Deuteronomy 26
When you have entered the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, 2 take some of the firstfruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land the LORD your God is giving you and put them in a basket. Then go to the place the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name 3 and say to the priest in office at the time, “I declare today to the LORD your God that I have come to the land the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us.”4 The priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the LORD your God. 5 Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. 6 But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labour. 7 Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our ancestors, and the LORD heard our voice and misery, toil and oppression. 8 So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. 9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, LORD, have given me.” Place the basket before the LORD your God and bow down before him. 11 Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the LORD your God has given to you and your household.
Luke 4. 1- 3
4 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
3 The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’
4 Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man shall not live on bread alone.”’
5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendour; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours.’
8 Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”’
9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
‘“He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’
12 Jesus answered, ‘It is said: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’
13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
Temptation is no longer something to be resisted.
Here is how the story goes now; in the old times, when people believed in absolute rules about right and wrong, temptation was to be resisted. Religions gave people rules, claiming that they were from God, and religions also warned of God’s anger and punishment if these rules were broken.
Most often these religious rules required denial of pleasures, and that made the past a very dreary place to be.
The story continues, now we realise religious rules are in fact entirely man made inventions based on prejudice and ignorance, and that God is a sort of heavenly bogey man invented by those in authority to keep us all in line. Today we realise that people can make their own moral choices, and that temptation is merely a prelude to pleasure, an anticipation to be savoured and then indulged. Indeed the only use of the old idea of temptation is to add that delightfully pleasurable sense of rule breaking that accompanies a forbidden pleasure.
Temptation has become a tool for Advertisers, enabling them to indicate a product is desirable, indeed our modern consumer economy would grind to a halt were it not for temptation. If we only bought what we needed sales would plummet, but now thanks to temptation we can repackage desire as necessity, and what we want becomes what we must have.
So temptation is no longer something to be resisted, it is to be encouraged.
There seems to be one exception; the language of temptation is still used in relation to dieting. Modern saints are thin, and have flawless skin. Their images appear on billboards and in magazines to show us what we should really desire, a new car, a low fat yoghurt, faster broad band, all things are guaranteed to make us happier. We are told that temptation will not lead to hell, far from it, temptation will lead us to the sparkly pleasures of consumer heaven where calories are no more, and where we may rest in peace upon our sale price sofa of delights, evermore plugged in to high definition multichannel entertainment. It seems truth was bad business, but moral relativism is good business.
You may have guessed I am not impressed with modern understandings of temptation, let’s wind back two thousand years and have a look at our gospel for today, the Temptation of Christ.
The gospel accounts of the Temptation of Christ dramatise the story of Jesus tempted by the devil, and to modern understandings the story presents some difficulties, for instance Jesus does not eat for forty days, which is humanly impossible. Of course one could say that it is divinely possible, and I do believe in miracles, but I don’t think that this is what is going on here.
Numbers in the bible are often symbolic, and the number ‘forty’ is one of the key symbolic numbers in the bible, it does not primarily denote a numerical value rather a period of spiritual testing, so we have the forty days of the flood in Genesis, and the forty years of the Israelites wandering the desert in Exodus. All times in which the biblical characters are put through a period of testing scrutiny through hardship. In the story of the Temptation of Christ gathers up all the historical symbolism of the number forty and uses that historical weight of meaning to explain what is going on in the Temptation.
There are other fantastical elements to the story, another instance is the marvellous high place from where all the Kingdoms of the World can be seen. I don’t know much about geography, but I do know that you can’t see Rutland from Palestine no matter how high up you get.
In the ancient world people read texts with an eye for symbolism and imagery, in our contemporary world, perhaps because of the scientific revolution, our reading of such texts has become very literal, and we become puzzled that the ancients could write such strange things – but the ancients knew what they were doing, it is we who are mistaken.
Then we come to the devil, the original Greek is ‘diabollos’ meaning ‘slanderer’, or ‘accuser’ or simply ‘liar’. Not a purveyor of banned sensual delights, but one who deceives in order to destroy. This is a contest between Jesus, who is the way, the truth and the life, and the devil, who is a twister of the truth. This contest is about truth and lies, notice Jesus and the devil both quote scripture to make their point in each confrontation.
When we are tempted the question is not ‘should I, or shouldn’t I?’The question is, ‘what is the truth of the matter?’ ‘Am I being deceived?’ ‘Does the advertiser, the diabollos, have my best interests at heart or is he just trying to sell me something shiny but rubbish in order to make a quick buck?’
So to temptation itself, the original New Testament Greek word is ‘peirasmos’ – a trial, or a time of proving, as metals are proved in fire or truth is proved in a court room. Temptation in the New Testament is not about a list of banned sensual delights, it is about the struggle to identify the truth.
Imagine a court room scene; the devil is the prosecuting attorney, and you are in the dock being tried, but thankfully you do have a defence lawyer, the New Testament refers to the Holy Spirit as the ‘paraclete’, the advocate. By the end of the trial we shall have learned the truth – so long as the lies of the prosecutor do not confuse and deceive you.
At the beginning of this sermon I outlined the popular idea that religions issue a list of laws to be obeyed or risk divine retribution, our first reading was an actual example of this; we heard of Moses in Deuteronomy instructing the Israelites to follow a ritual to give thanks for the land. Moses was a law giver, the Old Testament contains the Covenant of the Law; the New Testament contains the Covenant of Love. The principle of Christianity is ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and…’love your neighbour as yourself.’ The popular idea, and the popular criticism, that religions are all about rules, and that temptation is about resisting the desire to break those rules, should not hold with Christianity.
Love is a higher standard than law, for instance, imagine a mother and baby, it is late at night and the baby is grisly because it is teething. Religion demands of the mother to look after the child, that is the law, a mother must stay awake all night if that is what it takes. Such a law would be good, but the temptation to sleep would be great, and the guilty feelings caused by falling asleep would be greater still. Christianity supersedes the rule to stay awake with the command to love; this fulfils the law’s concern to have the mother care for the child but places the motivation in love not in fear of punishment. To be tempted becomes not to desire the sensuality of sleep, but rather to be tested by the situation in which the mother finds herself, and in which she may find out a few truths about motherhood, and about herself.
Doing good out of respect for religious rules is good, doing good out of love is better.
In the Temptation of Christ we see who Jesus really is, the devil sees if he can get Jesus to use his powers for selfish purposes, but God is good and Jesus does not act out of character.
In times of trial we discover who we really are.
What really matters to us.
Our true character.
Ukraine, and all of Europe, and the United States too, are undergoing a time of trial right before or eyes. We have been since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Do you believe in the devil? The twister of truth? He would seem to be on the staff at the Kremlin, and replicated in thousands of social media accounts. The original lie was that the 200,000 Russian troops assembled on the Ukraine border would not invade, and then following the invasion that this was in fact just a ‘special military operation.’
Our metal is being tested; are we a continent of sovereign nations, democracy, and respect for the rule of law, and if so, what cost are we willing to pay for these values?
Temptation is not trivial or fun, those are the devil’s dangerous lies.
Truth matters.
Temptation, the time of testing, is about the things that really count, about the things that define us, about who we really are.
Lead us not into the time of trial, but deliver us from evil.
May God indeed spare us the time of trial, but if we must pass through such times, may we walk the way of compassion, courage and integrity, the way shown by Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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