1^st Sunday in Lent at Epiphany on March 1, 2009

Mark 1:12 At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, ¹³ and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him. ¹⁴ After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ¹⁵ "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!"

Into the desert of temptation

Little Johnny was told not to go swimming in a nearby pond. He came home with wet hair and told his mother he had fallen into the water. “Then why aren’t your clothes wet too?” she asked. “Well,” he replied, “I had a hunch I might fall in so I took off my clothes and hung them on a limb.”

Little Johnny knew he would be tempted to “fall” into the pond. Have you ever been tempted? Of course you have. You can admit it. Temptations come big and small. Cheat on the income tax. Cheat in the exam. Crib the term paper. Lie about the business deal. Cheat on a spouse. Fudge the value of the property. Shave some time at work. Anyone who thinks he is above temptation is a fool scheduled for a fall.

Temptation is entertaining the possibility, turning it over in the mind. Weighing the consequences, doing the balance sheet. Temptation is to have forbidden fruit set in front of you on a nice piece of china by soft candelight. Sweet and seductive. Go ahead, take a bite. The old Adam, the “inner brat” pushing the boundaries, testing the limits. Walk right up to the line. Nudge it, tickle it with our toe. What will happen if I step across?

Temptation is a rubber worm dangled in front of a large mouth bass with a big hook behind it. Go for it, and you’re dead. Adam and Eve went for it. We go for it too. We’re natural born suckers for the Lie. We can’t resist it. Oscar Wilde said it best: “I can resist anything except temptation.” He lived that way. At least he told the truth.

Jesus was tempted. Mark gives the temptation of Jesus only a few short sentences in his Gospel. It goes by so quickly you almost miss it. Still dripping wet from His baptism in the Jordan, Jesus is cast into the wilderness. The same Spirit who descended on Jesus like a gentle dove, drove Him into the wilderness – literally “cast Him out.” What Jesus did to the unclean spirits, the Holy Spirit does to Jesus – casts Him out, headlong into the inhospitable wilderness to arm wrestle with the devil.

Just as Israel emerged from the parted water of the Red Sea to a forty year wilderness journey to the Promised Land, so Jesus – Israel reduced to One – begins His journey to the cross. Forty. The number of days the rain fell in the Flood. The number of years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness. The number of days Elijah trekked through the wilderness to return to Mt. Horeb. Jesus – God’s Israel, His Servant, His Son.

Matthew and Luke fill in the details. Jesus was hungry. He hadn’t eaten for forty days. He was having His Lent. Don’t you try that at home in your Lent. This is uniquely for Jesus to do. He was tempted by Satan. Tempted by miracle: Turn these stones into bread. Tempted to test the Word: Throw yourself off the temple. Tempted by power: It’s all yours, Jesus; just bow down and worship me. Jesus was tempted by the full blast of human temptation – appetite, pleasure, power. All our human buttons pushed at once. All the things that drive us to do the evil that we do. You might say that Jesus’ temptation was concentrated and focused, the way a magnifying glass concentrates and focuses the rays of the sun. Tempted in every way we are tempted, except for one thing – Jesus did not sin.

Jesus was tempted to the very core of His humanity. As God, He couldn’t be tempted. But He set aside that divine privilege. He put that power up on the shelf in the garage. This is the God/Man against the devil. The Promised Seed and the Serpent’s Seed, a wrestling match promised back in Genesis. (Gen 3:15) The Head Crusher vs. the Heal Bruiser. Cage match. One on one. No referee.

Satan tempted Jesus not to be what His baptism said He was: the Christ, the Son of God. “If you are the Son of God ... You are, aren’t you, Jesus?” So sly, so subtle. A snake in the garden. “Did God really say it? How can you be the Christ if you are rejected and crucified? Is that any way to start a successful religion? Is that any way to reform the masses? Is that any way to solve the problems of this world? Be crucified? That’s not what the world is looking for. They want miracle, they want invincible power, they want celebrity. They don’t call it “American Idol” for nothing! Give them what they want, Jesus. And maybe then you can give them what you want.”

Ever wonder why Jesus had to be tempted this way? Why go through forty days of hunger, isolation and temptation? Why even bother with the devil, that old liar? It goes back to the Garden of Eden and the threat that was a promise: “I will put enmity between you (the devil) and the woman, between your seed and hers.” There’s going to be war. One on one. In the wilderness. What the devil did to humanity would be undone by God fleshed in humanity. Where the devil’s lie was successful in getting Eve and then Adam to disobey, he would fail with the second Adam.

Jesus was the second Adam to replace the first Adam. Jesus was also the ram of sacrifice to replace Isaac on the altar. God’s Lamb walks alone in the wilderness – your Substitute – hungry with your hunger, thirsty with your thirst, tempted in weakness to go another way than the cross, to seek another joy than your salvation, to refuse the shame and the pain in favor of power and glamour and cross-less, painless, feel good, be happy religion. But then He would not have been the Lamb of sacrifice. He would not have been tempted as we are. He would not have laid down His life to save you. And you would be like Isaac without a ram, with the law of God dangling over you like a knife.

