Parley

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

When Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness, he is showing us what kind of a god the devil can work with.

The background is straightforward enough. Jesus is baptized in the River Jordan by His cousin John, not because baptism changes Him, but because He changes Baptism. Jesus transforms water and word into the place where God meets humankind, where we are baptized into Christ’s own death and resurrection forever.

And immediately following this, He is driven out by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness, the place where demons dwell. And He is tempted there for 40 days, just as Adam and Eve were tempted, just as Israel wandered the wilderness for 40 years. But whereas the Old Adam and the Old Israel both failed alike, this New Adam and New Israel succeeds.

We mustn’t read the temptation simply as an object lesson in morality: Jesus resisted the devil, so I ought to do as Jesus did. This is to miss the point. Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is not about us. It can’t be. We, humanity, have already been tested, many times, and we’ve failed every one. We cannot do as Jesus does; that’s the point. He does for us what we cannot. It’s a matter of mercy. It’s a matter of grace.

The temptation is about who Jesus is: if He is the Son of God, God’s essence now made man; and if He is, then what sort of God will He be? What vision of the Messiah, what understanding of the Son of God, will He embrace? The devil hasn’t come to accuse Christ of His sin, for he knows there isn’t any there for him to grasp. Rather, the devil has come to negotiate, beneath a flag of truce, to parley with this divine invader, in hopes of a sensible compromise here below.

“If you are the Son of God,” Satan says, “command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” That should be simple enough for You, right? Didn’t Your voice speak Creation into existence? Didn’t all things come into being through You? So let’s have some bread, nothing fancy. Simple fare for simple folk, You and I. What could be the harm in that?

Because if Jesus is willing to turn stones to bread, in order to satisfy His own hunger, then Satan can work with that. He does so love prosperity preachers. A Messiah who uses His power, uses His divinely appointed mission, to feather His own bed and fill His own belly, is a Messiah who can work with the devil, who has room in His Kingdom for the spirit of rebellion and pride.

Promise me, preacher, promise me prosperity, success, respect, wealth. Promise me shiny white teeth and perfectly coiffed hair and tell me that if I just sign the tract, forward the email, put a dollar in the box, I’ll have everything I’ve ever wanted. Give me a God who’s a genie granting wishes and we’ll pay you, preacher, all you’ve ever wanted, limos and Learjets and mansions and book deals. Doesn’t the worker deserve to be paid? Turn this stone to bread and I can work with that, Jesus: the Almighty and Lucifer, together again, but this time on more equitable footing.

“It is written,” says Jesus, “one does not live by bread alone.”

So much for that tack. Let’s try something else. “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 all their glory and all this authority if You will but worship me.’” Ah, and here we have the ancient temptation of the Church. Wouldn’t it be lovely—wouldn’t it be nice—if only the power of the state enforced faith? Wouldn’t it be so much better if Christianity were law?

Oh, the cathedrals we could build and the clergy we could pay. And every matter of morality and faith would be nice and neat, codified by lawyers and enforced with the sword and we would have all of this wonderful power—for good, mind you. All we have to do is let in a little pride, a little rebellion, a little compromise with sin. And if we do we’ll have Emperors of Rome and Kings of England and armies led by the Pope at our beck and call. And all for a good cause, of course! Wouldn’t it be lovely, Jesus? Wouldn’t it be sweet?

“It is written,” says Jesus, “worship the Lord your God and serve only Him.”

Fine. You don’t want wealth? You don’t want power? Then let’s see how strong Your faith truly is. And the devil whisks Jesus away to the pinnacle of the Temple—the corner of the Temple Mount, from which the shofar is blown, 300 feet off the ground—and he says, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down from here, for it is written that He will command His angels to protect You!”

And here we have one of the great fallacies of the Christian faith: that nothing bad will happen to you if you love and trust your God. Sometimes this takes silly forms: if I just pray hard enough, I’ll find a parking space, I’ll ace that test. Sometimes it’s more insidious than that: if God really loved me, He wouldn’t let this happen to me. He wouldn’t let me get sick. He wouldn’t let people die.

I’ll trust God if. I’ll love God if. And if He fails my test, well, then, to hell with Him.

To be a Christian is to take up the Cross. It is to enter fully into the brokenness, the woundedness, the suffering of this world and there to love others in their brokenness, in their suffering. That’s what Jesus does. He does not avoid death. He embraces it. He embraces the humiliation and the tortures and the beatings and the murder that we pour out upon Him. And still He loves us. Still He forgives us. Still He suffers for and with and because of us, all the way to hell and back.

To trust in God is to trust that God is with us in all that we suffer, and that the brokenness of this world, with its death and decay and unjust pain, will not have the final say. We trust that life with outlive death, that one day every wound will be healed and every tear wiped away and every godawful tragedy made right in the end.

We are not better than Christ, who suffered for no sin of His own, and gained not one whit of glory here below. To trust God is faith and peace and life. But to test God—to trust Him only on our own terms—is pride. And the devil can work with that. After all, he invented pride. He practically is pride.

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

And that’s it, folks. That’s all he’s got. That’s every arrow in the devil’s quiver, save of course for violence, which he will gladly deploy at an opportune time. And so he departs from the proven Son of God, unable to have come to terms.

Jesus, my brothers and sisters, is truly the Messiah, the Son of God, the Creator come down to earth. His temptation proves this as surely as His Baptism and birth. And He hasn’t come down for His own benefit or glory. He hasn’t come to claim worldly or secular power. He certainly hasn’t come to put the love of God to the test—for He is Himself that very love personified, made flesh.

Thus He will not be the warrior-messiah for whom so many have hoped. He will lead no armies, promise no prosperity, grant no wishes. He will instead, in His life, death, and resurrection, embody God’s mercy and grace and love and superabundant life poured out for the world from the Cross.

And there will be no compromise with the devil, no negotiation between infinite Good and shriveling evil. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather. Christ has come to conquer, and He will not rest, and He will not stop, until every atom of Creation claimed by Satan’s rebellion is retaken for the Kingdom and handed over to the Father that God at the last may be All in All. And He does this not by force, not by violence, but by a love that will not die, that cannot die, a love that fills up hell to bursting and pulls down Heaven from the sky.

Thus shall the spirit of pride in each of us perish. And the Spirit of God shall raise us anew.

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