Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, “One does not live on bread alone.” (Luke 4.1-4)
As we enter these forty days of Lent, the Scriptures tell us of the temptation of the Galilean Teacher as he experienced the loneliness and the intimidation of the desert, a place of dislocation and discombobulation, where the familiar is foreign and where the future is foggy. For forty days, the Teacher struggled with the anguish and angst of the desert, battling unforeseen demonic forces and tempted by the divisions within the human heart.
With an obvious reclaiming of the desert experience of the Hebrew slaves in the Desert of Sinai, where they dealt with their own demons of the day and the terrors of the night, the evangelist Luke puts the Galilean Rabbi in a similar desert, where he, like the slaves, must be tempted, but–unlike them–will prevail, proving himself stronger in the fight than the Hebrews, who succumbed and stumbled with just about every step they took, never strong enough or willing enough to do battle against forces ouside themselves and, more importantly, inside themselves.
But here, the Rabbi of Galilee reverses the storyline of the Hebrews, and where they failed, he succeeded and, in this way, summoned those who would follow in his footsteps to stand firm in the fight as he did, to muster good in the battle with evil as he did, and to stay faithful in the fog of uncertainty as he did. There is no following the Rabbi without going through the desert, no way around the challenges and the contests found in the wilds, not if we desire to be one of his disciples.
For that reason, the season of Lent is an annual reminder to us of the struggles that every disciple faces on the battlefield of life, where the Devil is lurking behind every corner, and where the temptations to abandon the fight are paraded before us like the lunch choices at a Luby’s cafeteria. And while we perform token exercises of self-denial and self-restraint, they are paltry when compared to the real battle that awaits us outside the walls of these forty days.
And for that reason, we should see Lent, not as a few miles of slow-down and rough roads on an otherwise smooth highway, like a construction zone where we tolerate irritable motorists and minor inconveniences, resuming full speed afterwards, but as a training camp for war, where we are reminded that the price of failure is our death, if not literally, then figuratively as followers of the Galilean who also fought the war, but who won.
One instructor in the U.S. Air Force Academy, seeing that new recruits needed more than just intense physical and mental training, invited real-life combatants to speak to the young airmen, sharing with them their life-and-death challenges on the field of battle. One speaker, particularly impressive, was a former soldier who had been captured and thrown into a Viet Cong prison camp, where he was tortured, humiliated, and starved.
Listening to his harrowing experiences, the recruits rapid-fired him with the same question–what improvised weapons or what training techniques did he find to help him survive his ordeal. The man stunned the students into silence when he answered them, “I survived all right, but it wasn’t because of what I had on me. It was what I had in me that made the difference.”
Only those who have experienced the depravity and the deprivation of the desert truly understand the significance of the man’s words because, in any desert experience, whether it is in the sands or in a prison cell, the path out is through, and the only way through is with the strength that we have within us, honed and tempered, not by forty days in the boot camp of Lent, but by months and years of preparation and discipline. Like baby fat, the benefits of our Lenten practices disappear in a short while.
That is the reality of being a foot soldier in the fight against evil where the war does not end in forty days and where the rounds of artillery do not stop on Easter morning. Instead, it is a constant battle and, if we are to have a modicum of success, then we will have to strengthen our spirit each day through prayer, acts of charity, and stripping away of our pretenses. Committed to a daily discipline of inner strengthening of our soul, we will find ourselves, when thrown into the desert, not the plaything of Satan, but a formidable foe, as Rabbi Jesus was, denouncing the Devil and standing solidly and stoically on immovable ground, even if he stood on the shifting sands of the desert.
As we can see, the real battlefield is our heart, where good and evil are opposing forces, one or the other proving the stronger in the multiple choices and decisions that we make each day, either refusing the sales pitch of Satan or gushing at the stupidities that fall from his mouth. The evangelist Luke understands this very well, presenting us with this primordial struggle in the story of the Galilean’s temptations in the desert.
There, we find the constant themes of temptations, the flavors always the same like those in an ice-cream parlor. First, Satan puts before Rabbi Jesus the love of pleasure–turn this stone into bread–knowing our weakness for anything that feels good. But the Teacher, unlike Esau of old, refuses to give up his birthright for a pot of stew and a chunk of bread, answering Satan, “A person does not live on bread alone.”
Upping the ante, the Deceiver par excellence dangles toys before Rabbi Jesus–I will give to you all the kingdoms of the world–knowing how greedy we are for unimaginable riches, the love of possessions always turning our minds into muddle. But the Teacher doesn’t blink an eye, but stares down the Devil, reminding him, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him alone you serve.”
Bringing out the big guns, Satan bargains with the Teacher, putting before him the love of glory–if you are the Son of God, then prove it–knowing how we humans are show offs and glory seekers, basking in adulation and praise like spring breakers soaking up the sun’s rays on the beaches of Florida. But not Rabbi Jesus, who never chooses self over service to others.
When these weapons in his arsenal of temptations–love of pleasure, love of possessions, and love of glory–do not bend the will of the Galilean to the will of Satan, the tempter is left beaten and battered like a defeated boxer on the floor of the ring, at least for the moment, or as Luke says, “he departed from him for a time,” signaling that he will show his ugly face all too soon, never ready to admit defeat, reading the human heart only too well, seeing our vulnerabilities and crawling through the cracks in our heart.
That this never-ceasing battle is waged before us in the scriptures today is good for us to see, reminding us never to let down our guard. And that the Galilean Rabbi is more than equal to the wiles of Satan, not stumbling or losing his moral compass as did the slaves of old in the Desert of Sinai, but stays on course, his eyes always on the ways of God, is also good for us to see, challenging us to become better fighters in the face of evil than we are.
Lent is important, then, for the reminders that it puts before us. But if we are to benefit from forty days in this scaled-down desert where giving up desserts is our biggest sacrifice, we will have to understand that the real desert is a place of famine, fear, and forlornness. At the same time, it is the place where our mettle is proved and where our resolve is fired. Our usual distractions and evasions can’t rescue us from the hardness and harshness of the desert. There is no confusing the sands of the desert with the sands of the Caribbean Islands.
But, as the Rabbi teaches us today, those who endure the test and trials of the desert will find greater purpose and a clearer calling on the other side, so long as we draw a line in the sand, putting ourselves on the side of good, and fighting the foes that stand on the side of evil. In that contest, where every ploy and pretense will be paraded in front of us, urging us to give up the fight, we will grow stronger and steadier with each refusal to capitulate to evil, refusing to trade what we want most–the ways of God–for what we want now–the ways of the world.
The well-respected 20th century writer and scholar, C.S. Lewis, once described his own decision to follow the ways of the Galilean Teacher, writing, “Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. . . all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a creature that is in harmony with God . . . or else into one that is in a state of war.”
He understood well that the Devil never takes a rest. Nor can we. As we walk through these forty days of Lent, we have a choice to make. We can choose to be like the Hebrew slaves in the desert, who chose to worship a golden calf over the one true God, or we can choose to be like the Galilean Teacher, who, when in the desert, chose to worship the Most High God. As he said to Satan, “The Lord God alone shall I serve,” proving to Satan that he was willing to die on the battlefield rather than become complacent and complicit with evil.
While forty days may seem like a long time–and it would be were we in a real desert like Rabbi Jesus was–it does not compare to a lifetime of battling the foe. However, those who learn desert warfare know that it is in the wilderness that God takes away the distractions and foolishness and blindness of our ordinary lives, putting us on a new path, giving us a firmer purpose and a higher calling. Uncomfortable as it may be, the desert is the perfect training ground for combatting evil in the world.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 