’t it?”
How does it start for you? Moving through our Christian life, our temptations can change over time. Our situation changes as we move from student to worker, single to married, poor to rich. But fighting temptations becomes like playing that whack-a-mole game you used to find at arcades: Slamming the mallet down on one mole, another immediately pops up. Master your obsession for money, sexual lusts dominate. Master your own lack of discipline, resentment of the lazy rises up in your heart.
It all begins so easily: a chance encounter, a gland at the TV screen, an email late in the evening eating away at you through the night, a provocation making you determined to prove yourself right.
How does it start for you? In the event Russell Moore recounts, everything was internal. What was all internal. What was happening in his heart and conscience was a loss of identity. “For a moment, just a moment, I’d forgotten who I was, who I am.”
In the temptation of Jesus from today’s Gospel, the tempter says three times, If You are the Son of God. This is an assault on the identity of Jesus, designed not to get Him to deny His Sonship, but to question its goodness. If You are the Son of God is another way of saying, “If God really is Your Father . . .” implying that He’s not a very good Father, not a very loving Father, not looking out for Jesus and taking care of Him.
One of the startling details of the temptation narrative is how it begins. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. St Mark is even more aggressive: the Spirit drives Jesus into the arena. Throws Him; like an exorcism. God tempts no one, the Small Catechism says. But that doesn’t apply here. The Spirit has led Jesus into the wilderness with the purpose of being tempted. Perhaps Jesus had already prayed Psalm 22 numerous times over the forty days, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
“If You are the Son of God, why is Your Father allowing You to starve?” Now it can be done, but forty days without food is an extraordinary feat. Deprivation of food causes the body to panic, while the mind becomes irritable, then euphoric, then irrational. It is likely that a prolonged period of fasting, such as this, could make a man delusional. Certainly he was very weak, in both body and will.
But with Jesus, although He is not exercising the power of His divinity, having set them aside and hidden them in order to endure and undergo every pain, suffering, and temptation as a man, an additional temptations must have been that He could turn the stones into bread. So there is an aspect of a dare to the tempter’s suggestion, “Are You really the Son of God? Show me. Prove it.”
What is our Lord doing? He is recapitulating, going through all over again the experience of Israel in the wilderness. He is the people of God reduced to one Man. He is all humanity. Is the Son of God, called out of Egypt, brought through the Red Sea of His baptism in the Jordan, thrown out into the wilderness, led by God the Holy Spirit. There in the desert Israel grumbled and complained, doubting that God would take care of them. He who had led them through the Red Sea without getting their feet wet, they doubted He could feed them. And when He gave them manna, rained bread from heaven, they complained further and demanded meat. Jesus goes through all of this, without manna and meat, without complaining, without grumbling.
Even more, He is recapitulating, going through over again the temptation of our first parents. Adam and Eve were tempted with food in the midst of a feast, while Jesus is tempted with food in the midst of a fast. Our first parents interrupted their feast by seizing from God the food that He withheld. They forsook communion with God to dine with the devil. Jesus does not interrupt His fast. He shall have fellowship with His Father in the Spirit by the Word that goes forth from His mouth.
For man, eating bread alone, will not live, but die. But the man who feeds on the Word that proceeds from the mouth of God will live. That is the food of Jesus during His fast. And it is our food, our meat and drink, our antidote as well in the hour of temptation. Jesus never forgets who He is. Jesus does not succumb to the suggestion that God is not His God, the Father is not His Father, a loving Father, One whose will and purpose is somehow not good, but malicious.
Through great endurance, in afflictions that we will never know, by hardships and calamities; in truthful speech and the power of God, through patience and the Holy Spirit, genuine love, Jesus is treated as an imposter and yet is the Truth. He never forgets who He is and who His Father is.
What about you? In what ways have you forgotten it? How does temptation begin with you? Food? Drink? Clothing? Shoes? House? Spouse? What provokes you to set aside the truth that God’s will and purpose for you, right now, even in the midst of sorrow and temptation, is good? That He is working all things, all things, for good?
