Roughly seventeen years and two churches ago, I started off with a five-week series on this passage. Since it was the beginning of the year, one of those services included the ordination and installation of a new elder. That got me thinking about Jesus as a human leader of a group of oddly-assorted people on a trying journey through challenging circumstances. It’s not a new idea, to be sure, but it wasn’t an angle I had spent a lot of time considering; and the more I thought about it in the light of Matthew 4, the more I came to think that if we want to learn about leadership from Jesus, our passage this morning is where we must begin.
When I say that, you might be looking back down at the text and wondering where I’m getting that, and the answer is: not in the text. It’s in the context. Look what comes next in this chapter. First, John the Baptist gets thrown in prison, prompting Jesus to move to the cities around the Sea of Galilee, start his preaching career, and recruit his first disciples. Then we see the early success—at least as those disciples probably saw it—of Jesus’ preaching career, as he starts drawing large, adoring crowds. That is followed in turn by the first great act of leadership of Jesus’ career, the Sermon on the Mount, which is designed in part to force those adoring crowds to make a choice: either follow Jesus as committed disciples, or abandon him. People following him for the sake of the stuff he’s doing doesn’t serve his purpose at all.
When the Father sends the Son into the desert to expose him to the temptations of the Enemy, the immediate purpose is to prepare Jesus for that sequence of leadership opportunities and challenges. This makes sense, because any position of leadership is a position of intensified temptation. The Devil might be a fool in the theological sense, but he’s not stupid. He wants to turn the church away from our calling, and the most efficient way to do that is to turn the leaders. You go after a flock of sheep one sheep at a time, you get one sheep at a time. You lure the shepherd into a blind canyon and block it off behind him, you get the whole flock in one stroke.
We might wonder why God allows this, given the catastrophic damage leaders gone astray can do to the church. Here in Warsaw and around the world, we’ve seen enough examples to make a stone weep, and I know I’m not the only one here who has friends or family who have taken deep spiritual wounds from some of them. Thing is, though, if God kept church leaders from facing serious temptation, it would only make things worse in the long run. For one, temptation is the spiritual resistance against which we exercise; it stresses our spiritual “muscles” and shows us where we’re weak. If we were never tempted, we would never grow stronger. For another, if we never struggled with temptation, we would never learn to show grace to others because we wouldn’t understand the need. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s dry question on suffering applies here: “The man who has never suffered—what can he possibly know, anyway?”
This is at least part of the reason the Father allows the Enemy to tempt Jesus. It’s a test, not because the Father isn’t sure Jesus will pass, but for our sake: so we can know he understands the struggles we face. He’s identifying with his people here. Like Israel, he will be tested in the desert, but where they failed, he will succeed; like us, he will know the power of temptation, but where we break, he will force the Devil to keep ramping up the pressure. That culminates in the cross; I’ve neither seen the movie The Last Temptation of Christ nor read the book, but Nikos Kazantzakis and Martin Scorsese got that much right, at least: the cross was not merely the Devil trying to kill Jesus, it was his attempt to drive temptation beyond the pitch of agony, to the point at which flesh could no longer resist. The flesh did not, but Jesus did, and so instead of calling the angels to set him free—he died. Not only does he know how it feels to be tempted, he knows far better than we do.
Here, of course, the Enemy is still limited by God to lesser temptations than that; and the ones he uses on Jesus are familiar ones for mature leaders in the church, whether we’ve thought about them consciously or not. It’s worth noting (and probably the reason the Revised Common Lectionary places this text on the first Sunday of Lent) that Jesus prepares for the test by fasting. If you were here a couple years ago for the sermon series on spiritual practices, you probably remember that fasting is one of the most important practices on that list; it’s a way of training the body, bringing it under the authority of the spirit, and shifting our priorities away from meeting physical needs toward spiritual ones—especially prayer, for fasting and prayer always go together. Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights, and here again we have echoes of the Exodus; not only did Israel spend forty years in the wilderness, but during that time, while the people of Israel were gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai, Moses spent forty days and forty nights fasting on the top of the mountain while God gave him the Torah.
