Testing and Temptation

Luke 4: 1 - 13 (February 21, 2010)

1) The Text

4Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, 2where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. 3The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” 4Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” 5Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” 8Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” 9Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ 11and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” 12Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” 13When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

2) The Context

From 2:41 to 4:30, Luke records six events which herald the beginning of the Messiah's mission. The events testify, witness to, Jesus' kingship. Today’s passage, 4:1-13, is the fifth of these testimonies - the witness of the temptation. In the temptation story there are three tests: (1) Stone into bread. Will God supply Messiah's needs as he seeks to bring in the kingdom? (2) Authority over the world. Will the way of suffering achieve results? (3) Signs and wonders. Surely self-glory will achieve a better response and so hasten the coming kingdom?

Luke has told us of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, of “a voice ... from heaven” (3:22) saying “You are my Son ...”. On that occasion “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form”, but is this what we today, would consider bodily? Ancient people conceived of several levels of spirit worlds with occasional contact between them and earth.

Perhaps Jesus transcends between earth and a spirit world in the story of his testing by the devil. During his time there (“forty days”, v. 2, meaning a significant period of time), the Holy Spirit sustains him in his travails; human as he is, Jesus is totally dependent on the Spirit being with him, for “he ate nothing”. In this dependence, Jesus is humanly helpless; he humbles himself before the Father.

The devil speaks, but is this like “a voice from heaven” speaking? The devil recognizes him as “Son of God” (vv. 3, 9), the one who fulfils God’s plan in creation and, given Luke’s genealogy in 3:23-28, in Israel’s history. Jesus answers the devil’s questions with quotations from the Law, i.e. Deuteronomy, then considered to be the words of Moses.

3) Interpretation

There are many layers of meaning to this story. Historically we know that it was not uncommon for leaders and would-be leaders of change to make their way to the wilderness. The hopes for liberation lived from the stories of liberation, especially the story of the exodus from Egypt, but also the return from exile. Revolutionaries gathered their troops in the wilderness. Pious groups, like the Essenes, made their interim settlements there, waiting for the great climax. Individual figures like John the Baptist made the wilderness their starting point.

Wilderness was the wild place, the waiting place, the place of preparation. It also connected then, as it does now, to very basic spirituality: a place to grapple with God, a place to learn dependence on nature and its provisions, a place of extremes or contrasts, of wild beasts and desert. It is the Lenten space par excellence. So it was natural that people expected Jesus headed for wilderness and very likely that he did. He went to John there and was baptized.

As with the birth stories, so with the testing, there are two versions. Both are situated in the wilderness. Mark’s brief account has Jesus tested for 40 days and nights and envisages a struggle between Jesus and Satan in which Jesus emerges victorious and ready to embark on a successful ministry of baptizing people with the Spirit through exorcism and healings.

Q’s version, drawn on by Luke and Matthew, has more elaborate allusions to Israel in the wilderness. Jesus is faithful and obedient in contrast to Israel’s unfaithfulness in the wilderness, a typology which Matthew has already been developing in the birth narratives. Here is the true ‘son’. The links with Israel in the wilderness are certainly also there in Luke, but Luke has not concentrated on the Israel typology in the same way as Matthew. His order is different: the climax is not the ascent of the mountain, but the pinnacle of the temple. Temple miracles were often a feature of future expectation along with times in the wilderness. It is true that for Luke Jerusalem is central, but the temple miracle is likely to have been also the original climax of the story and would make good sense in the light of Jewish hopes.

Many of the details of the story only make sense in the light of such hopes. In fact the story then emerges as a subtle way of defining just what Jesus was and what he was not. Yes, he is the liberator, but to say that or think that then raised a host of difficulties. Just what kind of liberator was he? It almost makes little difference whether we imagine ourselves listening in on early Jewish Christianity at this point or listening to Jesus’ own thoughts on retreat in the Judean wilderness. The central question was: who am I? who is he? And for us: who are we?

He is not primarily a wonder worker - as many aspirants to divine agency sought (and seek) to be, though no one wanted to deny his miracles. The story is bigger than ‘what happened’. It is a theological story about him, about them and about us. It is larger than life. It invites us to address spiritual options to engagement in God’s hope for the world: why we go to the wilderness and why we don’t stay there.

4) Thought Exercise

How do you depend on God during times of testing and temptation?

How can you find time and space to “head to the wilderness”? What will you do when you get there?