First Sunday in Lent (Year C) RCL, 2022

First Sunday in Lent (Year C) RCL, 2022

St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church

Luke 4:1-13

Feasting on the Foretaste

As you might know, these 40 days of Lent structured around these 40 days of Jesus in the wilderness and of His being tempted by Satan.

Why is that, you might ask?

Well, In truth is has a lot to do with how the church has understood not only this text of Luke 4:1-13, but the larger mission and purpose of Jesus.

It has to do with peopleviewing Christ as a hero of virtue to be imitated or as one who goes ahead of us rather thanin stead of us. In other words; a lot of this has to do with people reading not just Jesus’ temptation, but His whole life as an ethical template or moral example – not good news, but good rules. As a result; this text is often understood in ways that make Christ – the crucified Christ at least, more or less irrelevant.

See, some like to draw out of this text moral principles to follow, especially as Jesus pulls them out in response to Satan’s temptations.

In the face of Hunger; Jesus reminds Satan that man’s sustenance is spiritual just as much as physical. Tempted with worldly power and authority in exchange for Satan worship; Jesus reminds Satan of the 1stcommandment, to worship God alone, and serve Him alone. Encouraged by Satan to prove His divinity by sky diving off the top of the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus reminds Satan that it’s wrong to test the Lord. All of that is true. But is that really the point?

Others will use this text to draw out something less explicit; the weapons that God gives us to fight against temptation and sin:

to pray (I guess that’s supposed to be implied because He’s Jesus), to fast as Jesus did, and to read the bible, which is supposedly how Jesus was able to quote verses of Scripture against Satan – right? While fasting beats the body into submission, and prayer holds fast to the promises of God given freely, and the Word of God read or heard is a means of grace which truly brings our dead hearts to life, strengthens and nourishes them, and creates virtue and goodness within us – I can’t help but notice that this text isn’t the least bit interested in giving us an instruction manual for fighting temptation.

Because this isn’t actually about us at all, it’s about Christ for us.

We might like to think it’s about us. To invite us to be small heroes of virtue ourselves, to teach us to fight sin, to show us that it’s “possible” for you to. But it isn’t. You aren’t God. No matter how much you fast, how much you pray, and how much Scripture you read – YOU WILL STILL FALL. And that isn’t even to mention the complete lack of repeatability that we share with these temptations that Satan lobs against Jesus. Turn stones to bread! Yeah, cause we deal with that temptation all the time, right? Worship Satan in exchange for authority over every kingdom in the entire world, totally, ever morning I deal with this one, right? Yeah, not really. How about this, ever felt tempted to jump off a building to see if Angels will catch you?

I mean come on, really? Is Lent interchangeable with Ramadan? Is it just about fasting, fighting temptation, spiritual disciplines, and generic religious piety?

Or is there something more here?

Let me put it this way for you: Luke 4 and the beginning of Lent, is more about the suffering and death of Christ than it is about our attempts to resist temptation in this life. We begin lent not with instructions to start out on ourcourse for virtue and monkish detachment from the world, but we begin it witha foretaste of the end of Lent – where He will be crucified, He will die, and He will be buried. That is where all of this is heading. And so we begin looking forward to that. Indeed, we begin with a foretaste of that.

We begin here;

The suffering of God, the pain of God, - the hunger of God. V. 2 – for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

Now, I don’t know how you are with fasting, but one thing sticks out to me, especially in this Lenten season. See as the world views lent as the season of Christian fasting, they do so (hilariously) in the mildest of ways possible. Giving up chocolate, giving up television, giving up meat or cheese, giving up in the most extreme of cases maybe a meal or two a day, but for Jesus – a fast meant no food at all. NO FOOD. He isn't taking a break from meat or cutting back on beer. He is starving himself, not intermittently, not for a day or two, not even for a week, but beyond even a month for forty days He fasted! A mad man, this Jesus. A death wish, this Jesus!

And yet having survived these 40 days,

The devil said to him, (V. 3) “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread”

Not exactly a temptation we can sympathize with, isit? No. It’s a temptation unique to God, and unique to God incarnate in human flesh, currently suffering extreme hunger after 40 days of eating absolutely nothing in the dry, hot, dusty and empty desert. Even if Jesus wanted to eat something, He couldn’t have. He’s in a barren wasteland, similar to the one that Israel walked through after leaving Egypt. There was no food there. There were no fruits, no vegetables, no meats, no grains. IF they were to eat, God would have to rain bread down from heaven. And so He did. And just so, that is what Satan calls Jesus to do here. If you are the Son of God, create bread to eat in this desert.

But Jesus does not rain bread down from heaven to feed Himself, not does He make it out of rocks, but Jesus IS the bread that has come down from heaven. He came not to feed Himself, but to feed others with His own flesh. Not to satisfy Himself, but to satisfy those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And He came to do this all by His suffering. And so He sufferedhunger. And that hunger – wasonly a taste of the suffering He would endure throughout the Lenten journey that isHis march forward to the cross.

