Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
As modern, North Americans Christians, we live in a culture that has often lost sight of the holy and the sacred. God’s name and the name of Jesus are tossed around like any other word of exclamation. The church is often seen as a bunch of restrictionist thinkers who aren’t open to new ideas and stand in the way of personal freedom and choice. God and His Word is dismissed as just one interpretation of sacred truths. Theology as God’s plan of salvation has been replaced with therapeutic moralistic deism – where God is basically a feel-good deliverer of attaboys who can be called by whatever name you want him (or her) to be.
The flip side is also true, our culture has also lost sight of what is unholy and sinful. Things are no longer spoken of as being against the will of God, as sins, as being evil and wicked. Instead, we hear of mistakes, accidents, and choices which are all judged over and against the sliding spectrum of conventional wisdom instead of the unchanging and unshifting Word of God.
As a result, we no longer hear of temptation as being anything serious. Just consider how the word is used in our culture and society. Unless you are in the Lord’s house, “temptation” has lost the connection with sins and dangerous, damning choices. Instead, it seems more like a fun, flirty choice: “I’m tempted to try a piece of that chocolate cake with fudge icing and caramel sauce…” “I don’t really need a new cell phone, but that new one is just so tempting…” “The company made me an offer for a new position and I’m tempted to say yes…” And, it’s not that using the word in these contexts is bad, necessarily, but because that’s all we hear in our daily lives, we become inoculated against what it really means and the significance of temptation.
So, when we face real temptation, temptation by the world in which we live, temptation by our own sinful nature, or even by satan himself, we are caught with our defenses lowered. For example, we are so inundated with pictures of scantily clad underwear models that our minds wander into lustful thoughts and we hardly slow down. A few years ago, I saw a flyer for a woman’s underwear company that was marketing directly to teenagers with a product line called “the date collection,” the assumption being – apparently – that her date will be seeing it, sooner or later. We are bombarded with advertisements for the newest tech and when we see friends who have those devices while ours are adequate but old, and we become covetous, trying to figure out how to get one ourselves. Conventional wisdom says everyone is hooking up these days and living together without marriage, so what’s the big deal?
So when we hear this morning’s readings from Genesis and Matthew, the temptation of Adam and Eve, and the temptation of Jesus, it is tempting – please pardon my use of the word in this manner – to misunderstand and misapply these readings for ourselves. I suppose we would be tempted to read the narrative of Adam and Eve and dismiss it as they should have known better. After all, they had a perfect, intimate relationship with God, walking and talking with Him in the cool of the day. Shame on her and him for listening to that cunning and crafty serpent who misled them. It is tempting for us to sit back in our modern, sophisticated 21st century milieu and think we would have know better. Likewise, it would be tempting for us to misunderstand Jesus’ temptation at the hands of the devil, and either think it was a set-up – that the devil coulnd’t possibly tempt Jesus – or that it’s nothing more than a how-to-defeat-the-devil demonstration, that if you just have enough Bible verses in your hip pocket, so to speak, you can beat up the devil, too.
Let the narrative of Adam and Eve show you the truth of the dire consequences of being tempted to go against the will and Word of God. Let Adam and Eve tell you want it is to lose the perfect relationship with God. Let Adam and Eve speak to you about what it is to stand and attempt to do battle with the devil, daring to go one-on-one against the father of lies. Let Adam and Eve tell you the sheer sorrow of knowing that because of their moment of weakness, all of creation ever since that forbidden moment has had to suffer. Let Adam and Eve tell you what it is to have no need to know what “evil” is, only to find out first-hand; to have only joy in hearing the Lord’s drawing near, and to suddenly be afraid.
Let Adam and Eve tell you about what it was to only know their bodies as beautiful, and to suddenly be ashamed of their nakedness; let them tell you about seeing God’s compassion for them – even after their sinful weakness - demonstrated by clothing them and protecting them from the weather that, suddenly, was going to no longer be friendly; let Adam and Eve tell you what it was to watch God slaughter animals that they had named, to hear their cry of death, and then be wrapped with their skin, the animal’s skin constantly touching their skin, reminding them of what they had done. Ask them what it was to watch a life taken so that they might survive; let Adam and Eve tell you what it is to watch death for the first time. Suddenly, temptation becomes very real; giving into temptation is no longer blasé; the burden of surrendering to satan’s tempting lie is grasped; and the reality of the wages of sin is death is clearly understood.