Trials and temptations will come your way. That is certain. You can expect them. You are baptized, after all. Look at all the trouble Jesus’ baptism caused Him. To be baptized is to live as marked men and women. You bear Jesus’ mark, and the devil hates that. So does the unbelieving world. The cross is always there for the baptized. Temptation is always there for the Christian who still has the Old Adam living inside.

There was a pastor’s wife who, along with her husband, decided that they really had to save more and spend less. Well, she went shopping and found the dress of her dreams. It cost way too much, but she had to have it. When she showed it to her husband, he exclaimed, “After all we said about spending less money, how could you?” She replied, “The devil made me do it.” The exasperated pastor asked, ““Didn’t you tell him ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’?” “I certainly did,” she replied, “but he said ‘It looks really great from the back!’”

She saw it was pleasing to the eye, just as Eve had seen the fruit of the tree glistening in the garden. Temptations appeal to the senses – sights, sounds, smells, feelings. Like Eve, we like to rationalize temptation. If it feels so right, how can it be wrong? Follow your heart, Hollywood tells us. Christ tells you, follow God’s Word.

Eve bit on the lure and she was hooked. She gave some to her husband and he ate it without a peep of protest. A partnership was forged against God. We say, “Misery loves company,” but the truth is, “Sin wants a partner.” It just takes one and many follow.

And the rest, as they say, is history – a history into which you and I were born and live. We do the exact same thing every day. Sometimes we barely notice the temptation, the split second interval between the desire and the sin. The first bite is always the toughest, always the most anguished and guilty. After that it’s easy.

Easy, that is, until sin grows up and gives birth to death. And then you discover that it wasn’t a “lifestyle” after all, it’s a death style. But it’s already too late. We’re born into it, and can’t get ourselves out of it, no matter how many twelve-step groups we go to. There simply is no twelve stepping your way out of death.

That’s why Jesus is cast out into the wilderness for forty days. Hungry, exposed, vulnerable. Living on nothing but bare trust in the Word of God. He must do what we can’t and won’t do. Resist temptation at its source. As God in the flesh, He takes our humanity back into the wilderness. Not the Garden, you notice. There’s no going back to that.

He’s the new head of humanity, the second Adam. Where Adam failed, He will triumph. Where Adam fell, He will conquer. Where the lamb died, this Lamb will live again. Jesus was the substitute on Mt Moriah, in the desert, on the hill of death and in the grave of resurrection.

 “Lead us not into temptation,” Jesus taught His disciples to pray. God doesn’t tempt anyone. That’s the devil’s doing. He does test, as He did with Abraham. And He’s promised never to test you beyond what you are able to bear. But when you are tempted He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. (1 Cor 10:13) That’s the “secret” Paul wrote about, “I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.” (Phil 4:13) In our temptations, we are never alone. We have the One with us who was tempted and did not sin.

The baptized life is not an easy life. Christians are granted no special immunities from disease, no exemptions from suffering, no special passes that allow us to go around the wilderness. You can only go through it, you can’t go around it. The season of Lent symbolizes that for us. Forty days of sober, somber preparation – a fast before the feast of Easter.

The reality is that our wilderness, the sufferings and temptations are real. Were it not for Jesus, we wouldn’t make it. But there is a promise stretched out over you like an umbrella protecting you from the downpour of despair and depression: “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” You do not walk in this wilderness alone. God does not leave you alone to wrestle with the devil, the world, and your own sinful self. If God is for you, who can be against you? If God gave His Son for you, if that’s what you are worth to God, do you think He would possibly abandon you in your time of need? If Christ died for your sins, who can bring any charges against you? If God has justified you in Jesus, who can condemn you?

Do you realize what that means? You walk in this world justified by God, forgiven, restored, redeemed by the blood of Jesus. The Son of God, the crucified and risen Lord, is at the right of the Father interceding for you. “Father, forgive them,” showing His wounded hands and side. There is literally nothing in this world that can drive a wedge between you and God. Nothing. Not trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword, global warming, Islamic terrorists, tornadoes, blizzards, flooding, poor reffing, cancer, stray bullets, clogged arteries, killer viruses, death or holes in the ozone layer. Not angels, demons, the present, the future, powers, nothing in the heights or the depths. Not even the worst of your sins can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Not when your sins have been washed away in Baptism. Not when your sins have been forgiven by the word of Jesus. Not when you have received the broken Body and the shed Blood of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Not when you have Jesus on your side, the One who resisted the devil for you with a word.

We really do face death all day long, as Paul says. We’d rather not admit. We’d rather live in denial of it. Yet Paul says in all these things - things that signal death, things that the world fears and maybe you do too – in all these things we “hyper-conquer,” we conquer above and beyond conquering, through Jesus who loved us to death and who conquered sin on the cross, death in the grave and devil in the wilderness.

The Lord will provide, as faithful Abraham once said. And He has in Jesus, the sacrificial lamb. And He will provide, through Word and Water and Supper as you make your wilderness way through this Lenten life and on to endless Easter. Amen.