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.’” Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It is written ‘You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.’” Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you, and with their hands they will support you lest you dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him in reply, “It also says, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time. (Luke 4.1-13)
We have begun the season of Lent, our annual retreat, meaning a time set aside from our usual schedule when we free ourselves from distractions and duties so that we can give time to soul-work, that is getting ourselves right with God. Our souls need Lent much the same as our home needs the annual spring cleaning. Without Lent, we too easily lose sight of what is important and what is not important, wandering far off the path that we know we should be walking.
The season always begins with the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert as told to us in the three synoptic gospels. Seeing that we are in the year of Luke, the temptation story is his to tell us today. It is markedly different from the other two gospel accounts, particularly Mark who is satisfied with a short, two-sentence summation of temptation, writing, “At once the Spirit drove him out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him” (Mark 1.12-13).
We can make of Luke’s elaboration and elongation of the story whatever we want. Basically, Luke is offering us the well-known categories of vice that were already understood in his time–love of pleasure, love of possessions, and love of glory. They are as old as humankind and Luke employs them to emphasize that Jesus withstood these misguided loves, instead choosing the love of God and his ways.
As Luke sees it, the want for pleasure, possessions, and glory are the primary tools in Satan’s toolkit. There is enough everyday experience to support that belief. A quick glance at the world at large and we find people who have their priorities set on one or the other of these pursuits–perhaps all of them–wanting pleasure, possessions, and glory above all else.
But the season of Lent isn’t about other people’s lives and the choices that they have made. It is about our lives and the choices we have made. Rather than looking outside ourselves, always a temptation in itself, we look inside our own hearts to see how corrupted they are by the same vices. Like our computer files that can become corrupted and fail to function properly as a result, so our hearts also are easily corrupted, failing to work as they are meant to work.
At the start, it is interesting to see that Luke objectifies the Devil, presenting him as an external force, a wicked spirit in contrast to the Holy Spirit that has filled Jesus after his baptism. This very much fits with the Lucan view of things. He sees the world as the battleground between two powers, the kingdom of God as presented by Jesus and a shadow kingdom, that is the kingdom of the world as presented by the Devil and his minions. It is one way of looking at the matter.
Another way, one that I tend to prefer, is to see the evil not so much as external to us, but instead as something internal. In other words, the Devil is not dancing in front of us, holding goodies in his hands for our taking as if we are trick-or-treaters taking candies from the person in the doorway. Rather, there is something evil within us, a houseguest from hell that has set us residence in our hearts, prompting and prodding us to take a walk on the side of wickedness.
An externalization of evil carries the inherent temptation of placing the blame outside ourselves when, in truth, the choice to do evil rests always within our hearts where the real battle takes place between good and evil. In other words, the responsibility for the path that we take lies within us, not with demonic forces that are pushing and pulling us in one direction like a violent wind outside of us.
I suppose that puts me in the prophetic school of thought that tends to see evil as something inside us, not as something outside us. For example, Ezekiel beautifully expresses it when he speaks for the Most High God, telling the people of Israel, “I will take you away from among the nations, gather you from all the lands, and bring you back to your own soil. I will sprinkle clean water over you to make you clean; from all your impurities and from all your idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you so that you walk in my statutes, observe my ordinances, and keep them.”
In my mind, there is something exquisitely beautiful and utterly true about that understanding of the birthplace of evil. It is in our heart where we have allowed the ways of the world to set up a house, choosing for ourselves the paths of pleasure, possessions, and power, worshipping them as gods rather than worshipping the Most High God who would have us walk on the path of loving service, generosity, and humility.
Or as Micah the prophet put it, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” We find in his words the ways of righteousness in contrast to the ways of the world where self-seeking of pleasure, possessions, and power orient a person’s life.
All three synoptic gospels state that Jesus stayed in the desert for forty days, a number with significant biblical roots, recalling the core element of the Jewish story, that of the wandering of the Hebrew slaves in the desert where they were tested by the Most High God to see if they would truly be a people peculiarly his own or if they would choose to dance before the golden calves of the world.
