FINDINGS VII By Harry T. Cook
 
Lent I - C - February 14, 2016 
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13 
 
       
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
2/8/16


"Months in due succession, days of lengthening light . . ."* Even though that text appears in a hymn associated with Easter, it is a reference to the season that, with Ash Wednesday, will have commenced two days from this posting. "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 VII will be to make biblical texts accessible to unbelievers, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists -- should they care to know -- about what believers are thinking.

Luke was, it is assumed, 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" and "the wild beasts." Matthew and Luke add three particular "temptations" (from the Greek verb
πειραζω (to test or prove).
 
The tester for Matthew and Luke is "the devil'" (
διαβολος) and for Mark σατανα. Διαβολος literally means one who throws (βαλλω) something across (dia, as in diagonally) one's path. Σατανα is a stab at spelling or pronouncing a Semitic root "stn," which suggests an adversarial role.
 
Matthew and Luke chose
διαβολος 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
διαβολος "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 made to be, each one, 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 put 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 the tempter 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
διαβολος 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 CE 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
διαβολος as evil -- evil in the sense that διαβολος 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
διαβολος, having finished the current mission (literally, "completed every test") put distance between himself and Jesus "until an opportune time."
 
Luke uses
διαβολος four times in the narrative at hand and once more at 8:12 and then switches σατανα to 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 odd trajectory of the RCL.
 
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.
 
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 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?"

Διαβολος 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.
 
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 and 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.

At any rate, that is the evangelists' story.   

*
Venantius Honorius Fortunatus (540?-600? C.E)
     

Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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