Now, after fasting for so long, Jesus was literally starving—and this, too, echoes the Exodus; in their time in the wilderness, the Israelites complained constantly, and their bitterest complaints were about food. Hunger, and particularly hunger for the food they had known in Egypt, mastered them, and the Devil hoped it would master Jesus as well. “If you’re the Son of God,” he says, “command these stones to become bread.” If? The Devil knows who he’s talking to. He’s not doubtful, he’s throwing it in Jesus’ teeth. “If you’re really the Son of God,” he says, “prove it—use your power to give yourself some food.”
The Enemy is using hunger to sharpen the temptation, but the core temptation here is twofold. First, there’s the temptation to impress people. “Son of God, eh?” the Devil sneers. “Tell you what—do something impressive, and maybe I’ll believe you.” It’s a lot easier to get people to follow you if they think you’re amazing, or at least that you can do amazing things. Jesus resists that approach here, and we see him resisting it throughout his time on Earth; when the crowds praise him for his miracles, he makes a point of freaking them out with his teaching. His way is the way of weakness, not the way of power, popularity, and the big show, but here, the Devil is tempting him to precisely that. “Who needs this ‘Man of Sorrows,’ ‘Suffering Servant’ stuff?” the Enemy asks. “Come on, Jesus—take the easy route! Use your power, flash a miracle or two, and the world will fall at your feet!”
Second, the Devil is tempting Jesus to meet his own needs in his own power on his own initiative in his own timing rather than trusting the Father to provide for him. The Father sent him into the desert and the Spirit led him there, and they would not have done that only to leave him to die in the wilderness. Jesus has reason to trust he will get the food he needs in the Father’s good time. The Enemy is challenging that, tempting him to choose the “certainty” of providing for his own needs over the apparent uncertainty of trusting the Father to do so; he’s trying to talk Jesus into acting on his own rather than waiting for the Father to act.
When Jesus uses Scripture to defeat those two temptations—more on that in a minute—the Devil of course doesn’t give up. In fact, bold villain that he is, he tries to use Jesus’ own words against him. He takes Jesus out of the wilderness to Jerusalem, to the high point of the temple. In Jewish tradition, the temple was the center of Jerusalem—not geographically, but spiritually—and Jerusalem was the center of everything. The rabbis said the temple was the highest point on earth—again, not literally, but spiritually: of all places on earth, it was the nearest to God. Theologically, the highest point of the temple was the still point at the center of the turning world and the closest place on earth to the throne of heaven.
On a concrete level, it’s not certain what that “highest point” was, but I think the Enemy took Jesus to the roof of the southeast corner, where the outer wall of the temple and the wall of the city were one and the living rock of the mountain fell away into the deep, steep-sided valley of the Kidron. The Roman Jewish historian Josephus wrote that from that point, one could barely see the bottom of the valley below. When the Devil drags Jesus up there, points into the abyss, and says, “Do you really trust your Father? If you’re really the Son of God, jump,” it’s an effective challenge, because you’d have to be either God, a lunatic, or suicidal to make that leap.
To support his challenge, the devil pulls out Psalm 91. You can almost see him pointing to the scroll and saying, “Look, Jesus, I’m not making this up—it’s right here in the Bible. It says right here, ‘He will command his angels concerning you . . . On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ See, Jesus, it says right here, God has commanded his angels and they won’t let you fall—you won’t even bruise your foot. Do you really believe your Father’s promises to you, like you said a minute ago? Then prove it—prove you’re the Son of God—prove you really trust him: take a leap of faith!”