Temptation is very real, with very real consequences.
When Jesus stands in the wilderness, He does so as a second Adam, fully susceptible to the devil’s temptations. And, don’t be misled by the seeming simplicity of these temptations, either. This is about more than food, or a flying leap, or bowing the knee. Names mean things; devil is Greek and satan is Hebrew but both mean “accuser” – think of the prosecutorial district attorney, and you have the idea. Put this temptation in context: it happens immediately after Jesus baptism, where the Father’s voice spoke over Him declaring Jesus to be His beloved Son. Satan is accusing the Father of not being very Fatherly. The evidence he offers is the Father seemingly leaving His Son to starve to death, leaving Him alone with the devil, letting Him fend for Himself. The charge: He’s not Fathering you at all, Jesus. Take matters into your own hands. Feed yourself; oh, you trust the Father to feed you? Let’s see that trust - demonstrate it by jumping off the top of the temple. Oh, and your Father’s plan of glorifying you at the cross? How about the glory of the world instead…so much less painful, so easy to do. Do you really trust your Father with your life at the cross, Jesus?
Each temptation, Jesus, as the Son of Man, turns to the same Word of God that you and I have. This is not to model for us how we are to do battle, but to stand in our place. Fully God, yes; but more than that, also fully man Jesus faces the Devil’s temptations without using His Divine glory and power. He uses the same gift you and I have: the Word of God and His baptism.
Immediately prior to His temptation, Jesus is baptized. As water drips off of Him, the Spirit descends in the form of a dove and the voice of the Father is heard: this is My beloved Son. In this baptism, done to fulfill all righteousness, His holiness is washed into Baptismal water and the sins of the world are poured onto Him. But, so that He can be a high priest to understands our weaknesses of the flesh, He is also truly tempted in His human flesh.
Even though Jesus perfectly resists and defeats satan’s temptations, Jesus must pay the consequences of our failure to resist, our submission to that which allures us. There must be a cross. There must be suffering and death. There must be blood-payment. Someone – a Lamb, a perfect, holy, spotless Lamb, the very Lamb of God - must die. His death cry, “It is finished!” rattled from his throat. The sacrifice was complete.
So, when you fall into temptation and you confess that which tempted and lured you into sinful thoughts, words, and actions, you have a Savior who stands in your stead, who perfectly resisted those very same temptations for you, who faced Satan’s lies that your sinful status might somehow disqualify you from sonship. That Savior stands as your advocate before the Father. Where the devil is the accusatory prosecutor against you, arguing your sins deserve to spend eternity with him in hell, Christ – the living, breathing, resurrected and holy Savior stands as your defense, your advocate, and places Himself in the mercy seat before the Father where His blood was shed for you. He takes you and wraps you, not in His skin, but in His holiness and covers you so fully and so completely via your Baptism that all the Father can see is innocence. Your sins, your surrender to the temptations of this world, your own flesh, and the accuser, are all covered. You, through the merits of your brother and your Savior, who stood in your place, are declared holy, sinless, and righteous.
There’s a word for that. It’s called “Justified.” It is a legal declaration that you are innocent of all charges. In theological language, it means God sees you just-as-if-you-never sinned.
This changes our perspective. We no longer see temptation as something of a punchline. It’s a serious luring of the child of God into sin, something which we seek to avoid, something we try to flee from – averting eyes, ears, and all our senses from those things that would lure us away from God in His grace. We resist, by the power of the Holy Spirit, given us in our Baptism. Yet, we do so knowing that when we fall, when we fail, when we do surrender into satan’s lies, we do so still as children of God. And, when the father of lies tries to condemn us, “if you are a child of God, you wouldn’t have done that,” you respond in faith, “Because I am a child of God, I am sorry for what I have done and I trust as God’s child, for the sake of Christ, even this is forgiven.”
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