FINDINGS II
Lent
I - C - February 21, 2010
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke
4:1-13
 By Harry T. Cook
2/15/10
RUBRIC
"Months in due succession, days of lengthening light . . ."/1 Even though that text appears
in a hymn associated with Easter, it is a reference to the season that, with
Ash Wednesday, has just commenced. "Lent" is a derivation of "lengthening" from
the Old English "lencten." Lent's theological denouement is Passiontide and
Easter with all the mythology that has overlaid the Jesus movement almost from
its beginnings. Since there is no end to commentary written with orthodox
believers and practitioners in mind, our task for the next six editions of FINDINGS
II will be to make biblical texts accessible to unbelievers, atheists,
agnostics and secular humanists.
/1 Venantius Honorius Fortunatus (540?-600? C.E)
WORKSHOP
Luke was, of course, dependent upon Mark and then Matthew
for the narrative known as "the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness." Either
that or the text was so well-known that each evangelist was in singular receipt
of it. Mark's version is typically brief and spare (Mark 1: 12-13) with none of
the drama Matthew provides and which Luke altered some. Missing from Matthew
and Luke are Mark's characteristic "immediately" (euthus) and "the wild beasts."
Matthew and Luke add three particular "temptations" (from the Greek verb
"peirazō" (to test or prove).
The tester for Matthew and Luke is "the devil'" (diabolos)
and for Mark "satan." "Diabolos" literally means one who throws (balos)
something across (dia, as in diagonally) one's path. "Satan" is a stab at
spelling or pronouncing a Semitic root "stn," which suggests an adversarial
role./2
Matthew and Luke chose "diabolos" as the name of the tester
or agency of the testing, suggesting perhaps that the opportunities for
self-aggrandizement (stones into bread), exploitation of power (throwing
oneself down from a pinnacle) and, for a price, the acquisition of temporal
power (the worship of power itself) were stumbling blocks thrown across Jesus'
path in an effort to deter him. And while we will be rationalizing those
images, no doubt the evangelists took for granted the presence of cunning and
malign powers to which they did not hesitate to impute personal
characteristics.
Luke's order of the testing is different from Matthew's: Matthew
has the stones into bread first, then flinging from the Temple pinnacle and the
vision of power from the mountain. Luke puts the vision of power first and the
pinnacle scene second. Luke actually omits mention of a mountain, merely saying
that diabolos "took Jesus up," i.e., turned his horizontal path into a vertical
one. Did Luke omit "mountain" because his use of the word in 9:28 connotes a
place of quiet contemplation, or because it was silly to suggest that no spot
however high could be high enough for the human eye to see the whole of things,
"all the kingdoms of the world?"
When one considers the many more and well-known testings to
which flesh is subject, one wonders why the evangelists do not mention an
obvious one: sexual temptation. Maybe because even to mention it would have
threatened their nascent Christology.
Jesus' responses to his testings are all scriptural: "One
does not live by bread alone" (Deuteronomy 8:3); "Worship the Lord your God and
serve him only" (Deuteronomy 6:13) and "Do not but the Lord your God to the
test" (Deuteronomy 6:16). This latter quotation says, in effect, that human
beings are subjected to testing or proving, but should not in turn attempt thus
to subject the biblical deity. The Gospel of John includes no such testing or
proving narrative in keeping with the Christology of its prologue (1:1-18)
which proclaims that the one who was "was in the beginning with God," while
human, was never not divine.
In both Matthew and Luke diabolos quotes scripture back to
Jesus: Psalm 91:11-12 ("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.") Such a characterization of diabolos suggests that in both
evangelists' minds the diabolic power was intimately knowledgeable and quite
possibly an inner voice representing a darker side of human nature.
Though classic Hebraism was not dualistic, by the late First
Century C.E. the whole area known to the authors and editors of both Matthew
and Luke was fully Hellenized and therefore acquainted with Platonic dualism.
