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Sermon for Lent 1A

February 17, 2002

Our Scripture lessons today present us with “a Tale of Two Temptations.” The story of Eve and Adam and the serpent in the Garden, and the story of Jesus and the Devil in the wilderness, both show us something important about the nature of temptation, about the seductive power of sin. And although these stories are different in many ways, they both agree that the really insidious thing about temptation, the really seductive thing about sin, is not that it makes us want to do evil things, it’s not that temptation makes us rub our hands and say gleefully, “I think I’ll be really bad today”—no, the insidious thing about temptation is that it makes us want to do good things, but do them in a bad way; it takes what is fundamentally a good desire in us and twists it, perverts it, takes it out of context, removes it from the circle of relationships of giving and receiving in love that is God’s real intention for us. The insidious thing about temptation is that it takes a good thing and makes it bad by taking it apart from God’s love.

Look at what’s going on in the Genesis story. The woman doesn’t want the fruit because it’s ugly or disgusting or dangerous: she wants it because it is a delight to the eyes, and it’s good for food, and it’s to be desired to make one wise—and beauty, goodness, and wisdom are good things, and it’s good of her to want them. The serpent says that if she eats the fruit, she will be like God—and wanting to be like God is a good thing: God is wise and creative and generous and loving, and wanting to be wise and creative and generous and loving is a good thing. Eve and Adam’s wanting the fruit comes from what is fundamentally a good desire of their hearts.

There’s just one problem: They don’t have to do something do something extra, they don’t have to do take something special, to become like God: they already are like God. Created in the image and likeness of God, with God’s own breath of life breathed into them, the man and the woman were made capable of love and generosity and wisdom, just as God is, and it was God’s will for them that they should grow in love and generosity and wisdom, becoming more and more like their Creator with the passage of time. In fact, one ancient intepretation of this story suggests that God would have given the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil to the humans when they were ready for it, when they had grown strong and wise enough to accept such knowledge and not be overwhelmed by it. The knowledge of good and evil was supposed to be part of the whole relationship of love and trust in God that God first made the man and the woman for; that knowledge wasn’t something they needed to take, but something that would be given in good time.

And that is what the Tempter makes them forget. That’s the context of love that temptation blurs and obscures, so that their good desire goes wrong, and they take the thing that should have been a gift. The insidious thing about this temptation is not that it makes them want to do a bad thing, but that it makes them want a good thing in a bad way, it takes a good desire and twists it, perverts it, away from the relationships of giving and receiving in love that is God’s intention for them, it takes the good and makes it bad by taking it apart from God’s love.

And the same thing is happening to Jesus in our Gospel story today—it’s that same forgetfulness of the context of God’s love that the Tempter is trying pull on Jesus. Each of the three things the Devil tempts Jesus to do are fundamentally good things, and things that Jesus has been sent to do as part of his mission as Messiah. Make bread, the Devil says. And feeding the hungry is a good thing. And Jesus will make bread to feed the hungry, when thousands of them are gathered in the wilderness to hear his teaching, and there’s only five barley loaves and two fish among them all. Put your trust in God and defy death, the Devil says. And trusting God even to death is a good thing. And Jesus will put his trust in God, in Gethsemane, when he accepts the cup of Crucifixion that God has poured for him. Take up power and rule the world, the Devil says. And bringing in the kingdom of justice and peace is a good thing. It is precisely what Jesus has become incarnate to do. Each of the things the Tempter sets before Jesus is a fundamentally good thing, part of Jesus’ own good desire to serve God as God’s beloved Son.

There’s just one problem: the Devil tempts Jesus to do each of these things on his own, to feed his own hunger, to satisfy his own security, to demonstrate his own power—and not to do them as part of his ministry, as a way of showing forth and making concrete the relationships of giving and receiving in love that is God’s intention for Jesus—and in Jesus, God’s intention for the whole world. The Devil wants Jesus to do these things apart from God’s love; but apart from God’s love these things would have no meaning, and Jesus knows that, and that’s why Jesus refuses to do them—refuses, at least until the time, and the love, is right.

And so in this story too, the really insidious thing about temptation is not that it makes Jesus want to do bad things, but it tries to get him to do good things in a bad way, it tries to take a good desire and twist it, pervert it, it tries to take what is good in Jesus and make it bad by taking it apart from God’s love.

And that’s the way temptation works in us, too. For us too, the really insidious thing about temptation is that it takes our good desires and twists them by taking them out of the context of giving and receiving in love that is what God really wants for us.

It is good to want to be loved and appreciated and cared for—but it is temptation to fulfill that desire by manipulating other people, by exploiting their emotions, by playing games with their feelings in order to gratify our own.

It is good to want good food and fine clothing and nice homes and beautiful and useful possessions—but it is temptation to fulfill that desire at the expense of other people, in economic injustice where the rich get richer by making the poor get poorer, where one tiny sliver of the world’s population consumes the mass of the world’s resources.

It is good to want our nation to be secure and safe from terror—but it is temptation to fulfill that desire by becoming hostile to immigrants and refugees, or by undermining basic civil rights that are part of what makes this nation worth defending, or by acting in the community of nations as if we were the big kid in the sandbox who can have everything his way by pushing everybody else around.

It is good to want to be happy—it’s what God creates us for—but it is temptation to make our own happiness the only thing that matters, and to try to make everything and everyone else around us serve that selfish end.

For us as individuals, and for us as a society, the insidious thing about temptation is that it takes our good desires and twists them, perverts them, making us want God’s good apart from the context of God’s will. And that’s why, in the last analysis, the only real answer to temptation is love, the only real answer is remembering the circle of relationships of giving and receiving that is what God really wants for us, the only real answer is to trust that God’s good things will come to us—and through us—in God’s good time.

That’s what Jesus does in the wilderness; and that’s what we are called to do in this Lenten season, in this Lenten liturgy. We gather today in prayer and song, in Word and Sacrament, for one purpose only: to remember God’s love, to open our eyes to the giving and receiving in which we live and move and having our being, to be mindful of the grace and mercy that makes us and makes us good. That is how we join with Jesus to answer temptation, and that is how we celebrate God’s good news today.

In the Name of God: Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Amen.