The seduction of temptation
Lent 1B | Mark 1:9-15
The first Sunday in Lent is always the Temptation in the Wilderness. And when we read Mark’s version, we sure don’t have a lot to go on, do we?
Imagine sitting around a table at the end of this season of Lent and somebody asks how you spent your forty days.
One person goes: I gave up chocolate. It was brutal, but I’m looking forward to having some tonight!
Another says: I went to the gym every single day. Sometimes it was just a 20 minute walk on the treadmill, but honestly, I’m glad I did it.
And the new guy says: Me? I was tempted by Satan; was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on me.
There’s a story there, isn’t there? Yeah. Like three stories! We definitely want to know more about this being tempted by Satan stuff. But I also want to know about these wild beasts. Did he record any videos with them? Did he save any abandoned pets? What’s the deal here?
And where did these angels come from? Was this a reward for making it through, crossing the forty-day finish line, or was this just what happened throughout? Did he come home to his cave in the desert from a long day of being tempted by the Temptor to some angels who made him dinner?
Mark doesn’t care.
That’s the part that kills us, I think. We want the juice here. Spill it! And Mark’s clearly nonplussed. This is not his point.
Just eyeballing the reading, Mark spends twice as much literary real estate on the baptism than then temptation. And he even spends more on the return to Galilee, taking up the mantle of John.
As much as we want to know what happened out there in the wilderness, we aren’t going to get it. Or, we do. We just want more.
We’re asking what happened and Mark is saying I told you. He was tempted, dwelled with wild beasts, and angels waited on him. Now let’s move!
Many of us turn to Matthew and Luke for the details of the temptation. From them we learn that the material of temptation is power. Which is what most of us would guess it would be, I suspect. For what else could the temptor tempt Jesus with? Sony hadn’t invented the Playstation yet.
There really are only two temptations: power and stuff.
People seek power over others, safety—both economic and physical, and freedom/autonomy.
And then stuff—a house, cars, gadgets, books, food, a wage, a pension, social security, and investments.
All of this is fundamentally the same thing. Control. Over others, ourselves, and our environment.
We know how Jesus was tempted. Because it’s what tempts us to walk away from the Way.
Lead us not into temptation.
A few of us were talking about the Lord’s Prayer a couple of weeks ago, and the two versions we have in our prayer book are both formed from the gospels of Matthew and Luke. And one of them says: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
I don’t know if you grew up thinking this has to do with afterlife stuff like I did. But this is the material of our temptation. To want control over our lives, our destiny. Or to claim power over others.
Honestly, if I had a billion dollars, it would be hard not to spend it on shaping public dialogue. Trying to get journalists to stop treating evangelical theology like a synonym for Christian.
Or think about the public pledge two dozen of the richest people in the world made more than a decade ago: to give away 90% of their wealth and every one of them has multitudes more now. What is the reason they offer? They don’t trust other people to spend it well.
They want control. And they are afraid to share control with others.
So what are you afraid of letting go of? What do you want control over? Is it finances? Time? Maybe your chill! Self identity? Your church?
Finding what we want to control tells us a lot about our temptation.
Finding freedom
By not telling us what is happening in the temptation, Mark frees us from decoding it all so we can focus on the bigger picture.
Because the Tempter can’t control Jesus by appealing to Jesus’s human need for control. Instead, Jesus lives among the wild things in the wilderness. He is not bound by his fear, but free to dwell with other untamed creatures. He is human and divine among the animals.
The wilderness for Jesus is free from the temptation for control. It is dangerous for one to be alone in it. But we are safe among the 99. And he has no fear there.
Let us not agrandize agrarian life and chide the city-dwellers, but cities are the classic site of temptation. We can name them all, but they are all still the same thing: control. And Jesus is among the wild ones: those who cannot be controlled.
And lastly, of course, the angels protect him. Providing him with the one thing none can resist. We all must eat. And the angels ensure he is not tempted by a desire for security. He is provided with enough.
When his trial is over, Jesus takes up John’s mantle and preaches repentance.
Repenting
This season we’ll be talking a lot about repentance and discipline. Words we associate with…control. Both control over others and ourselves. And that kind of feels like succumbing to temptation, doesn’t it?
The repentance some pronounce on street corners is a message about controlling others’ behaviors and even the nature of our common faith.
And discipline is a word we most associate with parents or teachers trying to control the behavior of children.
Lent isn’t about self-control for the sake of self-control. And it isn’t about giving something up to experience suffering. It is about being intentional. And therefore not indulging in mindless extravagance as if that were the picture of freedom. As if doing whatever you want is a picture of freedom and not control over your environment.
The true tradition of Lent is not about control or freedom. For the better part of two thousand years, followers of Jesus have set this time aside for learning. Learning about the faith and from the faith. Studying scripture and letting scripture study us. Praying and loving and serving and welcoming and preparing ourselves for resurrection on the third day.
We prepare ourselves for the change that is coming.
So, does God care if you eat sweets over the next six weeks? Probably not. But when we indulge all of the normal things of our lives, when do we make time to examine them? To look at the stuff we take for granted. The power and control we seek or maintain.
This is the time for that. Because God has some resurrections in the works and I pray that I have eyes to see it. And that we all do, too.