Jesus is led into the wilderness to be tempted. Tempted with power, understanding, everything he could desire. Everything we desire.
Providence and the grace of God
Lent 1A |. Matthew 4:1-11
What does it mean that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted? Good question. Let’s talk about providence.
You may recall a few years ago, Pope Francis invited the Roman Catholic Church to amend the phrasing of The Lord’s Prayer they use in liturgy. It was, of course, modestly controversial. It put at odds the words Jesus uses in the gospel of Matthew, with the vision of God Jesus himself professes.
The main problem is that the specific phrase: “And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one” seems to imply that God actually does that sort of thing.
What Francis argued, and this is the kind of thoughtful comment we rarely hear in these debates, is that we as a church are teaching our children that God does lead people into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. Not just that God could if God wanted to (but clearly doesn’t). But that this phrasing enshrines that sense of possibility. It wants a great big plaque on the wall next to it saying “God could…”
What we communicate:
Imagine being a parent and you tell your kid every single night, I could hit you, but I’m super good, so I won’t. Tell me that isn’t scarring. Tell me that isn’t abusive. You know you aren’t actually projecting grace. You’re projecting that you are one synapse away from snapping. Because what your kid actually hears is “my Mom wants to hit me.”
So Francis invited the church to stop enshrining a kind of theological malpractice, even if it means adapting the words of Jesus. He is not saying Jesus is wrong. It is about how we hear these words. Words already adapted multiple times into English.
Let’s table the conversation about the Lord’s Prayer until we get there later in the year. But this idea of providence is present here. Because God compels Jesus to go to a place in which temptation will occur.
So how do we read this in light of a God that we know doesn’t push us into trials; who we know is not directly responsible for all the evil in the world?
And right there is actually the answer.
We scapegoat God.
The purpose of the scapegoat isn’t just finding something to blame. It’s about removing the blame that resides throughout the community and outsourcing it. So we don’t have to worry about it anymore. We relieve our responsibility to each other and throw that on the shoulders of someone else.
So, in tolerating all the sin of the world, God is made responsible for it. In creating the world and guiding us toward love, God must be responsible for the presence of evil. These make a kind of logical sense, but look at what these arguments actually do. They strip us of all responsibility. They may be rhetorically effective arguments, but they aren’t entirely honest ones.
Isn’t it more likely that God led Jesus into an inevitable confrontation? The one that would happen whether God acted or not? And isn’t it all the more likely that God is not testing Jesus, but present with him in this time of trial?
The resolute bravery Jesus displays seems to be the product of grace, rather than torture or abandonment.
Acting like children
Wrestling with the providence of God, that God serves as the ultimate scapegoat for every human evil is about the brattiest teenage thing a child can do to a parent. This is our version of shouting You ruined my life! as we stomp to our room and slam the door.
But at the root of our confusion is a desire to understand why seemingly good people do truly terrible things. It is to create order out of chaos and discipline out of disharmony. But what it really does is try to turn a paradox into a singularity.
We want to believe that good and evil are opposites, and dualistically equal, rather than what we can plainly observe in the gospel. That the Devil, the personification of evil, slithers and sneaks because it has no legs. As Stanley Hauerwas points out:
“It is significant, therefore, to recognize that the devil’s only viable mode of operation is to “tempt.” The devil can be only a parasite, which means that the devil is only as strong as the one he tempts.”1
Temptation
The Devil is clearly attempting to trick Jesus, tempting him, like he did the first humans in the garden; appealing to their basest instincts. Hunger, desire, power, and certainty.
Make yourself some food!
Make God prove how much God loves you.
And then it all leads up to this:
Make your will be done.
Just bow down and sacrifice to me.
This is the most human of temptations.
“The devil is but another name for our impatience,” Hauerwas writes.
“But Jesus is our bread, he is our salvation, and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness to the kingdom that is God’s patience.”2
This is what power tempts us with: the release of that impatience. To give in to desire, to possession, to decisive certainty when we are full of anxiety and fear. And Jesus is the very antidote. The one provoking us to be just when we think we don’t have time for being just.
“The devil’s temptations are meant to force Jesus to acknowledge that our world is determined by death. Death creates a world of scarcity—a world without enough food, power, or life itself. But Jesus resists the devil because he is God’s abundance. Jesus brings a kingdom that is not a zero-sum game. There is enough food, power, and life because the kingdom has come, making possible a people who have the time to feed their neighbors. Fear creates scarcity, but Jesus has made it possible for us to live in trust.”3
Trust
Temptation comes to eviscerate trust. And it does it in the most insulting way possible. To make God into our burden. Our scapegoat. That we might crucify our creator like we did Jesus. Even to blame God for our vengeance, as we mortally wound the immortal one.
That we might trade the righteous power of abundance, of plenty, of enough for everyone for the fleeting power of scarcity and fear—mine, and mine alone. Not like Gollum with his precious, but like the humans, at perpetually justified war.
The reason we miss the devil’s trick is that it, of course, doesn’t look like a trick. It looks like power, justified power. Knowledge, self-evidence. The wisdom to know good from evil. To judge.
To play God.
Playing God
As we were reading that passage from Genesis about Adam and Eve this past Thursday, I was asked a really good question. One that I needed more time to wrestle with. It is a simple question: What’s wrong with wisdom? What’s wrong with knowing right and wrong, good and evil?
Of course, nothing.
But as I thought and thought and thought, I came to a new conclusion.
Of course, nothing.
It isn’t wrong. And I might get into trouble for saying this, but I’m not so sure Adam and Eve’s transgression is all that wrong either. Because I don’t think the problem was really about disobedience or trying to learn or even the crazy idea that they trusted the snake and ate the fruit and sewed together some leaves for underpants.
Ultimately God was hoping they wouldn’t play God. Perhaps like parents don’t want their babies to grow up. And learn what we already know. We love them now and we’re worried that they will quite literally never be happier than this.
But now, humanity quite easily plays God. We know good and evil. We can choose.
Which means we can choose to follow Jesus. Even into the desert. Starving, needing to be saved, weary of war. And what we’ll find there, if we’re on the right path, is not a second almighty, yang to God’s yin. But a garter snake, playing Oz trying to sell us what God gives away for free.
And maybe knowing that, we won’t really be tempted at all.
1 Hauerwas, Stanley, Matthew (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), 51
2 Ibid, 55
3 Ibid, 55-56