The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. For the Hebrew people the wilderness is the pathway to the Promised Land. We saw that in our first reading (Deuteronomy 26:1-11). Once they arrived in the Promised Land they would have to recite a credal statement when they brought the first fruit of the land to God.
“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” They would acknowledge Abraham as the father of their nation. They would remember their sojourn in Egypt and how God led them out into the wilderness with Moses leading them. They would acknowledge that it was God who brought them through the wilderness in to the land of promise. “and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
The journey through the wilderness had included sacrifice and suffering. They could not help but be a changed people as a result of that journey.
As we hear of their gratitude on arrival in the Promised Land and the story of Jesus in the wilderness we are invited to enter into the wilderness of Lent. It will be a journey of testing but one which includes great promise.
Recently I have had a couple of conversations about young people not completing apprenticeships or university degrees. It seems that many young people growing up now regard any form of suffering, sacrifice or testing as something to be avoided if at all possible. The journey up the mountain that we heard last week in the story of Jesus’ transfiguration gives us another image of doing the hard work to come to the place of prayer. Both the wilderness and the mountain are places that our faith is put to the test. In previous generations there was much less choice, suffering, sacrifice and hard work were the paving stones of everyday life. Often your faith was honed on these stones. At our recent planning day people said one of the reasons they come to worship and continue to come is because of the people. We are blessed with many members of our Church who shine with grace and love. They have honed their spirituality on the stones of suffering, sacrifice and hard word work with the Holy Spirit’s grace bringing them through.
Let’s return to the story of Jesus.
Brian P. Stoffregen in his Exegetical Notes says
It is difficult to know how to translate Greek word peirazo (4:2) and the more intensive ekpeirazo (4:13) — “to test” or “to tempt”.
God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son (Gn 22:1).
But these words peirazo and ekpeirazo can also have negative connotations: “to tempt” or “to try and cause someone to make a mistake” or “to try and cause someone to sin”
At the same time that God is “testing” the strength of one’s faithfulness, the “Tempter” may be “tempting” someone to sin.
It is interesting to note that every other time peirazo/ekpeirazo are used in Luke, the tempters/testers are human beings: a lawyer (10:25) and part of a crowd (11:16).
Stoffregen concludes “I don’t think that most of our temptations come from the devil, but from other people. The Greek, diabolos almost always translates the Hebrew “SaTaN” in the LXX. “SaTaN” means “adversary,” which in the Hebrew scriptures are primarily other people, not supernatural beings. (However, Luke always uses “Satan” to refer to a supernatural being: 10:18; 11:18; 13:16; 22:3, 31.)”
Perhaps it is not even other people or the devil who temp us but thoughts and ideas with in. We wrestle with our own inner “demons”.
Kate Huey quotes N.T. Wright who tells us, “The story does not envisage Jesus engaged in conversation with a visible figure to whom he could talk as one to another: the devil’s voice appears as a string of natural ideas in his own head. They are plausible, attractive, and make, as we would say, a lot of sense.”
“he must begin by defeating [the devil] at the most personal and intimate level” (Luke for Everyone).
Most often our major temptations are temptations to do good things. It is the secondary temptations that cause the pain and sin. We may have committed ourselves to do just one more visit rather than spend time with our family. Then when we do get home we are hungry and tired and get cross with members of our family. We may have loaded ourselves up with to many commitments and then feel the need to put the foot down in the car speeding to our next appointment. The initial temptation was not to sin but we fail to get our priorities right.
Jesus faced three temptations which in a sense all related to his vocation from baptism. You are my son the beloved; with you I am well pleased. Luke 3:22
Luke separates the baptism from the wilderness story with the genealogy of Jesus. Here too he concludes Jesus is the son of Adam, son of God. Jesus is fully human but he is awakening to the realization of being the son of God. The testing in the wilderness would clarify how being the son of God is to be lived out.
If you are the Son of God, command this stone…
If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down…
Should Jesus focus on very human needs like hunger? Certainly we are to love our neighbour and that implies practical assistance. But to satisfy ones own hunger and the hunger of the masses with bread would not satisfy their deeper needs.
Another temptation is to seek glorious political power. As a ruler he could make substantial differences to people’s lives. For those who saw the film Amazing Grace you will remember William Wilberforce’s friend William Pit became Prime Minister. Immediately his need to maintain power clouded his ability to seek the same goals that Wilberforce and he had striven for. Jesus knew that political power was not to be his path.
Perhaps another way would be to draw the crowds with stunts. Jesus certainly had a gift to draw people to himself with healing and teaching. But even here people could grow expectations of Jesus that would be misleading. In the end Jesus would have to continue a journey of sacrifice and suffering. It would be a painful journey to the cross and many who had come to listen to Jesus and who had been healed by Jesus would fall away.
There seem to me a few things that we need to ponder as we continue on our Lenten journey this week. Firstly Jesus was able to respond to the temptations because the Hebrew Scriptures were part of the very fabric of his life. As Paul says “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” Do we immerse ourselves in the scriptures to the extent that we can respond to temptations with the word of God?
Secondly if Jesus had to walk a road that included suffering and sacrifice then we can be sure that our journey will include real pain and real hardship. Are we ready to enter the wilderness? We go into the wilderness with the promise of life in abundance even though the suffering will still be very real. Part of that wilderness is the process of clarifying our priorities.
Finally we have great opportunities to model faithful discipleship to our children and grand children. Perhaps the most powerful way we can teach them to grow into the person God is calling them to be is to live our own lives with consistent faith. Are we challenging our children and grandchildren to join us on the road through the wilderness?
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