There are two great mistakes we can make with the narrative of the temptation of our Lord Jesus. The preacher can use it as a club: “Jesus overcame temptation, so must you.” There’s no good news in that! Only moralism, only laws you can never keep, laws that will only drive you to hypocrisy or despair.
The other great mistake, a great evil, is thinking, “Jesus overcame temptation, so I don’t have to.” He did it. I can’t. He did it for me. I don’t have to do it. The forgiveness of sins, the central teaching of the Holy Christian Church, does not mean that you can consider your sins as light and insignificant. You cannot sin that grace may abound. You are saved by grace alone, this we preach and teach and confess. But never only grace as though the Law is annihilated and meaningless for the Christian life. This is satanic.
Looking at the sufferings, the humiliation, the temptation, the rigor of our Lord’s journey should make us see anew the horrible weight of our sins, the tremendous evil that is not just what you have done, but how you think and feel, how easily you can be led astray and forget who you are. Even for the briefest of random encounters with a hotel clerk.
What the fasting of Jesus reveals, and perhaps your own fasting, is the tremendous power that food and drink and the needs and lusts of our body wield over us. Putting God to the test, desiring the kingdoms of the world, or just wanting to establish your own little kingdom in your home and work, clinging to money and refusing to give it away to the glory of God the benefit of your neighbor - all these things reveal a problem in your heart, a fundamental sin against the First Commandment: You shall have not other gods before Me. What does this mean? We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.
You have not feared God, loved Him, trusted Him, but feared, loved, and trusted created things. Shadows and illusions.
So what’s the message for us in the temptation of Jesus? Try harder? Verily you should try harder. Rage, fight against sin, satan, and your flesh. But that’s not the message. Don’t worry about sin? Truly in Jesus your sins are forgiven, fully and completely. But do not reveal in them or count them as trivial.
No, neither of these are the central message. But this: the temptation of our Lord Jesus should drive you to Him with contrition and joy as the One who endured where you have fallen. As the One who obeyed where you rebelled. The One who worshipped the Creator while you have spent your life worshipping the created things. The temptation of our Lord Jesus ought to lead us to repentance and faith.
For you know your heart. Examining it is a gift of the Lord, by His Spirit. You know how you would grasp for food and the satisfaction of your lusts, how you would make a spectacle and fly through the air or do a quick genuflection if it would make you king of the earth. Knowing that, and hating it, leads you to come once again before the throne of grace and say, “I have lived as if God did not matter and as if I mattered most. My Lord’s name I have not honored as I should; my worship and prayers have faltered. I have not let His love have its way with me, and so my love for others has failed.”
And to you, weak and foolish, with nothing good, but hungering for something good, for righteousness not your own, our Lord Jesus says, “Take and eat, take and drink, I give to you the bread of heaven and the wine of paradise. My own Body and Blood, offered up on the Cross for the full and free remission of all of your sins. In Me your sins are absolved. By My bruised heal, Satan is beat down under your feet. By My crown of thorns you receive the inheritance of the kingdom and are crowned with innocence and blessedness. By My atoning sacrifice, your worship is holy and acceptable to God. At the Last Day I will raise you up from your grave, saying, ‘Come, dear child of paradise, your identity, your whole self, body and soul, heart and conscience, belong to Me.’”
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
“So there I was, standing in a hotel lobby with a strange woman, a throbbing heartbeat, and a guilty conscience.” That’s how evangelical theologian Russell Moore begins his book, Tried and Tempted. The situation is not as bad as it sounds, he assures us, “But,” he says, “in a lot of ways it was even worse.”
He had been during through a terrible rainstorm with his wife and four children. They hadn’t gotten as far as he’d hoped, but it was time to stop for the night. They pulled into a chain hotel and he went in alone to see if there were rooms available.
Behind the desk was a young woman, dimples in her cheeks, and as she tossed her hair back while checking the computer for a room, she reminded him of an old college girlfriend. She teased him about his soaking hair and giggled at his jokes as they made easy banter. “It felt like I was in college again,” he writes. “I didn’t have to judge disputes over who had whose toys or explain how predestination and free will work together in the Bible. I didn’t have to pay a mortgage or tell a faculty member he couldn’t have a raise. And I liked it.”
