Luke 4:1-13
March 6, 2022
For Superman it was kryptonite.
Superman was impervious to anything that might take out you or me. Bullets
bounced off his chest. His strength was so great he could stop speeding trains.
He could fly higher than planes. He only needed a telephone booth to make the
quick change into his hero’s tights. He even made people believe that simply
putting on glasses and ordinary clothes was an adequate disguise. Certainly, there
was no way anyone could place him as Superman when he was dressed as mild-mannered
Clark Kent.
But
there was one thing, and one thing only had the power to take out Superman –
kryptonite. Even a small amount of the matter and minerals from his home planet
could render him weak and powerless. His superhero, superhuman, superpowers
were unbeatable; he was indestructible and invincible. Unless … a small piece
of kryptonite got too close. Then he was as mortal and as weak as any of us.
For Superman it was kryptonite. That was his vulnerability. Kryptonite made him
vulnerable and human.
If we ever forget that Jesus was
human, we only have to look to this passage from the gospel to see that Jesus
was as vulnerable to hunger as any of us. No matter what year we are following
in the lectionary cycle, no matter what the gospel, we always begin the first
Sunday of Lent with the telling of Jesus’ time in the wilderness. After all,
Lent is patterned after that time. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness,
fasting, praying, and being tempted by the devil. Luke’s gospel tells us that
after those 40 days of no food, Jesus was hungry. Of course, he was! Who
wouldn’t be?! That’s a long time to go without food. He was as famished and
weak and hungry as any one of us humans would be. The devil, being the great
opportunist that he was, saw Jesus’ hunger as his chance. Although we read that
the devil tempted Jesus during the 40 days in the wilderness, we don’t know
what those temptations were. But at the end of Jesus’ time in the wilderness,
when he was starving, Luke reveals three specific temptations.
First the devil told Jesus that if
he was really the Son of God, then he should command a stone to become a loaf
of bread. Jesus answered the devil’s temptation with scripture.
“It
is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”
Second, the devil led Jesus up –
where? The sky, the heavens, wherever it was, it was someplace high enough that
Jesus could see all the kingdoms of the world. The devil informed Jesus that
he, the devil, had been given all authority over these kingdoms. He can give
that authority and power to anyone he wishes. He would give it all to Jesus on
one condition, “worship me.” Jesus didn’t buy it and again he responded with
words of scripture.
“It
is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”’
Lastly, the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem.
He placed Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple. Then the devil dared 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 protect you,’ and, ‘On their hands
they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”
The devil knew scripture too, and he
knew how to prooftext and manipulate it to say what he wanted it to say. But
Jesus still didn’t give in. He responded to scripture with yet more scripture.
“It
is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the text.’”
The devil knew he had lost this
round, so he left Jesus; not for good but to wait for another opportune time. When
the devil retreated, Jesus left as well. He left the wilderness and began his
public ministry in Galilee.
Jesus went into the wilderness “full
of the Holy Spirit.” Although he ate nothing and was famished, he still did not
give into temptation. The devil could not get the best of him. Whenever I read
any of the temptation accounts, my first thought is, “Well of course, Jesus
wasn’t tempted. He was Jesus. He was human just like us, but he did not sin.”
That is the accepted belief of our faith, isn’t it? Jesus was fully human just
like all of us, but he did not sin. He was Jesus, God’s Son. Sinning was just
not going to happen no matter how hungry he was. End of story.
Usually when I read Luke’s account,
I focus solely on the temptations themselves. I read the sentence, “he was
famished,” but it’s just a blip in the story. It’s easy to see hunger as a blip
when you’ve never faced true, debilitating, killing hunger, isn’t it?
But
it seems to me those three words – he was famished – are the point.
Jesus. Was. Famished.
He
went without food for 40 days and he was as hungry as anyone of us would have
been. If he was as hungry as the rest of us, it is a good chance that hunger had
the same effect on him that it has on us. When I get really hungry, not forty
days hungry, but really hungry, my head begins to hurt. I feel weak and
lightheaded, agitated, and shaky. If I don’t get to bite into some food soon, I
might just bite your head off. Jesus was famished.
