Hilton Head Island, SC – June16, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 4:1-13; Luke 19:28-40
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." - Matthew 6:13
On many occasions I have noted that the story of Jesus presented by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the three synoptic Gospels, is quite different from the story presented in John, the Fourth Gospel. The first three have the same synopsis, the same basic chronology, and their Gospels were probably written especially for relatively uneducated Jewish peasants. On the other hand, John was written for highly educated Jews and Gentiles. Whoever wrote the fourth Gospel was steeped in Greek thought and culture, and he wanted to present an unmistakenly divine Jesus who was unquestionably God Incarnate. The other three probably also thought that, but not with the same theological zeal that John possessed.
It should come as no surprise to you that I have many opinions about many things, and am not shy about expressing them. One of my opinions is that the more education one has about the Bible and comparative religion, the less likely is that person to have strong convictions, or perhaps any convictions, about the existence of the fallen angel called Satan, a Persian word meaning “The Adversary.” Satan was a major factor in two religions, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. The first originated in Persia sometime between 800 and 600 BCE, and the second also in Persia in the third century CE. Both were founded on the idea that there is a permanent battle between God and Satan, and that it will last until the end of time.
In the Synoptics, Jesus talked quite often about Satan. In John he did only once, in the 13th chapter, which focuses on the Last Supper and the temptation of Judas Iscariot by the devil to betray Jesus to the Romans. I find it fascinating that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have accounts of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the Judean desert after he was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. My guess is that they wanted to ensure their readers that from the beginning, Jesus had overcome Satan’s satanic traps, and that he had proven victorious over Old Harry’s demonic charms. But all that was outside the considerations of the man who wrote the Fourth Gospel.
At the end of Luke’s narrative of the temptation in the desert, he writes, “And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from (Jesus) until an opportune time” (Luke 2:13). Early in Matthew’s Gospel, in the 6th chapter, Jesus teaches the Lord’s Prayer to a crowd of people who heard him preach the Sermon on the Mount. In the prayer Jesus gave the fifth petition, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (6:13). If historically there actually was a temptation of Jesus by the devil in the desert, might he be remembering that, since it had occurred only a few weeks before Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount? And if Jesus was including himself in his prayer when he said that, when would he again be tempted by demonic forces or even the Prince of Demons? It is my opinion that Jesus’ greatest temptation occurred on Palm Sunday. The largest crowd ever to gather around Jesus shouted, “Blessed be the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! Praise to the Son of David!” His theological enemies, the Sadducees and Pharisees, told Jesus to rebuke the enthusiasm of his followers. Jesus said to them, “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out!”
But what could possibly be dangerous or wrong in the Palm Sunday procession, and what could be the error in Jesus saying that? Wasn't it only proper that Jesus' followers sang their praises to him? Listen carefully, Christian people: here was the danger, not that the crowd should recognize Jesus as the Messiah, but that Jesus should recognize himself as the wrong kind of Messiah! The people were not looking for the proclaimer of the kingdom of God; they were looking for the restorer of the kingdom of Israel! They did not seek someone who would lead them to God; they were seeking someone to lead them out of their bondage to Rome! Jesus offered them spiritual freedom, but what they wanted was political freedom! He was the Anointed One of God, and they wanted an Anointed One of David! What if Jesus himself should be swept into their political aspirations?
For a while during that triumphant entry into Jerusalem, Jesus nearly succumbed to the enthusiasm of the crowd. But then, when he reached the Holy City, he discovered a truth which permeates the being of every holy city everywhere on the face of this sullied planet: the reality does not and cannot mirror the theory. In his mind, Jesus had thought of Jerusalem as being theoretically the holy city of God, but when He actually got there, and saw the money changers charging too high a percentage to exchange foreign currencies into Judean shekels, and he saw how the poor were neglected and the rich grew more powerful, He felt profound anger and disappointment. Somehow it didn't turn out as he had imagined; not at all. After Palm Sunday Jesus felt about Jerusalem the way Gertrude Stein felt about Oakland. Speaking of the city on the east side of the beautiful but polluted San Francisco Bay, the irrepressible Miss S. said, "There's no 'there' there." (I suspect she was the first to say that, and now many people also use that expression.)
What a sobering thought for Jesus! When he got to Jerusalem, He discovered there was no Jerusalem to get to, that the City of God wasn't, that the Holy City wasn't, that the spiritual center of the world, the tangible hope of the earth, wasn't. Jerusalem was not there! Oh, it was there all right, but not as Jesus had pictured it, not as the city of triumph, and suddenly he knew again what he had known all along but had understandably tried to put out of his mind, that Jerusalem might give him a hero's welcome, but that it would also assassinate him. Given his nature and the nature of Jerusalem, it could not be otherwise. "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Conservative rabbi who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in the middle of the last century. He was one of the great saints of God, and his influence upon both Judaism and Christianity has been immense. Rabbi Heschel said there were five features which characterized the Hebrew prophets. They were extraordinarily sensitive to injustice. Because that was so, they spoke out against it with unrestrained zeal; their images did not shine, said Rabbi Heschel, they burned. Thirdly, the prophets did not attempt to explain or excuse human weakness and sin; they just railed against it. Fourth, the prophets were iconoclasts, and they fiercely attacked respected beliefs, institutions, and people, which inevitably left them feeling lonely and isolated. Finally, prophets spoke with divine power because they were somehow able deeply to experience divine pathos; the prophets felt as God felt.