The temptation here is pride. That might not be obvious, because when we think about pride, we tend to think about we can do. When my favorite cousin was little, my uncle says, she used to reject help with the declaration, “I can do it m’ownself.” The adult version of that, we recognize as pride. Satan tempts Jesus with another kind, in some ways the equal and opposite error, the sin of spiritual pride; he dares Jesus to prove he trusts God more than anyone else and show how much the Father loves him. Spiritual pride says God loves me more than you because who I am is better than you. It’s the most insidious of temptations, and it’s a particular risk for leaders; leadership positions offer many opportunities to feel superior to other people, and easy ways to chase more such opportunities—mostly without even having to jump off tall buildings.
When that fails as well, the Enemy pulls out his high card, the temptation to pragmatic idolatry: “Worshiping me is an easier way to get what you want than worshiping your Father in heaven.” To Jesus, he comes right out and says it, promising to give him the world without a fight if Jesus will bow down to him. To Israel, he offered gods they could see and touch who promised the good crops, success in battle, and other practical results they wanted; and time and time again, the Israelites decided that worshiping idols seemed to work, and that was enough. To our culture, he sells a God who loves you and wants to be nice to you, and wants you to love yourself and be nice to yourself, and to be nice to other people, too, as long as it doesn’t impose too many difficulties on you—to love one another, within reason, however you define love.
And to the American church? The Enemy doesn’t even need to take us up on a mountain, he just shows us the bigger church down the street and says, “You see how many people they’re reaching, and how much money they have?” Not that we shouldn’t care at all about those numbers—they are measures, if imperfect ones, of how well the church is doing its job—but if the Devil can get us focusing on them, it’s easy for us to start thinking whatever makes those numbers bigger is good, and whatever doesn’t make them bigger is bad, or at least not good enough. We stop asking what God wants us to do and start asking what will give us the numbers we want. What can we do to build market share? How can we attract more customers, and what do we need to do to keep them satisfied? No, it’s not devil-worship, but it’s something other than “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only,” and for the Enemy, that’s quite good enough.
Jesus of course defeats Satan by turning to Scripture, and there are two things we need to say about that. First, this is all Jesus does, aside from telling the Devil to get lost. Jesus leads his disciples by following the Father, and those whom he calls to lead his people in his name do so by following him; if he who was himself God, who was the Word, who spoke God’s word every time he opened his mouth, chose to respond to the Enemy’s temptations with Scripture and nothing but Scripture, how much more should we do the same?
Second, remember the Devil knows the Bible too, better than any of us. When he pulled out Psalm 91, it wasn’t the first time he’d hid temptation in the words of Scripture, and it wasn’t the last, either; he’s very good at twisting Scripture to lead us astray. That’s one of the reasons the church’s teaching responsibility is so important; we need to know what the word of God says—and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t say—if we want to be able to spot when it’s being misused. We need to be aware of the temptation to interpret Scripture to mean what we want it to mean rather than letting it say what it actually says.
So, to resist the Devil and his temptations, we have only Scripture as our weapon, but how do we keep him from turning it against us? We’ll never know it as well as Jesus did, after all; he wrote the book, we just read it. But here’s the thing: Jesus saw through Satan’s final temptation because he understood the true nature of his calling and mission. He had come to set the world free from the Devil, but taking the Devil’s bargain wouldn’t have accomplished that. To bow before the Enemy and worship him would have been to re-enact the primal error, to put himself under the Enemy’s power; he might have received authority over the whole world in return, but it would only have been as the Devil’s viceroy. To set the world free, Jesus had to remain free himself. Satan’s offer was inherently deceitful, even fraudulent, because the very act of accepting it would have changed it.
No, we’ll never know all of Scripture by heart as Jesus did, but we can still wield it effectively against the Enemy if we remember the calling with which we have been called and the mission which has been entrusted to us. If we keep re-centering ourselves on the gospel of Jesus Christ and looking to him who has called us, who is leading us in mission in this lost and broken world so loved by God, this will keep our eyes open to see through the Devil’s false promises and fraudulent gifts; and there is no better way to do this than to gather around the table of the Lord, for this reminds our hearts how he saved us.
Ilya Yefimovich Repin, The Temptation of Christ, 1898.