If Luke did not go so far as to locate an evil diametrically opposed to good in
Jesus, Luke certainly at the least saw Jesus as good arrayed against diabolos
as evil -- evil in the sense that diabolos was imagined as behaving true to
form, i.e., deterring, detouring
and confusing.
Mark and Matthew end the testing narrative by saying that
angels (delegated messengers) ministered to Jesus. Luke merely hits the pause
button, saying that diabolos, having finished the current mission (literally,
"completed every test") put distance between himself and Jesus "until an
opportune time."
Luke uses "diabolos" four times in the narrative at hand and
once more at 8:12 and then switches to "satan" for five entries (10:18, 11:18,
13:16, 22:3) and two more in Acts (5:3 and 26:18).
Jesus, foretold in Luke chapter 1, born in 2, baptized in 3
and tested in 4 is now ready to begin his public career, which he does among
his hometown folk in their Nazarene synagogue -- stories we have heard earlier
in this Year C, thanks to the trajectory of the RCL.
FOOTNOTE: The
two most apt connections between the gospel lection and the rest of the Lent
I-C proper occur in the psalter (91:1-2, 9-16), a portion of which is quoted in
the gospel; and in the epistle reading from Romans 10, being Paul's exhortation
to confess with lips and believe in heart in keeping with the Deuteronomist's
counsel: "Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him," i.e., foreswearing
deterrence and detour by diabolos.
/2
see Pagels, Elaine, The Origin
of Satan, 1996, Vintage, p. 39
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
No matter what how much mythology there is in the gospels,
no matter the unnecessarily complex creedal formulae laid down by centuries of
theologians like so many busy bees in a hive, the personage or character we
refer to as "Jesus" was human. He was a man. He could have been a woman, but
all sources say he was a man. Either way, as a human being he would have been
and surely was subject to all that makes one human, which is to say vulnerable.
Human beings by nature are vulnerable: vulnerable to
exertions of pride and prejudice, to overreaching, to fits of anger, to being
irrational at exactly the moments quiet reason would be most desirable.
Indeed, human beings are wont to see pearls of what they
think are of great price and just as wont to climb over anything and anyone in
their headlong rush to obtain them. Sometimes those pearls are fake and of very
little price, sometimes things not good for those who pursue them.
That's a good time for what Luke calls "the devil" to throw
that cross-body block (dia-bolos ) on the pursuer and make him stop. And if he
is stopped for long enough, he may have thrust upon him that all-important moment
in which to ask, "Why am I doing this?"
The diabolos may not be a dead stop but a detour. Maybe what
one seeks is a fine thing, but the way he goes about obtaining it is not a good
way. Then the path is diverted to a better, maybe safer way.
The great human "sin" - if sin is a word we must use - may
be not thinking before we act, or not thinking hard enough, of not counting the
cost, and figuring out if the promise is worth the cost.
If the gospels are taken at face value, they portray the
adult Jesus in the last year or two or three of his life (depending on which
gospel account is credited) embarked on a path, the end of which could only be
just about what he got out of it: arrest, trial, conviction and execution.
Maybe the classic temptation-of-Jesus-in-the-wilderness
story heard every year on the First Sunday in Lent was an interior experience.
Maybe Jesus made a retreat all by himself, and went out among the owls
scorpions to ask if it was hunger for recognition he sought ("Make this stone
into a loaf of bread"), to ask if it was power he sought ("See these great
kingdoms? Give all your energies and loyalty to power, and you can have them"),
and to ask himself if he really wanted to prove his prowess in a carnival-like
fashion ("Throw yourself off the pinnacle of the Temple and hope for the best").
The answers he is depicted as coming up with were the
product of rather tortured but rational consideration. That which was thrown
across his path did not, in the end, keep him from taking it. What was thrown
across his path helped him understand what would be the cost of taking it. He
would say what he had to say and do what he had to do on the way down the path
he set before himself, as best as he could predict its route and its end point.
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