Hilton Head Island, SC – February 28, 2010
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 9:23-26; Matthew 4:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Again the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.” – Matthew 4:8-9 (RSV)
Martin Copenhaver is a United Church of Christ pastor, and now a seminary president. When he was a congregational pastor, he wrote a book called How to Be a Perfect Stranger. In it he told of coming to the beginning of the ecclesiastical season of Lent. A parishioner anxiously asked him, “Are we going to do Lent again this year?”
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I would answer that lady’s pointed question by saying this: Yes, we are going to do Lent again this year. As long as there is a season of Lent, and long as I am still preaching regularly, we are going to do Lent. And to do it, we are going to study several aspects of the life and ministry of Jesus, as we do every year.
This year the overall theme is Via Dolorosa. Those two Latin words literally mean “The Way of Sorrows.” The feminine name Dolores or Delores means “Sorrows.” In Christian tradition, the route Jesus traversed from the Antonia Fortress (or the Praetorium, as it says in the Gospels) to Golgatha (or Calvary) is called the Via Dolorosa. It will be my contention throughout this series of sermons that Jesus actually was following his actual Via Dolorosa from before the time he began his public ministry. His Way of Sorrows was foreordained, not because God determined it, or because others determined it, but because, in a particular manner, he himself determined it. There was no way Jesus was going to avoid the cross, given the clear choices he made all along the path he chose from the very beginning. He became more convinced of that as time went on.
In the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), right after Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, we are told that God led Jesus out into the Judean Desert. He was there forty days, which doesn’t necessarily mean exactly forty days; it just means “a long time.” While in the desert, all three Gospels declare that Jesus was tempted by the devil. About the physical or metaphysical existence of the devil I shall say nothing here, because it would only lead us onto a homiletic detour, which would also likely be a dead end. Suffice it to say that either Jesus or the Gospel writers or all four of them supposed that it was Satan who was doing the tempting.
Biblical scholars have argued for centuries about whether Jesus knew from the beginning that he was the Son of God and the Messiah. I have my own thoughts on that, but I’m not going into that either, because it too would likely be a detour or a dead end. But it seems clear that Jesus was convinced even before he began his public ministry that God had a special destiny in mind for him, and he was willing to pursue that destiny at whatever costs to him it might entail.
In order to set out on his journey, Jesus first had to decide what sort of “man of God” he intended to be. Would he attempt to impress people by enlisting unique powers from God? Would he establish himself and his place in Judean society by wowing people with feats no one else could accomplish? Would he choose to become known as a divinely-gifted superstar?
In the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, King Herod summoned Jesus to appear before him just before the crucifixion. With disdain dripping from his every utterance, Herod sings to Jesus, “Prove to me that you’re no fool/ Walk across my swimming pool/ If you do that for me/ Then I’ll let you go free/ Come on, King of the Jews!”
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice well describe the conflict Jesus confronted within himself when he spent several weeks in the Judean Wilderness, wrestling with both satanic temptations and his own conception of what God wanted him to do. Naturally Jesus was hungry, so the devil smarmily said to Jesus, “Turn these stones into bread.” Jesus responded, quoting the Book of Deuteronomy (8:3), “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Jesus refused to use the power of God for himself and his own physical needs. He believed that somehow God would see him through this painful experience of physical and spiritual deprivation in the isolation he felt out in the desert. Therefore Jesus rejected the temptation to appropriate God’s power to satiate his own inner hunger.
Then we are told the devil took Jesus to the pinnacle of the high wall surrounding the temple mount in Jerusalem. “To convince yourself that you are the Son of God, throw yourself off the edge,” the devil said. Then the smarmy Satan quoted two verses of scripture, saying, “For it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” As we say, the devil can quote scripture for his own purposes. But Jesus came back at Satan with yet another scripture quote, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.”
And that’s exactly what Jesus would have been doing, wouldn’t it be, had he done what the devil suggested? He would have been tempting God miraculously to save him. Jesus wasn’t going to do that! He wasn’t going to use the singular connection he had with God to benefit himself! If Jesus was going to use divine power, it was going to be in the service of others, not himself! To put it in terms of a family business, the son of the owner of the business was not going to presume upon his relationship with the owner, in order to feather his own nest.
What is going on in this story, whether it was an actual test of an actual Satan against a Jesus who was about to start his public ministry, or a conflict Jesus had with himself in his own mind, is that Jesus was sorting out for himself how he planned to use his unique relationship with God. Would the relationship assist him, and build him up, and prove to people that Jesus had this unique relationship, or would it assist a needy humanity, and build up the kingdom of God, and prove that all good comes from God? Would Jesus be a wowing Jesus, who blew everyone away with spectacular displays of charismatic power, or would he be a winsome Jesus, who won people to his cause by small deeds of kindness and compassionate acts of love?
Jesus never came across as God’s Goody Two-Shoes. Some people are so obviously righteous, but also so sanctimonious, that they repel others by their superior behavior. Who would want to try to follow God if it means becoming such a morally stiff twit? Jesus never acted that way. He drew people to himself with a magnetic warmth, not a frigid righteousness. The power he used was low-key, not flashy.
How was Jesus going to use the remainder of his life, which would be the most important part of his life? That was the issue he faced in his run-in with the devil in the desert. What would give his life the most meaning?
The Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard thought about that. He wrote, “So much is spoken about wasting one’s life. But the only wasted life is the life of one who has so lived it, deceived by life’s pleasures and sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what is the same, he never became aware that there is a God there and that ‘he’ himself, his self, exists before this God.” And that was the thing about Jesus that sets him apart from everyone else who ever lived. He was totally intent on living his life for God, on proclaiming God, on making people understand that whatever power he had was the power of God, and not his own. Jesus was not devoted to exalting the power of Jesus; he was devoted to exalting the power of God.
But how, precisely, should he exercise that power? Should he seek to take the reins of political power, and govern as God’s proxy on earth? That was the third and final temptation put before him by the Prince of Darkness.
“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me’” (Matt. 4:8-9). It is impossible to understand this story using wooden literalism. Even with the limited knowledge of astronomy and cosmology of the first century, no one who first read this would assume that the physical devil took the physical Jesus physically to an actual very high mountain which was so high they could see all the kingdoms of the world. We are meant to perceive this as a psychological temptation, not a physical event.
It is in the nature of human beings throughout history that when we live together in large groups, national governments of some sort are bound to come into existence. They may be kingdoms, which probably characterized the governments of most nations for almost all of history. Or they could be republics or democracies, both of which have been both rare and recent. But whatever the form of government, to most people national power represents the greatest form of power humans have ever created.
Jesus showed absolutely no interest in political or military power. His teachings touched on these issues, to be sure, but he did not have the slightest intention of seeking to gain control of any kind of governmental authority. Unfortunately, the small number of theological enemies Jesus had among the Jews probably pulled the proper political strings to engineer Jesus’ execution at the hands of the Roman government. The Romans were sufficiently ignorant of Jewish theological undercurrents that they could be cleverly conscripted into ordering Jesus to be killed. Without question Jesus represented a great threat to Roman imperial government, but it was not because he had any military or political ambitions. It was rather because the Roman way of doing governmental business was unjust, and Jesus strongly stood up for social justice.
Government is almost certainly a necessity for any smoothly functioning society. It is also a necessity for societies which don’t function smoothly at all. But the kingdom of God is not like the kingdoms of this world. They are two very different entities. God’s kingdom uses bottom-up power; nations use top-down power. In God’s kingdom persuasion ultimately governs; in nation-states, coercion ultimately governs. Jesus sought the hearts and wills of whomever might follow him; governments demand the obedience of those who live under them.
According to all three of the Synoptic Gospel writers, Jesus did not do anything in public until after he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. We may infer something very crucial about Jesus’ understanding of himself and his own mission from this chronology. It was only after Jesus rejected the temptation to use God’s power for himself that he realized he was ready to start his three-year journey which would end ultimately at Golgatha. His Via Dolorosa was made possible only when he willingly declined to use power in ways he knew would be unacceptable to God. Jesus could have employed powers he felt were within him to establish God’s kingdom by means of what the Gospel writer John called “signs and wonders.” According to John, Jesus did exactly that on many occasions. But that isn’t what Jesus did. Power was not the compelling force behind Jesus’ ministry; love was. “Big flashes” wouldn’t do it for Jesus; only “little glimmers” could do it, and even at that, it might take a lifetime to understand it.
And so Jesus talked about giving a cup of cold water in his name, and walking an extra mile in his name, and seeking the least and the last and the lost in his name. Because he conducted his ministry as he did, very few people became his followers during his lifetime. He didn’t win converts the way any other spiritual leader has ever won converts. He said that whoever wanted to be his disciple must give up everything and take up a cross in order to follow him. You don’t make a lot of friends or influence a lot of people talking like that. Power begets more power, but before he had taken one step on his long Via Dolorosa, Jesus had consciously turned away from power altogether.
The Apostle Paul described what Jesus did in some magnificent theological prose. He said that though Jesus was “in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be snatched away (from God,) but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Jesus knew very well what divine power was, but he wasn’t going to try to expropriate it from God. By so doing he had no other option than to lower himself, and to start walking the road at the end of which he knew inevitably there was a cross awaiting him.
Six centuries before the time of Jesus the prophet Jeremiah wrote these words as God’s words: “Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practice kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the Lord’” (Jeremiah 9:23-24).
Jesus early on was tempted to seize divine power to establish God’s kingdom. He chose instead to allow God to establish His own kingdom, and Jesus deliberately and conscientiously lowered himself in the process.
And how about us? Do we want God boldly to thrust Himself into our lives when things get difficult or dicey or dangerous, or are we, like Jesus, willing simply to trust that God is always with us, and that in the end, it will all work out? Do we want a mighty and mechanistic God, or shall we accept an awesomely absent God, one we know is very much here but also very much there, and we must wait to see what, if anything, He will do when times are difficult or dicey?
Jesus didn’t think the way we ordinarily think. He didn’t act the way we ordinarily act. But if we lived the way he lived, the kingdom of God would appear around us with more power and glory than otherwise it does appear. For it to happen though, it means we too must give up what we call power, just as Jesus gave up power. True strength comes from true weakness. Real power comes from avoiding real power. And so we begin the Lenten journey with Jesus, on the Via Dolorosa.