But because he’s Jesus, I think we
tend to diminish his hunger and how it might have affected him. He was hungry
and he was fully human, but he was also fully divine. Well, what does that mean
exactly? What does that look like? When it comes to his temptation, I think we see
Jesus more like a superhero that has been exposed to the one thing that makes
him vulnerable. He is like Clark Kent opening his shirt to reveal the large S
underneath. Jesus is fully human, but when it comes to temptation there is a
shirt with a large D for divine underneath his robe.
As one commentator put it, Jesus’
divinity acted as a failsafe. If temptation went too far and he got too close
to the edge of sin, then divinity jumped in to save him. But if that’s true,
then what’s the point of his humanity? What’s the point of telling the story of
his being tempted, because in the end they would not have been real
temptations? It seems to me that temptation has to have the possibility of
snaring you in order to actually be temptation. It has to have teeth and a
bite. If Jesus wasn’t really tempted, if it were impossible for him to actually
give in, then this story is no more than a morality play. We watch to get an
example of how we should be, but we are actually human so we might fail. This
is nice of Jesus to show us this, but if he couldn’t actually give into
temptation, then he really isn’t like us.
But Jesus was like us. That is the
substance of the incarnation. Jesus was like us, fully human. And to be human
is to be hungry, vulnerable, tempted. He was human, just like us.
At the risk of ticking a lot of
folks off, let me say that one of the most powerful depictions of Jesus’
humanity that I have ever seen was in a movie that was so controversial, people
from all denominations worked to ban it from theaters. The move was The Last Temptation of Christ. I did not
see it when it came to theaters. I watched it when I was in seminary. The main
reason this movie was controversial was because it showed Jesus in a physical
relationship with Mary Magdalene, and even the idea of that is completely
taboo. I do not want to stir up a hornet’s nest here, and there were parts of
this movie that were strange and even a little boring. But here is the part of
the movie that made me think.
The
story was about Jesus and his ministry and his walk to the cross. It was while
he was on the cross that the last temptation occurred. Temptation came to him
in the form of a little child, haloed in beautiful light. The child told him
that he could get down from the cross. He didn’t have to stay there. So, Jesus gets
down. He gets down off the cross. He falls in love. He lives.
I realized that the true temptation
for Jesus was not lust, it was life. His last temptation was that he got to
experience what we experience as humans. He got to love just like us. He had
the chance to have a family and a home and the ordinary everyday realities we
take for granted. If we mean what we say that Jesus was fully human, then let’s
acknowledge that being human is messy. It is filled with temptation. It is
filled with wrong turns. As humans we have enormous capacity for love, and we
have an equally enormous capacity for evil. Examples of giving into the
temptation for power, for cruelty, for evil is writ large in our world today.
Jesus was fully human, so the devil’s temptations to make food where there was
no food, to have power, to have coercive authority must have been … tempting. Jesus
was fully human, so those temptations must have pulled at him as much as they
would have us.
But I think that what makes Jesus
different, what makes him able to resist temptation was not some superhuman
ability that we do not have. I think that what he had was full knowledge, full
understanding, full comprehension of love, God’s love, sacrificial love, agape
love. Jesus was fully human, as fully human as we are meant to be, as we are
created and called to be. He knew and lived and breathed Love. Jesus was not a
superhero savior. He didn’t have some secret ability that we don’t have access
to. He was filled with the Holy Spirit, he was filled with God, he was filled
with Love.
The good news, the great and
glorious news, is that we can be too. We can be as filled with love and life as
Jesus was. We were created out of Love, because of Love, for Love. Jesus was
fully human just like us. He was tempted just like us. He was weak and
vulnerable just like us. But Jesus knew completely how to love and he lived and
died trying to teach us to do the same. Siblings, during this season of Lent
and always, let us take seriously what it means to be human; let us take Love
with a capital L seriously. Let us love like Jesus did so that we can be fully
human as well.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Amen.”
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