Sermon Archive
The temptation of Jesus
Sermon preached by John Burdett at Evensong on 17 February 2002
'This is my Son whom I love; with him I am well pleased'. Those were the words that Jesus heard as he came up out of the river Jordan after his baptism. Now he hears another voice 'If you're the Son of God...' How's he going to react?
It's interesting to compare our experiences in Lent with our Lord's temptation in the wilderness. In both of them there's some degree of abstinence, but while Jesus had to endure temptation, for us the emphasis is more on our failures to resist temptation - on our sinfulness; but not entirely, because for a devout Christian Lent can be a time of temptation. A lot of people quite rightly think of Lent as a time of self-discipline, self- examination and self-denial, and all these are excellent. The danger in them, and the source of the temptation, is in the word they have in common: Self. Because sin is an attempt to displace God from the centre of our lives and to replace him with something else.
That something may be power or money or sex or alcohol or food or a BMW or any one of a host of things, and all these are in themselves morally neutral. They can only acquire the status of a sin if we involve ourselves in them in the wrong way.
So most, if not all sin is an attempt to displace God from the centre of our lives and replace him with self. So in practising self-discipline, self-examination and self-denial we must always remember that the object is to direct our attention away from ourselves towards God, and not the other way round. I think it's safe to say that all sin is ultimately self-centredness. That was recognised in the Mosaic Law. The first four of the Ten Commandments put God at the centre, the fifth directs our attention away from ourselves towards our parents, and the rest are instructions not to seek our own advantage at the expense of other people.
When we come to our Lord's temptations in the wilderness the accent is very much on the temptation to self-centredness. Jesus went into the desert so that he could be alone to plan his ministry. He'd just, immediately after his baptism, received all the assurance he needed that he was indeed the Son of God. Now he had to work out what that meant for himself, for his ministry and for the world; and I think we have to see his temptations in that light. And those temptations sprang from the very fact that he was the Son of God. 'If you are the Son of God,you can do anything. You can do anything you like'.
Some people say that the temptation to turn stones into bread was a temptation to satisfy his own hunger, and of course if that was so his motive for doing it was clearly self-centred. But I don't think that was the temptation. For one thing he'd gone into the desert voluntarily, and if he was hungry he could do what anyone else would do, walk to the nearest village and buy food. But I think that in any case food wouldn't have been a source of great temptation to Jesus. He enjoyed food and drink, but he was a man who didn't set much store by creature comforts, and I don't think hunger would have worried him too much.
A great many of the country people of Galilee must have been poor almost to the point of starvation, and Jesus would have known that it's not much use talking about spiritual things to a man with an empty stomach. So it would be logical to suggest that the first thing to do would be to use his miraculous powers to feed people, and that after that they'd be in a better state to listen to his teaching. And to a compassionate man feeding the hungry is clearly a good thing to do. Why else do we support Christian Aid?
But, as so often happens, the good is the enemy of the best. Jesus knew that any attempt to feed people in that way would be centred on him as a man. Who would turn stones into bread for them after he'd gone? Later in his ministry he said 'I am the bread of life' and this first temptation was to substitute the earthly bread of Jesus the man for the bread of heaven, the body of Christ.
In any case, simply to give people food doesn't solve their problems. It makes them economically dependent. They lose their freedom of choice. You notice how when governments give aid to Third World countries it usually has strings attached, so that the rich country acquires an export market or a source of cheap imports. At first sight our Lord's answer to the devil seems strange 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God'. But who was it said 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.'? The word brings independence, freedom.
In our Lord's imagination the scene changes. He looks down on all the nations of the world. On their poverty and suffering. On the greed and corruption and tyranny and plain inefficiency of their rulers. How much he'd be able to do for them as the absolute ruler of the world's only super-power. The world could only benefit from being ruled by a wise and benevolent dictator. But you've only got to look at our own times to see what chance he would have had of establishing universal peace and justice, and what the attempt would have meant in terms of compromise with evil and corruption. He'd be the all-conquering Messiah the zealots were waiting for. But any attempt at world conquest and domination would have gone the way of so many revolutions - starting with high ideals, freedom for everybody, but ending with armies of occupation, secret police, political prisoners, the lot, as he tried to force his will on people.
In Jesus's imagination the scene changes again. He thinks of the huge temple court in Jerusalem at Passover time. It's seething with a dense mass of pilgrims from all parts of the world. Suddenly one after another they look up at a figure outlined against the sky on the topmost pinnacle. What a thrill of horror there would be as the figure leaped forward from the tower. But when instead of him crashing on to the pavement below the crowd saw him floating gently to earth, borne up by invisible angels, their horror would turn to delirious fanaticism. Every member of the crowd would be instantly converted and would hail him as the Messiah.
It would compel people to believe him. He'd have been the centre of attention all right. He'd have been a nine-days' wonder, but it wouldn't have lasted, would it? It would have proved almost nothing. It certainly wouldn't have proved God's love for all mankind. It would have been an easy way of convincing people, but again it would have been an attack on their freedom.
Jesus saw, and allows us to see, that this was a temptation to do something contrary to one of the principles by which God has always governed the world - the principle that our belief in him must never be forced; we can believe or not as we like, but our belief, like his love, must be absolutely free.
But there was another temptation here - a test of our Lord's own faith. He'd just, as I said, received the assurance that he was the Son of God, and perhaps the devil was saying 'Are you really sure? Let's just try it out and make certain. After all, if you're wrong, if you've really been fooling yourself, it'll be a quick end to all your doubts'. But Jesus must have known that if he had the slightest doubt about who he was and what he had to do he would have had no right to start on the journey he'd planned. He had no right to put God to the test.
So Jesus overcame these temptations to self-centredness, and he recognised that they were also temptations to rob us of three freedoms - economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of belief. And this theme of freedom must have been very much in his mind, because St.Luke tells us that when he returned to Galilee he went to the synagogue and he read a passage from Isaiah 'He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed'
So Jesus went into the desert to plan his ministry. Perhaps we should do the same thing, because ministry is, of course, another word for service. Perhaps we should spend some time during Lent planning our lives. Working out in what ways we can devote our lives more effectively to the service of God and of our neighbour. An essential element of that planning must be an assessment of where we are now. And that means that we must take stock of ourselves, that we should stop taking our bad habits for granted, that we should hold them up to the light and have a good look at them.
But we mustn't wallow in our sinfulness for three reasons. Firstly, to concentrate excessively on our own sinfulness is to put ourselves at the centre, which is itself sinful. Secondly, we're made in the image of God, and although we've marred that image nothing made in God's image can be fundamentally evil. And thirdly, and most importantly, in spite of our sinfulness God still accepts us. 'If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness'.
Jesus hadn't seen the last of temptation. In his agony on the cross he heard that same voice again: 'If you are the Son of God . . . come down from the cross'. Once again he refused to succumb. In the desert he refused to rob us of our freedom, on the cross he bought our freedom once for all, setting us free to serve him whose service is perfect freedom.
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