DT 26: 4-10
PS 91: 1-2, 10-11, 12-13, 14-15
ROM 10: 8-13
MT 4:4B
LK 4:1-13
A colleague of mine runs an annual program called “Atheism
for Lent”; not exactly what one would expect of a minister running a
church-based program! His point is not that people literally “give up God for
Lent,” but that they allow the most important critiques of religion to “test”
our faith, burning away impurities and leaving behind a more serious and mature
faith, like refining ore to get down to a pure sample of metal.
It is no coincidence that during the 40 days of Lent we read
about Jesus’ 40 days of testing in the desert; this scene comes immediately
after Jesus’ baptism, at which he hears the words, “You are my beloved son;
with you I am well pleased (LK 3:22). Whatever Jesus might or might not have
known about himself by that point in his life, that sort of moment demands some
unpacking. Hence, the testing in the desert – less “temptations” than tests, in
the sense of proving the solidity of his understanding of God and his
commitment to that God.
Twice the tempter begins his test by saying, “IF you are the
Son of God…”; that does not sound to me like doubt about WHETHER Jesus is the
Son of God, but what it means for him to BE the Son of God, and indirectly what
it means for God to be God. After a long fast, the temptation is to make stones
into bread, because ‘if you are the Son of God, you should not be hungry.’ The
implication of Jesus’ response is, ‘I AM the Son of God, but that does not mean
I will always be well-fed and taken care of.’ Similarly, the third test is for
Jesus to rely on angels to save him from bodily harm, because ‘if you are the
Son of God,’ you should be invulnerable.
Again, the implication of Jesus’ response is, “I AM the Son of God, but
that does not mean that I will always be safe.”
From a certain angle, the tempter’s tests make sense: if God
is the all-powerful King, and Jesus is the son of that God, Jesus should live
like royalty. But what if Jesus is the Son of a different kind of God? If Jesus
is vulnerable, able to suffer, moved by the pain of others, but God is
all-powerful and above suffering, then Jesus is not actually what God is like,
which would be pretty misleading. What if God is less properly understood in
terms of power and invulnerability and better understood in terms of solidarity
with the marginalized?
We all want safety, security, to be well-fed and properly
thanked for our efforts; there is nothing magical about any of that. But any
number of examples throughout our history, right to the present moment, demonstrate
the riskiness of being a part of God’s family. Of course we too often collude
with the powers that be, make God look like just a bigger and stronger version
of the powers that be, imagine God on our side destroying our enemies or at
least clearing our path. That is the tempter’s vision of God, and it is indeed
tempting – so much so that I imagine most of us have given in often enough to
the impulse to favor security over sacrifices.
One way we might imagine Jesus’ relationship to God is that
Jesus does not go scrambling towards what we WANT God to be like, a God of
security and power. Jesus acknowledges his limitedness and vulnerability in the
context of his proclamation of the reign of God, whereas we so often expect our
religion and our world to provide us all the things that Jesus clearly did not
expect: absolute certainty, security, popularity, success.
This season, as we consider what we give up each Lent,
consider the value of giving up God-images which no longer bring life in favor
of more mature and serious models of relating to the God who calls us to
justice.
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