[Marty Miller]

Our Scripture for the First Sunday of Lent is Luke 4:1-13
The Message

“Tested by the Devil
4 1-2 Now Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wild. For forty wilderness days and nights, he was tested by the Devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when the time was up he was hungry.
3 The Devil, playing on his hunger, gave the first test: “Since you’re God’s Son, command this stone to turn into a loaf of bread.”
4 Jesus answered by quoting Deuteronomy: “It takes more than bread to really live.”
5-7 For the second test he led him up and spread out all the kingdoms of the earth on display at once. Then the Devil said, “They’re yours in all their splendor to serve your pleasure. I’m in charge of them all and can turn them over to whomever I wish. Worship me and they’re yours, the whole works.”
8 Jesus refused, again backing his refusal with Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God and only the Lord your God. Serve him with absolute single-heartedness.”
9-11 For the third test the Devil took him to Jerusalem and put him on top of the Temple. He said, “If you are God’s Son, jump. It’s written, isn’t it, that ‘he has placed you in the care of angels to protect you; they will catch you; you won’t so much as stub your toe on a stone’?”
12 “Yes,” said Jesus, “and it’s also written, ‘Don’t you dare tempt the Lord your God.’”
13 That completed the testing. The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another opportunity.”

I found a really interesting conversion on this text at:
https://inquiries2015.files.wordpress.com/2002/02/02-4-pb-jesus-wilderness-temptations-as-vision-quest.pdf looking at Jesus’ time in the wilderness in terms of a vision quest. It’s pretty long so I offer some (still too long) excerpts:

Jesus on a Vision Quest: Exodus or Egypt?

THE CHURCH TRADITIONALLY inaugurates Lent by reflecting on the “wilderness temptations” of Jesus. This story is articulated most fully in Matthew 4:1-11 (= Lk 4:1-13; I will follow Luke’s version). In preparation for his mission, Jesus follows a mysterious yet compelling calling to radical wilderness solitude. He fasts. He lives in the wild. He wrestles with spirits.

That this sojourn lasted “forty days” (Lk 4:2) is clearly intended to invoke Israel’s forty-year wanderings in the wilderness after Egypt. But what exactly is the connection? Jesus is somehow interiorizing the experience of his people, but not in the sense that modern religious existentialists understand it. I would suggest instead that he is mystically re-tracing the footsteps of Israel in order to discover where the journey of his nation went wrong.

Jesus believes that his people have lost their bearings, and that course-correction can only come through a kind of “re-visioning” of the fateful choices that led liberated Israel back into captivity. This vision quest is, in other words, seeking a radical diagnosis that moves beyond symptoms to the root causes of the historical crisis of his people.

The temptations here, as in the Old Story, represent a fundamental test of this primal identity. “If you are the child of God…” taunts the Devil in refrain (Lk 4:3,9). This is the question Jesus—and the Church that is invited to follow in his footsteps in Lent— must answer: Are we as a people still defined by the Exodus journey, or have we abandoned it?

Indigenous people understand far better than we that the “bush” is precisely the place to examine the way we have internalized the pathologies of empire. The wild spaces of nature represent a mirror to us to see how domesticated under “civilization” we have become. In this wilderness mirror, we can more clearly see how Satan has lured us into all the other narratives that constantly compete with the biblical one for our allegiance. And the myths of Pharaoh and Caesar and Bush, of the National Security Council and the television news, of Wall Street and Hollywood, are seductive indeed. They promise prosperity, power, and prestige — but deliver only captivity. Jesus knows he can resist these imperial delusions only by staying grounded in the old Story. Hence his counter-refrain: “It is written…” (Lk 4:4,8,12).

The gospels re-narrate the Exodus journey as the “Way” of discipleship (Mk 1:2-4)— and this Way begins with Jesus’ vision quest in the wilderness. The three temptations he faces there, in turn, name the archetypal characteristics of the Domination System: the economics of exploitation (Lk 4:3), the politics of empire (4:5f), and the symbolism of omnipotence (4:9-11). Interestingly, Luke’s ordering of these temptations corresponds, in reverse order, to the first three petitions of his version of the Lord’s Prayer: May Your Name be hallowed; May Your Kingdom come; Give us each day enough bread (Lk 11:1-4). Moreover, Jesus re-enacts these same three themes in the course of his ministry, offering them as object lessons to his disciples, as we shall see.

Jesus’ vision quest is, in other words, no minor skirmish in the desert. It articulates the central issues with which the people of God always struggle in their journey of faith and liberation. I believe these issues have not changed for the church in our time; they represent the “unfinished business” to which we must attend still.