“Just then I heard a word I never thought would terrify me, but it did, just that once. I heard ‘Daddy.’” He had completely forgotten about his family waiting for him outside in the van. They were on their way into the lobby, his three year-old son riding the luggage cart, being pushed by his older brother. Suddenly his voice and body language toward the clerk became very businesslike.
On the way up to the room he reassured himself that he’d done nothing wrong. Nothing had happened. But, just for a moment, he’d forgotten who he was. “Husband. Pastor. Son. Christian. Daddy. I was struck by the thought, it starts like this, doesn’t it?”
How does it start for you? Moving through our Christian life, our temptations can change over time. Our situation changes as we move from student to worker, single to married, poor to rich. But fighting temptations becomes like playing that whack-a-mole game you used to find at arcades: Slamming the mallet down on one mole, another immediately pops up. Master your obsession for money, sexual lusts dominate. Master your own lack of discipline, resentment of the lazy rises up in your heart.
It all begins so easily: a chance encounter, a gland at the TV screen, an email late in the evening eating away at you through the night, a provocation making you determined to prove yourself right.
How does it start for you? In the event Russell Moore recounts, everything was internal. What was all internal. What was happening in his heart and conscience was a loss of identity. “For a moment, just a moment, I’d forgotten who I was, who I am.”
In the temptation of Jesus from today’s Gospel, the tempter says three times, If You are the Son of God. This is an assault on the identity of Jesus, designed not to get Him to deny His Sonship, but to question its goodness. If You are the Son of God is another way of saying, “If God really is Your Father . . .” implying that He’s not a very good Father, not a very loving Father, not looking out for Jesus and taking care of Him.
One of the startling details of the temptation narrative is how it begins. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. St Mark is even more aggressive: the Spirit drives Jesus into the arena. Throws Him; like an exorcism. God tempts no one, the Small Catechism says. But that doesn’t apply here. The Spirit has led Jesus into the wilderness with the purpose of being tempted. Perhaps Jesus had already prayed Psalm 22 numerous times over the forty days, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
“If You are the Son of God, why is Your Father allowing You to starve?” Now it can be done, but forty days without food is an extraordinary feat. Deprivation of food causes the body to panic, while the mind becomes irritable, then euphoric, then irrational. It is likely that a prolonged period of fasting, such as this, could make a man delusional. Certainly he was very weak, in both body and will.
But with Jesus, although He is not exercising the power of His divinity, having set them aside and hidden them in order to endure and undergo every pain, suffering, and temptation as a man, an additional temptations must have been that He could turn the stones into bread. So there is an aspect of a dare to the tempter’s suggestion, “Are You really the Son of God? Show me. Prove it.”
What is our Lord doing? He is recapitulating, going through all over again the experience of Israel in the wilderness. He is the people of God reduced to one Man. He is all humanity. Is the Son of God, called out of Egypt, brought through the Red Sea of His baptism in the Jordan, thrown out into the wilderness, led by God the Holy Spirit. There in the desert Israel grumbled and complained, doubting that God would take care of them. He who had led them through the Red Sea without getting their feet wet, they doubted He could feed them. And when He gave them manna, rained bread from heaven, they complained further and demanded meat. Jesus goes through all of this, without manna and meat, without complaining, without grumbling.
Even more, He is recapitulating, going through over again the temptation of our first parents. Adam and Eve were tempted with food in the midst of a feast, while Jesus is tempted with food in the midst of a fast. Our first parents interrupted their feast by seizing from God the food that He withheld. They forsook communion with God to dine with the devil. Jesus does not interrupt His fast. He shall have fellowship with His Father in the Spirit by the Word that goes forth from His mouth.
