Jesus goes into the wilderness to pray11/15/2022 ![]() And let’s be honest: “our own needs” is an ever-enlarging category: more clothes, more comfort, more amusement. “Turn the stone to bread”: save yourself, use whatever power is at your disposal to look after you own needs first.In Jesus’ temptations, we see more fully what it looks like: It sounds good on the surface, but day after day we keep making choices that are simply good for ourselves. What does God tell us to do? “Love the Lord and love your neighbor.” And what does such love look like? Choosing the other’s good, submitting to each other in humility, forgiving sins, being generous. Like Adam and Eve, we don’t want simply to do as God tells us we want to be the ones to decide what our lives should look like. That’s why Jesus’ story ended with temptation in the Garden of Gethsemane.Īt the heart of temptation is our human propensity always to prefer our own “wisdom” (such as it is) to ensure our own comfort and self-preservation. That’s why Jesus’ ministry began with forty days of temptation. That’s why the Bible begins with a story about temptation. The scriptures are written for us and for every generation as a lens to perceive God, to perceive the ways of God, and to perceive who we are and how we fit into God’s story.Īnd fundamental to the whole thing is our vulnerability to temptation. They’re not principally about historical fact they are portals for deep truth. After all, they were written for us, the readers. It is the way we, the readers, mirror these stories in our own lives. And with that knowledge, he discerns the evil before him, and chooses not the miraculous and the powerful, but the vulnerable and the weak.īut there is also a third temptation. The irony, of course, is that Jesus already is God, which means he already knows the difference between good and evil. But at its heart, the temptation is – as the serpent hisses – to be like God.įor Jesus, the temptation is to be like a caricature of God, to do the showy and the miraculous. But in both cases, his intent is the same: he comes as the tempter, luring the children of God/the son of God, to a choice that is anything but Godlike.Īdam and Eve are tempted to eat the “forbidden fruit” of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: to leave their childish state of innocence for a life burdened with choosing between right and wrong. In each story there is a common character: in the garden he appears as a serpent in the wilderness he appears as Satan. Our first Sunday in Lent begins with two stories: the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, and the story of Jesus in the wilderness. ![]()
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