Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.
I need to begin this morning with a recantation. On Epiphany III, I preached a sermon on Jesus and his disciples attending a wedding in Cana of Galilee where he turned water into wine. In that sermon I made this statement: “Three days after his baptism by John, Jesus and his fledging disciples went to a wedding in Cana.” What is wrong with that statement is my accounting that the wedding was three days after his baptism. That could not be the case because Matthew, Mark, and Luke clearly state that immediately after his baptism he went into the wilderness. I had not attended closely to what was going on in the Gospel of John. There we have a description of John the Baptist preaching and being questioned. But in fact there is no description – not even a reference to the baptism of Christ. Why? Because John had baptized Jesus forty-some days earlier, and what we come upon in the Gospel is Jesus’ return from the desert after the Temptation.
We walk into the middle of a conversation that John the Baptist is having with the agents of the Pharisees:
Why are you baptizing if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?
John answers them:
I baptize with water but among you stands one whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.
The next day John sees Jesus standing along the bank again:
Behold the Lamb of God…I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven and light on him!
After that two of John’s disciples left John and followed Jesus. One of those disciples was a young man named Andrew the brother of Simon Peter. Soon after Jesus picked up Simon Peter, Philip, and Nathanael. It was the next day, the third day after John had announced the Messiah’s presence, that Jesus turned the water into wine in Cana. So there you have my recantation and with that said let us go back to the text for today:
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.
Immediately after his baptism, Jesus was led into the wilderness by the very Spirit that John had witnessed come down from Heaven. St. Mark puts it even stronger:
The Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness.
This place, this wilderness, this wasteland is referred to in the Old Testament as The Devastation. It is a sterile place, full of salt deposits from the Dead Sea and no vegetation can grow there. It is also the location of the Qumran with hundreds of limestone cliffs and caves. If you have ever seen photographs of the Qumran you know what a lifeless place it is. David hid from King Saul in and around this region. This was the place known as the Wilderness where Jesus was tempted of the devil.
The doors of heaven swung open at Jesus’ baptism and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, came to light upon his head. Then God the Father spoke so that the Baptist saw it all:
This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.
That was the first step into his public ministry – the declaration by the Father that Jesus was his Son. The second step was the testing; the proving of that declaration and that is what the temptation of our Lord in the wilderness is all about. This narrative is not meant to demonstrate to Christians the manner by which temptations may be overcome. That is not to say that lessons for living cannot be drawn from our Lord’s personal experience of temptation, but the danger of that utilitarian approach is that it will overshadow the meaning that the event had for Jesus and his Apostles. That meaning, simply put, is that Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, is the Son of God. The temptation is all about Jesus, all about his identity, all about his mission. That is what the devil meant to dispute and destroy by force or fraud or deceit and trickery. “If thou be the Son of God…” is the challenge, resistance, the hostility we will hear from this moment forward in one way or another throughout his ministry. But here is the beginning of the conflict:
If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread…
Notice that the first challenge is not a quotation from Scripture. Nowhere in the Old Testament is there any indication that stones will be turned into bread. Jesus will in fact take a few loaves of bread and a few fish and he will multiply them hand over fist to feed thousands of hungry people. But he never turned a stone into bread because that would be magic and magic overturns the sacramental principle, which is the very principle of the life of Christ and of the life of his Church. What is that sacramental principle? There are two parts to the sacramental principle: first of all the material creation is not the opposite of the spiritual, but in fact the material is spiritual. The great example, the great Archetype of that truth is the Incarnation itself. “The Word became Flesh.” The life-giving sacraments of the Church are all based upon the fact that God himself has entered the material creation as a material creature. The Word did not come down from Glory like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; or like Athena bursting forth from the head of Zeus a full adult. That leads us to the second sacramental principle: Grace does not overturn, does not destroy nature; grace perfects nature. So the Word by becoming flesh perfects flesh, the Word will turn water into wine, multiply real loaves and fishes, loosen the tongue-tied children of Israel, and give sight to the blind – but he never overturns nature, he always completes nature. The Word became Flesh without destroying flesh. The devil is tempting Jesus to use his divinity to work magic, to destroy nature. This Jesus rejects.
But even more devastating to Jesus’ identity–turning stones into bread would be a rejection of God’s will for his Son. The will of the Father for the Son, at that moment, involved fasting and hunger for his Son. Jesus loved his Father with his whole heart, soul and mind.
But he answered and said: It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God.
The devil tried to draw Jesus away from his path of loving obedience and trust in the Father. In each case our Lord answered the tempter from the Bible and specifically from the book of Deuteronomy 6 through 8, which is the context of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. The temptations are drawn from three events in the life of Israel in the wilderness. The first temptation is linked to Israel’s longing for the fleshpots and the bread of Egypt and they began murmuring against Moses.
Jesus rebuffs the devil’s second temptation with a quotation from Deuteronomy 6:16: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God.” Israel had demanded signs from God over and over again – a testing of God. “Give us this, give us that,” over and over again.
Jesus finally defeated the devil at the end of the third temptation with the words of Deuteronomy 6:13: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” Where Israel was drawn away by fascination with the Canaanite cults and alien gods and their courts of power, Jesus remains true to his Father.
Just as Jesus identified with Israel in his baptism, that identification continued on into his temptation in the wilderness for 40 days. Jesus is the New Israel. He recapitulated not only Adam’s temptation, but he also recapitulated Israel’s temptations in the wilderness and he reversed that failure. He established himself right there as the New Israel and soon he would return to the banks of the Jordan and begin gathering 12 Apostles that correspond to the 12 Patriarchs. After the third temptation the devil left him for a while. But he was never too far off to attempt to destroy the work of God in Christ. We shall see on Palm Sunday, as our Lord was dying upon the cross for us, the tempter appears again: