March 5, 2006
(First Sunday in Lent)

The First Temptation of Christ

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Genesis 9:8-17  •  1 Peter 3:18-22  •  Mark 1:9-13  •  Psalm 25 or 25:3-9
(From The Lectionary Page)

My best friend and I were on the phone last week trading "Can You Believe It” stories. She’s the rector of a downtown church in a Chicago suburb and her church, like the Cathedral here, gets its share of street people stopping by looking for help. Some are the anawim, the voiceless ones whose lives are chronically chaotic. If you help them on Monday, you will have helped them for the day, but if you do help them on Monday, you can count on them being back on Tuesday for more help. More colorful are the scam artists – the ones who, if they were to put their acting talents to legitimate work, could probably make a pretty good living in the theatre. Either way, my friend and I agreed, the encounters leave us feeling unsettled. The people generally are not threatening, but they represent different threads of the tattered cloth that our society – any society – prefers to tuck away in the back of some dark closet. Substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness, illiteracy, generations of poverty and dysfunction are just some of the problems represented, to say nothing of the economic and political roadblocks that make these problems even more intractable.

Well, you can imagine how that conversation progressed – a veritable litany of what’s wrong and why so many efforts at fixing don’t work. In very short order, we were both sounding like Squidward, the cynical character on SpongeBob Squarepants who sighs and says, "Why do I even bother?"

And it was long ‘bout that time that the Prince of Darkness turned that conversation into a conference call.

Okay, yes, I'm speaking metaphorically. We Anglicans don't generally think of Satan as an incarnate being. Actually, popular culture gives us more images of Satan than the Scriptures do. However, we heard one such reference in our gospel passage this morning: the brief account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness immediately following his baptism. Unlike Matthew and Luke, who give us details of the temptation itself, Mark tells us only that Jesus was tempted by Satan. Actually, the Greek verb can also be translated as "tested" by Satan. Which, in many ways, makes more sense. Satan is portrayed in most of the Hebrew Bible not as the embodiment of evil but rather an adversary, or better, a prosecuting attorney – one who tests you by challenging your testimony. Jesus has just been baptized in the River Jordan. God has proclaimed that he is the beloved Son with whom God is well pleased. And then immediately the Spirit of God shoves Jesus into the wilderness. Will the testimony – literally, the truth of God – embedded in the person of Jesus withstand the testing amid wild beasts and angels? Mark doesn't come out and say so as Matthew and Luke do, but we do know that Jesus emerges from the wilderness 40 days later and begins his ministry from the integrity of God's testimony.

We don't always fare nearly as well in our own moments of testing. On the phone last week, my buddy and I were well down the road of cynicism. Our faith commends the sacredness of all creation to us and assures us of God’s eternal covenant with us, and yet how easily tempted we are simply to throw up our hands and turn away. When faced with the magnitude of problems manifest in any urban community, or for that matter, in any community anywhere on earth, how tempting it is for people of good will to give in to the wild beasts of cynicism, denial, rationalization and despair.

That's our testing. We miss it, because we don’t think of our comfortable lives as the wilderness. We think that temptation is all about an exercise of willpower, not eating the brownie that calls to us at 8:00 at night. We think that it’s all about standing strong against illicit desire in whatever form it might take. We think it’s about controlling our appetites, not doing the bad thing that beckons. We miss the point. Our post-baptismal testing comes in each opportunity to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ. It comes each time we are called to seek Christ in all people. It comes each time the opportunity presents itself to strive for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being. Our testing comes each time we are called by the world to engage the gifts we have been given in baptism. At the risk of lapsing into a sort of heretical dualism, let me ask you to consider who – or better, what – derives benefit from our cynicism, denial, rationalization, fear, and despair? The Commonwealth of God? Not so much.

The Spirit of God drove Jesus into the wilderness immediately following his baptism. There, the testimony of God, the truth of God, the proclamation that he was God's beloved son, was tested. His was a post-baptismal testing, and we know something of that because we encounter it too, pretty much every day. We, too, are God's beloved children and in our baptismal covenant we draw on the strength of that relationship to empower us to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world. We don't always do real well. Lord knows, I didn't last week.

Which is why I draw a measure of comfort from our gospel passage for today. That post-baptismal time of testing is not something that we endure apart from God. God Incarnate did his own hard time in the wilderness. And if Mark doesn't given me the details of how Jesus emerged victorious, well, that's okay. It's enough to know that there's no place on earth where God is not present, no thing that ultimately can defeat the love of God.