"Who is that man?" asked many of the bystanders at the fringes of the Palm Sunday parade. "Why, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet from Galilee!", his excited disciples answered. Jesus was first of all a prophet, and the temptation into which he pleaded God not to lead him was that he should be tempted to give up his essential and necessary role as prophet. "Become a nice fellow, Jesus," an inner voice said to Jesus, "and you can avoid what is coming if you insist on being a prophet!" It wasn't the "Hosannas!" of the people Jesus heard as he rode along that spring morning; it was that alluring voice. And the voice almost won.
The woman to whom Abraham Lincoln was married was an exceedingly difficult woman. It seems certain to me, though I am certainly not an expert in such matters, that Mary Todd Lincoln suffered from at least two forms of mental illness, bipolarity and paranoia. She spent money like water; her inaugural gown for the second inauguration in 1865 cost $2000, and in 1865, $2000 was a hefty chunk of money; it would perhaps be $20,000 today. That was money the president did not have. Within a four-month period in one year she bought three hundred pairs of gloves; that did not endear her to Washingtonians. She insisted on being called "Madame President," which sadly further ostracized her. One day, after a tradesman who had been summoned to the White House to fix something complained to the President about how difficult Mrs. Lincoln had been, the saintly sinner from Springfield put his hand on the man's shoulder, and Abraham Lincoln said to him, "You ought to be able to stand, for fifteen minutes, what I have stood for fifteen years." A friend asked the President what he thought of marriage, and he reminded the man what his father had once told him, "When you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter" (See The Day Lincoln Was Shot, Jim Bishop, Scholastic Book Services, New York, 1955, pps. 23-5).
Our temptations can be very obvious or very subtle, and the evil from which we ask God to deliver us can appear to be a positive good. If Mary Lincoln had not been sick, and had not her sensitive husband been aware of that, he might long since have given up on her. But he knew that many of her problems were beyond her control, and so one sad year after another he stayed with her. His clear awareness of the entire situation didn't make it any easier for him; in all likelihood it made it that much harder. But he never did what he was sorely tempted to do, and the nation's finest leader was finally released from the bondage of his insane wife not by any act of his own volition but by the insane act of a second-rate actor, John Wilkes Booth.
Temptation can be so utterly evident, but it also can be so beguilingly sly! When we were feverishly pouring over our 1040s a couple of months ago, did we include everything we should have? When we do what we have long wanted to do, it seems good to us, but is it good? Do our wishes supersede the wellbeing of our family or community or nation or world?
On Palm Sunday a great temptation presented itself to Jesus, the temptation to seize power, to use force, to become what the exultant people wanted him to be. Why be a dead Messiah when you can be an heroic live one? Why get a cross when you might instead get a crown? It is a great temptation to be in the public eye, especially for public people and politicians, and to do what the public wants, because the public always wants the easy way and the wide gate and the smooth road. But the way of God is hard and narrow and rough, and if you follow it, you may end up dead. "He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it!": that's what Jesus had said, and that's what he remembered as the cheers rang out and the Hosannas echoed off the honey-colored walls of Jerusalem.
In the introduction of his outstanding little book called Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner says, "I have called this book Telling Secrets because I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition -that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.... I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell" (Telling Secrets, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1991, pps. 2-3).
There it is, isn't it? There is something inside us, something so terrible, so shameful, so odious, that we dare not bring it back to remembrance. Continually we are tempted to shove it down into the subterranean recesses of our minds, so that not even God can find it. But if God can't find it, what can He do to overcome it? If we have hidden it from Him, how can He forgive us for it?
Nevertheless, as Buechner says, God is there, and He knows! It can't be hidden from Him, and we are foolish to try to do so! Even more than He needs to know of it, we need to have it known, and our temptation to keep it from Him is the worst evil from which we desperately need to be delivered!
On Palm Sunday Jesus had not yet seen it, for he could not, but as the crowds sang his praises, he was being tested as never before in his life, more so than after his baptism when he had been tempted by the evil adversary of us all. He was going to be arrested and tried and executed.
When we recognize temptation and evil, they normally are so bold and brazen that no one could mistake them. It is when they are subtle and cunning that we must be the most wary, for that is when the danger is the greatest. "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest!" In our moments of greatest triumph may be the seeds of our greatest tragedies. When things seem their best they may be at their worst. At those times when we are the most affirmed, we may be the most tempted. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” God would never lead us into temptation, though we are often tempted. But He will always deliver us from evil - - - if we have sufficient courage and wisdom to put our lives under His guidance.