Explaining the purpose of the forty years in the desert, the writer of the Book of Deuteronomy states it clearly, writing, “Remember how for these forty years the Lord, your God, has directed all your journeying in the wilderness, so as to test you by affliction, to know what was in your heart: to keep his commandments, or not” (Deut 8.2).
Interestingly, in the sojourn of the Hebrew slaves, it was the Lord God who put them to the test. However, it is the Devil who tests Jesus’ resolve when he goes into the desert for forty days. But the end result is the same–to present a series of tests “to know what is in a person’s heart.” And that, I would suggest, is the same end of our Lenten stay in the desert–to know what is in our hearts.
Of course, that knowledge is not easily learned and not learned without affliction as both stories make clear. As we know, the ancient tradition for allowing that affliction to touch us during the season of Lent is done through the practices of fasting and abstinence. We deny ourselves material things to remind us of our utter dependence on God.
Obviously, it has some merit. Pampered and protected as we are in our ordinary lives, it does us some good to deny ourselves a bit of pleasure or a plateful of food. But, as I see it, giving up a few pieces of candy or reducing the portions of our meat is not really up to the task of the testing required “to know what it is that is in our hearts.”
I think a greater affliction would come to us by way of honest truth-telling to ourselves. It is far more difficult to look behind the mask and to see what really resides in our hearts than it is to avoid the candy dish or the bowl of ice cream. Denying ourselves a beer or two is not going to get to the bottom of our hearts, regardless of how much we enjoy our booze.
That honest-to-goodness truth telling begins when we look into our hearts to see how much space we have allotted for pleasure, for possessions, and for power. And when we’ve done that assessment, we will also see if there is any free space left in our hearts for generosity, for goodness, and for godliness. It boils down to the Ezekian question of whether we have hearts of stone or hearts of flesh.
Honestly, forty days may not be enough time to uncover the truth about ourselves, which requires destroying the defenses that we have built up, working through the labyrinth of lies that we tell ourselves, and bringing to the surface the ugliness that we cover up with a smile and a bit of powder. But it is a start and we have to start somewhere if we are going to align ourselves on the side of goodness rather than join the forces of evil that dominate the landscape around us.
The struggle is real, but it is most real within our hearts because it is there that the decision and the pacts are made. We can blame all the ills of the world on peoples, forces, and demons outside ourselves, but the birthplace of evil is the human heart that beats within the chests of each person alive and within each person who once walked upon the earth.
If I might be allowed to borrow another Nathaniel Hawthorne’s parable to make the point, I would ask all of us to reflect on the allegory that he tells in his story “Earth’s Holocaust.” To summarize, the people of the earth decide to rid the world of everything that has overburdened it by way of suffering, hatred, intolerance, misery, and oppression.
So, the reformers planned a great bonfire to burn all those things that were considered evil. First, all the jewels and crowns were cast into the fire. All the world’s barrels of liquor and ale were next destroyed, followed by the entire tobacco harvest. Then, guns and swords and artillery and ammunition of every sort were gathered up and also thrown into the flames.
The reformers, filled with zeal, continued, next throwing into the raging fire various books, even the Good Book, as well as constitutions and charters. As the flames licked up, they tossed in all manner of currencies, stocks, and bonds, delighted to see the fire roar. So, they decided to throw in more, adding to the flames clothes, money and toys.
Gradually, as day turned to night, the flames slowly died out, exhausted from the heap of worldly goods tossed onto the heap that had at last turned into rubble. A bystander who has watched it all, seeing the procession throughout the long day, remarked aloud, “There is one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw in the fire, and without which the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all.”
“And what might that be?” someone asked him. He replied, “What, but the human heart itself. Unless they hit upon some method of purifying the foul cavern, for from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery, the same old shapes, or worse ones, which have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume in ashes.” He ends by saying, “Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world again.”
The story provides us a perfect start to the season of Lent. For the truth of the matter is that who we are and what we do begin within our hearts. And the one person who decides who rules our hearts is ourselves. We can decide to allow the spirit of God to reside in our hearts or we can decide to allow an evil spirit to fill the space within our hearts. As I said, these forty days give us the opportunity to uncover the truth about ourselves.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 