Philippians 2 paints a perfectly beautiful picture of this truth;

That Jesus Christ

though being in very nature God,

did not consider His divinitysomething to be used to his own advantage;

7 rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

8 And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to death—

even death on a cross

What Satan wanted, more than anything was for Jesus to stop His suffering short. He knew that hunger was not going to be the end of it. But that He who was was in very nature God, was not planning to use that divine power to avoid suffering, but was going to low Himself even further than He already had in taking on human nature with all its suffering and infirmities, sicknesses, sufferings and limitations – He was going to go all the way to death to redeem sinners with the price of His own precious blood, with His own innocent suffering and death. Satan knew that this small foretaste of hunger pointed forward tothe much greater feast of suffering that was to come atthe end of Hislife. Not only would He suffer hunger; but pain, sorrow, despair, and eventually even death. And all of that, for you.

But He needn’t only suffer, that wouldn’t do it for your souls, He needed to go yet lower still.

(V. 5) The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7If you worship me, it will all be yours

The authority that the devil had was one lorded over others. It was one most certainly of this world.But that wasn’t what Christ had come to establish. Satan offered to Him the authority and splendorof an earthly King, a comfortable life, of aworld domination – but Christ had come to die under the rule of a tyrannical empire, not sit at the top of one.

And so He refused. Not only because it was wrong to worship anyone other than God, but because His mission here on this earth was one humble servitude, and His glory was one of humility, and His splendorwas found in His being a victim of state sanctioned murder.

But Satan wasn’t the only one demanding that Jesus take up the glorious military Messiah role. That was what all of Israel (under the tyrannical oppression of the Roman empire at the time) was waiting for, His disciples included!

Matthew 16

21 Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Peter was of a Satanic mind; and so are we most of the time. We don't want a Crucified Christ – we don't want a loser Lord, we want a glorious and victorious hero to lead us into the way of self-betterment, comfort, and of overcoming of all that is wrong in us, with us, and around us.

For to be hungry, to suffer, even to be oppressed, was was not low enough for the Lord of all to go in order to raise you up to salvation. He had to go yet lower still!

V. 9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:

“ ‘He will command his angels concerning you

to guard you carefully;

11 they will lift you up in their hands,

so that you will not strike your foot against a stone

Is there really anything tempting about jumping off of a temple just to be saved by angels to prove to the devil that you’re God? Hardly so. But Jesus’ refusal to do so isn’tmerely obedience in the temptation to test God’s saving power and His angelic host – it’s a refusal to use His divine Sonshipas an excuse to escape death. For just as Satan says this here on the temple, so too he speaks it through the mouth of those who wouldcrucifyHim!

Luke 23:36

They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.”

36 The soldiers also came up and mocked him and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

39 And one of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us

If you are the Messiah save yourself, - for to the Jews, as to all the world – our concept of a saviour is the strong hero, not the loser on the cross. Why? Because Messiah’s don’t die. And that is why the crucifix is so unpalatable to the world. An empty cross, sure. They can handle that. But God made flesh nailed to two intersecting beams of wood? God forbid – Satan forbid, Peter forbid, the Law of right and wrong forbid!

Satan’s round of temptations in Luke 4, you see, they weren’t just an attempt to get Jesus to sin, to value food over Scripture, to worship Satan, to test God – they were an attempt to convince Jesus to back out of His mission to save YOU. And this round of temptations would not be Satan’s last. Satan would returnagain and again and again in Jesus’ ministry. In the form of Pharisees, in the form of Rome, even in the formof Jesus’ own disciples. Satan’s temptation of Jesus is for Jesus to take advantage of His divinity, to be the Military messiah that the people wanted, to reign and rule this evil world, to save Himself from death – BUT HE WOULDNOT.

He wouldinstead be lowered;to hunger, to oppression, to execution, and to death. For you.

Does this text call you to fast? No, it doesn’t. Does this text tell us anything about what we should be doing? No, it doesn’t. Because Lent isn’t Ramadan. These 40 days of Lent are about Christ’s sufferings, not yours. They are for your forgiveness not for your penance. These 40 days of Lent serve to point us toward Easter, not to give us a second chance at new years resolutions orself-betterment programs.

So you see,

For all of the walking around and talking about these texts that we could do; searching for moral instruction, searching for Jesus’ secrets to avoiding temptation, trying to extol His holiness and steadfastness in the face of all of the devils temptations, we will miss it all if we miss what Satan’s temptations actually are; the temptation for Christ to not die for the forgiveness of your sins.

And that is why I have called this sermon today “feasting on the foretaste.” Because that is where all of this is headed. Today, Jesus is hungry, He is a simply a Jew oppressed by Rome, He is simply not going to jump off buildings for the sake of it – but at the end of this journey He will be given vinegar to quench His thirst as that oppressive government drives nails through His hands and feet, crowns Him with thorns, strips the flesh off His back, and leaves Him there to suffocate under His own body weight.

And THAT is what we eat at that Altar – the body given unto death for you, the blood spilled to the ground for you – for the forgiveness of your sins, for the salvation of your souls. You will eat His suffering, but for now, we feast on the foretaste of that suffering. For today; Jesus fasted and was hungry.

Amen.