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Lent 1A 2005 Matthew 5:1-11
Several years ago, a newspaper account of an automobile accident included the following:
Passersby carried the driver to a nearby service station. The crash victim then came to, and as he opened his eyes he panicked,
struggling mightily to break away from the circle of Good Samaritans and rubber-neckers who had gathered around him.
But a rescue team arrived, quickly subdued him, and took him to a hospital.
Asked later why he had made such a desperate attempt to get away from his rescuers, he explained that they had taken him
to a Shell station, and someone was standing in front of the "S." (1)
The story reminds us, of our ability to create our own hells on earth, our ability to estrange ourselves from God.
In our Gospel reading for today, Jesus is preparing to begin His public ministry. He retreats to, even driven out into, the
desert wilderness for a period of prayer and fasting. His focus there is on preparing to preach the Good News; to proclaim
the Kingdom of God, to begin to understand his unity with God the Father, to contemplate his all out devotion to the Father's
Will. And, in the midst of this holy exercise, along comes the devil with his hellish temptations.
Our ancient foe can appear in many guises. During the American Civil War, in the city of New Orleans, after its occupation
by the Union Army, General Ben Butler, the commander, succumbed to bribery, lining his pockets well enough to see him continue
a successful and lucrative political career after the war. His incorruptible successor, General Nathaniel P Banks, was almost
immediately offered a bribe of one hundred thousand dollars to trade Union salt for Confederate cotton. (2)
Such attempts to bribe Banks were almost an every day occurrence. There is a story that one day he was in his office when
one of the leading dowagers of the city was announced. She entered with a beautiful young woman in attendance. She told
the astonished Banks that if he would allow a large shipment of Confederate cotton through the Union lines, he would receive
fifty thousand dollars and the services of the young woman for as long as he liked.
He looked at them a moment, shook his head, and had them escorted out. Then he immediately telegraphed the Secretary of War:
“ I request to be relieved of command in New Orleans immediately. They are getting too close to my price.” He
passed the test.
Our Gospel today is traditionally called the Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness. The Greek root word is peira (Peira).
It means more than temptation. It also means test, trial, attempt, endeavor. The verb forms are to tempt, to put to the
test, to put to the trial. All with overtones of calamity or disaster. Satan as tempter or tester – the noun form
is peirazomenos (peirazomenos) – tester. Surely it would have been a disaster for all of mankind, had Jesus succumbed
to these three temptations, failed the test. The novel and movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, has vivid imagery of Jesus
succeeding at these temptations.
The same form is used in the Lord’s Prayer – the best translation is do not lead us into test – peirasmon
(peirasmon), but we use temptation largely because of tradition, I suppose.
When the Hebrew scholars of ancient Israel that most Jews lived in the Greek speaking world and had no Hebrew or Aramaic,
they set to work in the Second Century Before Christ to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. As an aside, this was the
bible of Christians until the New Testament canon was established in the early Fifth Century AD and the Bible as we now know
it with Old and New Testaments became the scriptural standard.
When these Jewish scholars set about the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint, the term that they
used for testing Abraham on the mountain to sacrifice his only son Isaac, and the term that they used for the testing and
trials of Job derived from this root word peira. It is used throughout the Septuagint for trial, test, temptation, and is
usually associated with the potential for calamity or disaster.
When humans are faced with peira tests, there is the al too human tendency to think about it for a moment and consider it,
however fleetingly. Although he passed the test in the end, General Banks thought about it for a moment. And we have seen
contemporary instances in the Enron crisis when greed led to failure to pass the peira test. Not to mention the United Nations
Iraqi oil for food scandal, and so on and so on and so on.
Bad as these things are, the stakes were never as high as they were during those forty days in the wilderness when Jesus faced
the satanic tester. What was at stake was the salvation of every human soul. What was at stake was whether the Kingdom of
God, the kingdom of Heaven would ever be realized in any way on earth. What was at stake was whether God or Satan would be
the one we worship.
It was really like Eden revisited but with the potential for a fall so great that humankind would be in Hell on earth for
all eternity.
It is important to note that, although Jesus was fully human, he did not demonstrate any of the human tendency to think about
it even for half a second. In all of the Gospel witnesses to this wilderness testing event, it is clear that Jesus never
hesitated to counter Satan. Saint Mark particularly gives the sense of an almost breathless response to the challenge, as
though Satan hasn’t reached the end of his sentence before Jesus is answering.
Thursday night at our Lenten Study one of the questions we considered was the Kingdom of heaven. Is it here? Will it ever
come? The answer is yes to both questions. It’s all around us, if we just look. It might be imperfectly realized,
but it’s there. And yes, it will come. Because the God who loves us answered as he did in the desert during those
days. And then died for us on the Cross to make it happen.
AMEN
1. From sermon for Lent 1A, Voicings publications, voicings.com.
2. Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, Doubleday, p.71.
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