Enough bread for today: manna or mammon?

Satan’s challenge to Jesus to turn stones into bread, therefore, invokes the old primal wilderness anxiety about sustenance, and ridicules the divine economy as foolishness. Why not exploit the land for profit? Surplus promises security. Can Jesus renew the Exodus journey by making a different choice at this archetypal crossroad?

He does—countering with the first of three citations from Deuteronomy, the book of remembering—by recalling the lesson of the manna: God has humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna…in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of Yahweh (Dt 8:3 = Lk 4:4). In his subsequent ministry Jesus will rehabilitate the vision of Sabbath economics in the two central petitions of the Disciples Prayer: “Give us enough bread for today, and release us from debt as we release others from debt” (Lk 11:3f).

“May Your sovereignty be realized”: Dispersal or Domination?

The second temptation both escalates the conflict and retraces the next stage in the apostasy of Israel—and of the church. Satan parades “all the kingdoms of the world” before Jesus and offers to grant him jurisdiction over them—as a vassal-king, of course (Lk 4:5-7). The narrative here is very matter of fact in its analysis of state power. First, the notion that a pantheon of principalities could be viewed “in a moment” suggests that all forms of centralized political hegemony are essentially the same: seen one, seen ’em all. Second, there is no question but that they are all administered under the authority of the Devil himself. He can “deliver them to whom he wishes” indeed! Would that our churches could maintain such a clear perspective on the State as principality and power!

In fact, the Bible has a deep suspicion of empire that is woven into the very earliest traditions, most notably the Genesis myths of origins. Near Eastern antiquity was dominated (and Israel geopolitically surrounded) by powerful city-states, from Egypt to Babylon to Assyria. These highly centralized and hierarchical societies were rightly perceived by the Hebrew storytellers to be dangerous and predatory. As seen in the story of the ”Tower of Babel,”
The divine solution to overconcentrated social power is dispersal —presaging what modern sociologists are only beginning to rediscover, namely that as in nature, diversity and decentralization are crucial to a healthy social ecology.

This sets up the first great plotline of the liberated Israel’s history: the struggle to maintain the alternative confederacy under pressure from within and without to conform to the dominant political paradigm of monarchy.

Israel’s fateful turning away from this vision is narrated poignantly in I Samuel 8. The community, now settled in Palestine, again gathers in complaint, this time demanding “a king to govern us” (8:5). The elder Samuel, representing the old wilderness federation (Judges 21:25), warns of the dire consequences of such a political project.

Jesus returns to this archetypal crossroads, too, and rehabilitates the old insistence upon the exclusive (and thus anti-royalist) sovereignty of Yahweh. This time his defense is taken from the great Shema: “Hear O Israel” (Dt 6:4ff).

Take care that you do not forget Yahweh, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The Lord your God you shall fear and serve, and by this name alone you shall swear (Dt 6:12f = Lk 4:8).

Jesus reiterates this same point in the second petition of the Prayer: “May Your sovereignty be restored” (Lk 11:2). To pray this is to de-legitimize every other jurisdiction—particularly those that claim sovereignty. Otherwise, would disciples not simply have been instructed to ask God’s blessing upon the king-of-the-moment? This is the real significance of Jesus’ famous proclamations about the “kingdom of God” (Lk 4:43; 10:9).

The Roman authorities understood perfectly the implications of Jesus’ renewal of the Dreaming as it concerned Yahweh’s sovereignty. The church since Constantine, however, has not been so clear and thus has succumbed repeatedly to the politics of domination. Jesus invites us to turn back to the wisdom of indigenous peoples to reanimate our imaginations about how we might work to disperse political power today, under the shadow of history’s most dominating empire.

“May Your name remain holy!” Liberator or Patron?

Satan knows that behind every political economy is a theology, a “sacred canopy” thrown over the regime to lend it cosmic legitimation. So he turns the tables on Jesus and begins thumping his version of the Bible—perhaps we can think of this as a sort of Presidential prayer breakfast. But the text is chosen, and interpreted, carefully: Psalm 91:11f. Indeed, this powerful statement of God’s protection of those who “abide” can all too easily be misunderstood, like so much of scripture. When read through the hermeneutics of power and privilege the psalm becomes a tune of entitlement, a hymn to invulnerability, and finally an ode to empire. We have seen how “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (Ps 91:2) became a marching tune for the Reich — and thus truly what Phyllis Trible calls a “text of terror.” This strand of political theology prevailed at times under the Israelite monarchy, as it has under every Christian empire since.

