Our topic this week is sacrificing our humanity to change the world, and our reading is from the gospel of Matthew:
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:
‘He will command his angels concerning you,
and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”
Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. (Matthew 4:1-11)
This week marks the beginning of Lent. This is the Christian season leading up to Easter and its celebration of the undoing, reversing and overcoming of the state murder of Jesus and the resurrection.
The stories of Jesus’ temptations are legends that were part of the earliest traditions in the Jesus communities of the first century. In each version that we have today, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy. The gospel authors use the Septuagint version of the Hebrew scriptures for these quotations. As I’ve written recently, it’s helpful to remember that Matthew’s purpose in drawing parallels between Moses and Jesus is to characterize Jesus as a liberator.
As we discussed last week, Jesus does not replace Moses as a new lawgiver, but is a present day Moses. As Moses was a liberator, Jesus is another liberator. This time the people aren’t liberated from Egyptian slavery but from Roman imperialism destroying rural Jewish communities. It’s helpful to hold this in mind with each temptation if we are to harvest any relevance for us as we work to shape our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone in the face of contemporary systemic injustice.
Moses and Israel were tempted for forty years in the wilderness in their liberation myth. Similarly, in the temptation narratives, Jesus is tempted for 40 days in the wilderness, He is another liberator.
The first temptation in Matthew comes in the context of Jesus’ extreme hunger from his extended fast. “Living for bread alone” speaks to the Jewish elites’ complicity with Roman empire and their hoping for power, property and privilege. “Bread for today” was their highest priority regardless of what it might set in motion for the Jewish poor and marginalized tomorrow. Rural Jewish farming communities dotted through the countryside were the most deeply impacted by the choices of the urban elite and wealthy. Rome promised the elites wealth and positions of influence or power, but that would all come at a price that paid by the masses.
This strikes a similar chord today. In our capitalist system, how many times are people’s long-term wellbeing traded for the short-term profit margins of wealthy corporate investors or CEOs? Too often, the bottom line is the highest priority: profit is king. I think most about the environmental devastation that will get worse in the next decades if something doesn’t change. Just making more capital isn’t life-giving, and growth for growth’s sake is cancerous. Growth needs to happen in a responsible way. That’s why I think the message of not living for bread alone but by those things that are life-giving in the long term I think still can speak to us today.
What other things can you think of that are often sacrificed for short-term gain? This temptation paints a picture of Jesus as one whose liberation wouldn’t involve short-term gains that sacrificed the community’s long-term life. His liberation would be holistically life-giving.
The second temptation may be harder for us to draw present societal applications for.
We’ll consider this, next.
(Read Part 2)
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