Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our setting for today is Jesus, baptized and pushed out into the “wilderness”. The wilderness is a desolate place. It is arid, dry, and life is hard there. It is not unlike our desert places in the American Southwest. When we go on retreats, we go to conference centers in the deep woods or by the bay, not so for Jesus. Jesus put himself out into the desert to be tested.
“Lead me not into temptation” says the Lord’s prayer. The way the expression is worded in our normal translation, suggests that we somehow find temptation because of God’s involvement. I don’t know about you but 99 and 44 one hundred per cent of the time I can find temptation without God’s help. I seem to go there quite gleefully myself. Oscar Wilde, the famous playwright and novelist once quipped; “I know what to do with temptation: I give into it”. I am afraid I studied at the Oscar Wilde School. How about you? From resisting high fat ice cream and that half a loaf of Italian bread that comes to my table before the meal, the get rich quick schemes, to verboten internet sites, I am my worst enemy. I can find “temptation” all by myself.
Temptation and “testing” being put to the test almost always involves the law.
The law is God’s “no” to us. It is a warning, prohibition and danger signal. “Don’t steal” It is wrong. You don’t want to live in a world where there is theft, so don’t do it yourself. Don’t covet. Don’t want what other people have because slowly but surely you’ll start to obsess about their possession or belonging and begin to want, crave, and scheme to get them. The law is given to us for our own good, but limited creatures that we are, we won’t accept that as true for us.
St. Paul puts it this way in Romans the 7th chapter: “for we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. I am always impressed by the accuracy and truth of Paul’s words. I know when I’m headed for trouble. I can feel the tug of “conscience” which is always the Holy Spirit working through the law, God’s Holy No, for my own good. But do I listen! In English, we have a phrase, “forbidden fruit”. As soon as something is prohibited to me, it becomes the very thing I want. The phrase is Biblical, of course, like so much in our language and comes from Genesis. The snake beguiled Eve and Adam by using God’s prohibition about the “fruit” of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The snake didn’t make Eve eat; Eve wanted to taste the fruit because she’d been told “No”. How do we resist temptation? How do we pass the test? Can we grow in resisting sin’s call? Yes, of course we can. That’s what Lenten discipline proves to us. We can become more faithful. We can listen to and obey God more.
When I was a teen my Dad used to ask us to help him weed his garden. It was summer, muggy, but the evening wasn’t too hot. Even though Dad provided everything and asked almost nothing else. Did we go into his garden willingly? (We were normal kids, naturally and had to be forced out into the garden, grumbling the whole time.)
We were weeding tomatoes. My older sister was in front of me about 10 feet away. Carol is a good gal, but being the first born Mother always used her as an auxiliary parent, putting her in charge of us younger ones when she had need. In a perfect world this would have been fine. She would not have misused her new found power to bend us to her will or seek to humiliate us by exploiting that power. We younger ones would not have resented her, nor would we have challenged her authority at every opportunity. No, no, no. Neither would we mentally scheme to find ways of undermining her and toppling her down from her exalted position of dominance…. As I said, “in a perfect world”. But, in the real world of sinful flesh where most of us spend real time, this happened a lot. I say all this to remind you of the context of our story. Brothers and sister together as in the phrase “sibling rivalry”.
Well, as luck, or in this case Satan would have it, I spied a rotten tomato. This tomato was grotesquely ugly and rotten. It was bloated and swollen with putrid juice. It had been rotting so long that fuzzy white mold was growing on top of it. It was there in all its decaying glory just waiting for me to pick it up and lob it ay my unsuspecting older sister who was bent over weeding, offering here unprotected and unsuspecting behind as a perfect target, not ten feet away.
Was I tempted? Was I tempted? I’ll say I was tempted!!! In my mind, the Holy Spirit ran double time trying to get me to come to my better, purer, more Holy Self. “Don’t do that. You are just picking a fight. Think of all the times she’s helped you on your homework. Think of all the times she could have ratted you out and told the truth about you and she kept quiet to protect you”.
I can even recall the Holy Spirit saying in my mind. “Stop, get a grip. You’re in temptation’s trance. Satan is after you. Stop, break the cycle. Go get a drink of water. Go to the bathroom. You will regret doing this. You wouldn’t want her to do it to you. Remember the Golden Rule. ‘Do unto other as you would have them do unto you….your neighbor as yourself kind of thing.’”
How did Paul say it “for I do not do what I want, I do the very thing I hate”.
Well, you can fill in the rest of the story. I picked up that rotten projectile and I hit my sister smack dab in the middle of her bright pink peddle pushers, and predictable all “Hades” broke loose. All of it, of course, easily avoidable if I had just listened to the Holy Spirit who was trying desperately to override Satan’s tempting.
That’s why, during Lent we redouble our efforts to steep ourselves in God’s Word. When we internalize it, when we remember it, the WORD protects us from temptation’s assaults like a stockade. Like a shield, the WORD helps us fend off the darts of the EVIL ONE as Paul calls him in the 6th chapter of Ephesians. That’s why that daily Bible reading and doing devotions helps strengthen and fortify us to resist the temptations that inevitably come our way.
But most of all it is one WORD, the WORD made flesh, Jesus himself who protects and leads us. He is human just like us and knows the pull of the flesh. He also has provided the antidote to sin’s toxin by taking it away.
Thank you Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, and mine, most of all.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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