Loving Devils

Scriptures: The First Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Immediately following His Baptism in the Jordan River at the hands of His cousin John—an event that inaugurates His public ministry—Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days, there to be tempted by the devil. Like all great stories, this one appears deceptively simple, yet reveals layers of meaning and allusion just beneath the surface.

40 is always a pregnant number. Rather literally, as it turns out. Just as it takes roughly 40 weeks for a woman to come to term and bear her child, so in the ancient world the number 40 represents a time of hardship, of labor, resulting in new birth. In the time of Noah, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. In the time of Moses, Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. And in our own day we keep the fast of Lent 40 days before the Last Supper.

Jesus’ time in the wilderness recalls Moses and Noah, but more importantly it recalls Adam. Our first parents were happy in the Garden of Eden, happy in the classical sense of being whole and virtuous and true to the best in one’s own nature. They experienced perfect harmony with God, with each other, and with the world around them. Adam and Eve were the linchpin of God’s good Creation. They weren’t the wisest or strongest or most glorious of creatures, mind you, but they were the bridge connecting the spiritual with the physical. In humanity, the realms of the ethereal and the material became one.

It was the devil, recall, who entered the garden and slipped into our first parents’ minds the notion of rebellion: of becoming our own gods. Eden was no trap, mind you, no gilded cage. There was an exit freely available, for God is Love, and love by its very nature cannot force. You know the story. We decided that we could be wiser than Wisdom, truer than Truth, more godly than God. And so that original intended harmony established in God’s paradise was lost, and we have been at war—with Nature, with God, with one another—ever since. The entire story of the Bible is that of God calling us home, coaxing us, seducing us, loving and scaring and begging us, to come back to Him.

Yet we wouldn’t, foolish and small and obstinate as we are. We would rather reign in hell than serve in Heaven; we would rather be our own gods, which is to say, devils. So when we at last would not come back to God, God came down to us. He entered our world, took on our flesh, through the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and He walked among us once more in the person of Jesus Christ. God became Man, that Man might be brought back into harmony, into unity, with God. For indeed, Love cannot force, but neither can Love abandon His beloved.

In Christ, God does what we could not. God Himself becomes the New Adam, the New Man, who overcomes the temptations of the devil. In Christ we find the one truly human being, utterly sinless in His perfect union with God. And so He provides us with a new birth, a New Creation, a New Covenant in His Blood. He inaugurates the Eighth Day of Creation, for behold, He makes all things new.

And interestingly enough, no one seems to understand this better than the devil. God has made a new Adam, Satan sees. A new harmony to disrupt. A new balance to overthrow. But this can’t just be a replay of the last the time. Jesus cannot be tempted to disobey God, for Jesus is Himself God. No. If he is to succeed, the tempter must use Jesus’ humanity against His divinity. He must convince God to be a different sort of God—the sort that devils and men expect God to be. The sort of God, in other words, with whom Satan can work.

“You are hungry,” says the devil. “Turn these stones to bread. I know that You can.”

“I have not come to fulfill My own appetites,” Jesus replies.

“You are their King,” says the devil. “Worship me and I’ll hand power over to You.”

“I have not come to impose My own rule,” Jesus replies.

“You are the Son of God,” says the devil. “Call down Your angels to protect You!”

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” Jesus replies.

And the very next line, the very next verse, reads: “the devil finished every test.” Isn’t that interesting? Jesus says, “Don’t test God,” so the devil finished testing Him. It’s the same word in English, the same root in Greek, and that is no coincidence.  All this time, Satan was not simply testing a Man. You can see this in the very nature of his temptations. When the devil tempts Adam and Eve, he doesn’t say, “Worship Satan!” No, he says, “Worship yourselves. Be your own gods.” The devil presents himself as a humanist, as a fan of Man. He enslaves us through our pride.

But that won’t work with Jesus. Instead, he tells Jesus, “I’ll give you what you want. I’ll lay the world at Your feet. I’ll return Your wayward children to Your power. All You have to do is worship me. All You have to do is say that I was right about them, that I was right all along. You and I, Jesus, we can be their God together!” But the sort of godhood that Satan craves—the sort that seeks first its own good, the sort that mistakes power for love, the sort that thinks the world must be forced into what you want it to be—that’s all wrong. That’s all false.

Jesus could do all the things that the devil tempts Him to do. He could turn rocks into food. He could call angels to reveal His glory from the pinnacle of the Temple. He could bend the nations of the world to His will with a messianic rod of iron! But that is not why He has come. That’s not what He does. That’s not who He is. Why, if He so chose, He could crush the devil beneath His heel like a worm, right now! Squish! But what would that do, other than prove that the devil was right—that force and dominion are the true powers in this fallen world. Not Love. Not forgiveness. Not for these filthy apes.

“Say I’m right, Jesus,” the devil whispers, in tones too low for us to hear. “You know what’s coming. You know what these animals are going to do to You. Just say that I was right about them from the start and we can put this all behind us and make this world back into what it should have been from the start: angels in Heaven and men in the mud. Be the sort of God that the devil always wanted You to be, that I always knew You should be! Take what’s Yours and take it now!”

That’s the temptation of Christ. Not to fall as a Man, but to fall as God.

And Jesus looks to the devil, to this most beautiful and powerful of creatures that He had freely and lovingly created on that first glorious day of light, this eldest and most rebellious of all His sons, and He whispers: “No.”

And I’m not sure what He sees then in the devil’s eyes. Frustration? Fear? Pain, perhaps? Pride, certainly. And the devil snorts at Him, “Fine. Have it Your way. I’ll see You at Your funeral.”

And as he vanishes from Christ’s presence until the opportune time, Jesus sighs after him, “Yes, Lucifer, you will. You most certainly will.”

How hard it must be, to be Love given flesh. Loving even the devils who betray You. Loving even the men who will murder You. Yet in this moment of temptation we see clearly God’s own choice: to love the unlovable, repair the irreparable, forgive the unforgivable; to accept in full the only kingship we will offer: a cross, a spear, a crown of thorns. He knew what we would do to Him, and He let us do it anyway. All for love. All for us. My God.

Jesus is not the sort of God we can work with. But He’s the only sort of God we can love.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.