For man, eating bread alone, will not live, but die. But the man who feeds on the Word that proceeds from the mouth of God will live. That is the food of Jesus during His fast. And it is our food, our meat and drink, our antidote as well in the hour of temptation. Jesus never forgets who He is. Jesus does not succumb to the suggestion that God is not His God, the Father is not His Father, a loving Father, One whose will and purpose is somehow not good, but malicious.
Through great endurance, in afflictions that we will never know, by hardships and calamities; in truthful speech and the power of God, through patience and the Holy Spirit, genuine love, Jesus is treated as an imposter and yet is the Truth. He never forgets who He is and who His Father is.
What about you? In what ways have you forgotten it? How does temptation begin with you? Food? Drink? Clothing? Shoes? House? Spouse? What provokes you to set aside the truth that God’s will and purpose for you, right now, even in the midst of sorrow and temptation, is good? That He is working all things, all things, for good?
There are two great mistakes we can make with the narrative of the temptation of our Lord Jesus. The preacher can use it as a club: “Jesus overcame temptation, so must you.” There’s no good news in that! Only moralism, only laws you can never keep, laws that will only drive you to hypocrisy or despair.
The other great mistake, a great evil, is thinking, “Jesus overcame temptation, so I don’t have to.” He did it. I can’t. He did it for me. I don’t have to do it. The forgiveness of sins, the central teaching of the Holy Christian Church, does not mean that you can consider your sins as light and insignificant. You cannot sin that grace may abound. You are saved by grace alone, this we preach and teach and confess. But never only grace as though the Law is annihilated and meaningless for the Christian life. This is satanic.
Looking at the sufferings, the humiliation, the temptation, the rigor of our Lord’s journey should make us see anew the horrible weight of our sins, the tremendous evil that is not just what you have done, but how you think and feel, how easily you can be led astray and forget who you are. Even for the briefest of random encounters with a hotel clerk.
What the fasting of Jesus reveals, and perhaps your own fasting, is the tremendous power that food and drink and the needs and lusts of our body wield over us. Putting God to the test, desiring the kingdoms of the world, or just wanting to establish your own little kingdom in your home and work, clinging to money and refusing to give it away to the glory of God the benefit of your neighbor - all these things reveal a problem in your heart, a fundamental sin against the First Commandment: You shall have not other gods before Me. What does this mean? We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.
You have not feared God, loved Him, trusted Him, but feared, loved, and trusted created things. Shadows and illusions.
So what’s the message for us in the temptation of Jesus? Try harder? Verily you should try harder. Rage, fight against sin, satan, and your flesh. But that’s not the message. Don’t worry about sin? Truly in Jesus your sins are forgiven, fully and completely. But do not reveal in them or count them as trivial.
No, neither of these are the central message. But this: the temptation of our Lord Jesus should drive you to Him with contrition and joy as the One who endured where you have fallen. As the One who obeyed where you rebelled. The One who worshipped the Creator while you have spent your life worshipping the created things. The temptation of our Lord Jesus ought to lead us to repentance and faith.
For you know your heart. Examining it is a gift of the Lord, by His Spirit. You know how you would grasp for food and the satisfaction of your lusts, how you would make a spectacle and fly through the air or do a quick genuflection if it would make you king of the earth. Knowing that, and hating it, leads you to come once again before the throne of grace and say, “I have lived as if God did not matter and as if I mattered most. My Lord’s name I have not honored as I should; my worship and prayers have faltered. I have not let His love have its way with me, and so my love for others has failed.”
And to you, weak and foolish, with nothing good, but hungering for something good, for righteousness not your own, our Lord Jesus says, “Take and eat, take and drink, I give to you the bread of heaven and the wine of paradise. My own Body and Blood, offered up on the Cross for the full and free remission of all of your sins. In Me your sins are absolved. By My bruised heal, Satan is beat down under your feet. By My crown of thorns you receive the inheritance of the kingdom and are crowned with innocence and blessedness. By My atoning sacrifice, your worship is holy and acceptable to God. At the Last Day I will raise you up from your grave, saying, ‘Come, dear child of paradise, your identity, your whole self, body and soul, heart and conscience, belong to Me.’”
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
RSS Feed