It is ego gone mad in its desiring, and in its absolutely fruitless quest for security, permanence, and immortality. It is our insatiable energies of greed, arrogance, and power. He is promised all will recognize him as the ultimate Son of the Most High.Īnd what is all of that? Ego, ego, ego. He is promised not only rule over the Temple and its rituals, but also all the kingdoms of the earth. Satan’s apparent mission is to persuade Jesus to turn away from his call, announced in the baptismal moment, and so offers him three really good deals, usually named “temptations.” Satan offers him material abundance and wealth, political power, and unmistakable religious legitimacy as the ultimate miracle worker. I’ll hand all these central theological issues over to Rachel when she returns! Meanwhile, back to Satan and his questions to Jesus. He was not an easy guy, certainly not the image we have created of him, like that painting over the altar – that very kind, serene Norwegian. We see him in the gospel stories furious in the temple, kicking over tables, very sharp with his mother and his disciples and family. That he is already perfect and wholly without sin, a person who came from God, God’s only Son, the perfect sacrifice to restore humanity to God’s favor.īut there is an ancient understanding, which is also certainly to be found today among Scripture scholars and theologians, that Jesus was a human being, a fully human being. I know I’m saying things about Jesus which some of you will find impossible or annoying, and that don’t fit with your understanding of Jesus as divine and not at all like the rest of us.
Into the wilderness wow how to#
It becomes “Instruction” for how to walk our spiritual path. This way the story yields a great deal, I will argue, for each of us. But “adversary” allows us to recognize it as an inner phenomenon, an aspect of our inner landscape, and perhaps as one of the multiple voices and inclinations within each one of us. Ukraine certainly makes me wonder, yet again. There is a side issue here we could consider some day: Is Satan a Being? A force? A cosmic power? I don’t know or know how I could know. Satan is a Hebrew word, and it means “the adversary.” Its translations into Greek have given us “Satan,” and “devil.” I really prefer “adversary” and will stay with that. Satan arrives, for the crucial encounter of this story. Some accounts say, he had neither food nor drink during that time. And there he fasted for 40 days, the Biblical number for “a long time.” This would be a deep retreat, with no distractions.
The gospel tells us, he is “sent” by the Holy Spirit. Off he goes to the wilderness, in that region, a dry and barren desert. After the crucial encounter with John the Baptist and his receptive encounter with the Holy Spirit, he is sent away on retreat, presumably to take all this in.
He is called a child of God, the Son of God. The story actually begins with his baptism by John, in the Jordan, along with many other country folks, when he receives a huge “download” of Holy Spirit. (And please note how the story sets up the last days of Jesus’ life, from Gethsemane to the trappings of power, the associations with kingship, and the cruel mockery about God’s protection of his beloved son.) But I want to read it as a guide, an instruction, for us, on how we prepare ourselves to follow God’s call to us, and how we might align with Spirit, to become who we really are. I’m going to take the story as somehow, “accurate” or “true,” though I rarely agree to this interpretive move. No one watched or overheard what happened and what was spoken. How did he learn who he was, and who he was called to be? How did he learn his “work” for his life? How did he become so certain even as an illiterate carpenter, a man who worked with his hands in a poor village a couple days’ walk from Jerusalem?Īnd I won’t even ask, why did the evangelists put this story in, and why there, right after his baptism in the Jordon? And then, how do we know this story? Remember, Jesus went alone to the wilderness. Did he find a teacher as a young man? Did he have some exposure to other traditions, for his world was rich and complex? Traders and merchants crisscrossed the whole region. So many of us wish we knew something about the first 30 years of Jesus’ life. This is a wonderful story, of Jesus fleeing or sent to the wilderness. This is a story of encounters: Jesus with John the Baptist and then the Holy Spirit. From a sermon for St Johns UCC Church on March 13, 2022.
Photo P.GillHow can we remove the obstacles to recognizing who we really are and what our life purpose might be? A gospel story tells how Jesus went into the wilderness for a long retreat, and there had quite a conversation with Satan.
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