In antiquity, however, the great institutionalized cultic centers were imperial culture’s way of violating all three commandments. Imposing structures were built to the sky, and royalty dwelled in the penthouse suite communing with the gods, whose blessings underwrote the whole Temple-State. The cult thus functioned as the ideological mechanism in the Canaanite/Egyptian tributary system, complete with local shrines that secured political loyalty and facilitated collection of agricultural taxes in the hinterlands. Thus Israel’s struggle against idolatry often focused on resistance to these “sacred poles” and “Asherahs,” the most vivid narrative expression of which is found in the story of Gideon (Judges 6).

The first Temple was originally envisioned as a storehouse for redistribution of the community’s surplus, but it inevitably became the mechanism by which power, wealth and privilege concentrated in the hands of Israel’s elite. Instead of a place where sacrifices were offered on behalf of the people, it became a place where the people were offered in sacrifice to the state. Again the prophets railed, warning that what Yahweh did to Babel’s tower he could do to his own “hijacked House”: Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the Temple of the Lord…” Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbery? …Therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust…just what I did to Shiloh. (Jer 7:4,11,14). Jesus, renewing the old Dreaming, will have occasion to re-enact these very words.

Waving Psalm 91:11f in Jesus’ face, the Devil urges him to “take the fall” for empire. And what a vantage point he offers, on the rooftop of the great Second Temple of Herod, above the gleaming capital city of Jerusalem, the center of Israel’s universe! It is of course a symbolic perch, the highest place in the “dwelling place of the Most High” (Ps 91:9). In other words, we are now at the heart of the historical project in question, and Satan assures Jesus that nothing can happen to him, for he will be “borne aloft” by his people’s ethnocentric theology of entitlement. We in the U.S. know this mantra all too well: our self-interest is acceptable to God, who will back us up and bail us out because we are God’s instruments of civilization.

In the third temptation, Jesus has once more arrived at a fateful intersection in the journey of his people and chosen the “road less traveled.” Today we live in the most idolatrous of ages, in which our desire for technological omnipotence knows no shame, from nuclear weaponry to genetic engineering. The radical Yahwist principle of nonidentity remains our only hedge against every attempt to absolutize our institutions (the First Commandment), against all forms of commodity fetishism (the Second Commandment), and against whoever would draft God to legitimize domination (the Third Commandment). Only if we refuse to domesticate God’s name will we be able to resist our pathological imperial tendency to objectify everything else: nature, the works of our hands, and indeed our own humanity.

The Lenten Journey

Our strange old gospel story concludes with a sober epilogue: Having failed to seduce Jesus, the Devil departs, seeking a more “opportune time” (Lk 4:13). The word here, remarkably, is kairos—Luke’s pointed reminder that there would be more such crossroads for God’s people to face in the future. Indeed, there were.

We know all too well the multitude of ways in which the Bible was expropriated into the service of oppression throughout the long, painful and unfinished history of European world colonization and conquest. We struggle to make sense of 19th and 20th-century Christian missionaries among indigenous peoples around the world who indeed “slandered what they did not understand” (II Pet 2:12b). How often did “they promise freedom, but were themselves slaves of corruption” (2:19)? “In their greed, they will exploit you with deceptive words” (2:3)—does this not summarize the legacy of Christian complicity with squatter’s rights, Stolen Generations, and the destruction of sacred lands?

Lent invites us to battle mimosis by practicing mimesis, to undertake afresh a visionquest that will examine the choices our ancestors made for either Exodus or Egypt. It takes character and courage to seek to lay bare the roots of our national pathologies. In the U.S., for example, the fact that each year Lent falls during or just on the heels of Black History Month represents a great opportunity for the American church. There is no history more suppressed—nor more consequential—for our nation than that of African Americans. Perhaps for Christians Lent really ought to commence with Black History month’s public invitation to “re-vision” the terrible legacy of slavery and racism in order to embrace a truly multicultural and just future. In many other ways, we who are the inheritors of the profoundly flawed legacy of “Progress” must face the truth about our past. The Devil tempted our ancestors and they too followed him, choosing to domesticate the wilderness and to conquer its peoples, instead of finding God among both. We have therefore become like the idols we worshipped: economically dominating yet captive to “affluenza,” politically grandiose yet impotent to change what we dislike, children of empire who still piously invoke God’s blessing and favor. But there is another way. Repentance means to turn around, and that means not only facing the past but recovering what was left behind. With Jesus our Elder Brother, let us retrace our national footsteps back into the bush, confront our sins, and begin taking care of Unfinished Business with our indigenous First Peoples. We may also, discover there older lifeways which just might show us the way out of our historical conundrums.

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