Sermon Tone Analysis

Jesus decides his priorities

The first three gospels tell how, immediately after he was baptized, Jesus was challenged to get his priorities right as God’s promised deliverer, the Messiah.

Mark mentions the temptations of Jesus only briefly, but Matthew and Luke both give more detailed accounts.

They all place this period of self-appraisal at the very start of Jesus’ public work, as a programmatic statement of his basic aims and objectives.

But the issues raised in this story were continually cropping up in his ministry, for each of the temptations was an invitation to minister in a way that would bypass the suffering and humble service that Jesus ultimately knew to be God’s way of doing things.

In other words Jesus would not be the good shepherd as seen in , Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34 and the stories of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son and the older son

The first temptation was to bring about the messianic age by economic means, making stones into bread ( ).

There were certainly plenty of hungry people in the world who would have welcomed bread from any source.

Indeed, Jesus himself was in the desert, and must have been hungry enough at the time.

In addition, the ancient scriptures had often pictured the coming new age as a time of great material prosperity when the hungry would be fed and everyone’s needs would be satisfied ( ;  ;  ).

Moreover, later stories show Jesus feeding the hungry on different occasions, so he was certainly not indifferent to the needs of starving people.

There were therefore plenty of good reasons why Jesus should think it appropriate to be concerned with such matters.

But he knew that the fame and popularity of an economic miracle-worker  were not the same as suffering and service, and to establish a reputation on this basis alone would have been to deny the very essence of what God was calling him to do and be.

A word of God to the people of Israel at a crucial moment in their past history helped him to overcome the temptation: ‘People cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ ().

A similar temptation presented itself with the suggestion that he should throw himself down from one of the towers of the temple into the crowded courtyard below.

Had he survived, that would certainly have been a dramatic demonstration to the whole nation that he was indeed endued with special powers.

The miraculous and unusual had a special kind of appeal to the people whom Jesus knew best.

Paul, who knew Judaism better than most, said it was characteristic of his people to ‘demand signs’ (), though the same has been true of people in most cultures for most of history—including our own.

For Jesus, though, there was a more subtle underlying message here as well, for there was at least one ancient prophecy which seemed to suggest that the Messiah would suddenly appear in the temple in this kind of dramatic way ().

This, together with a further promise that God would protect those who were ready to put their faith to the test (), presented a powerful argument for trying such a stunt.

If Jesus was really God’s Messiah, then should he not confirm his calling by trying out these promises to see if God really was on his side?

Jesus was not afraid of the miraculous and the supernatural: there are many examples of that in the rest of his life.

But he rejected the temptation to base his message purely on such sensationalism, again quoting the ancient scriptures to back up his judgment: ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’ ().

The context of  had made it clear that such promises of safety and security would be valid only for those who were prepared to live in obedient service to God’s will—and for Jesus that was to mean service and suffering, not the arbitrary use of God’s promises for his own ends.

The third temptation was to be a political Messiah.

Luke places this one second, but Matthew puts it last, perhaps to emphasize its importance ().

There is no doubt that this must have been the strongest of all temptations, for it was precisely what most people at the time were hoping that the Messiah would be.

They also commonly believed that they would rule all the other nations in the new age that was coming, which no doubt explains the terms in which this temptation is presented to Jesus, to accept the authority of Satan in order to gain power over the world.

The idea was made even more vivid by a vision of the splendour of the world’s kingdoms.

But Jesus realized again that this was far different from the kind of new society that he was to inaugurate.

It was not that Jesus was unsympathetic to the deeply felt desire of his people for freedom: he had himself lived under the tyranny of Rome and had worked with his own hands to produce enough to pay Roman taxes.

He was not unaware of the miserable condition of his people.

But he rejected political messiahship for two reasons.

Firstly, he rejected the terms on which the devil offered it to him.

According to the gospel narratives the devil offered to share sovereignty with Jesus.

If Jesus accepted that the devil had authority over the universe as a whole, then he would be given limited political authority in exchange.

That was something Jesus could not accept.

His own commitment, and the commitment that he later demanded of his followers, was exclusively to God.

To acknowledge the devil’s power in any area of life would have been to deny God’s ultimate authority.

In addition, Jesus was offered the possibility of ruling by the ‘authority’ and ‘glory’ of an empire like that of the Romans.

He knew that the nature of God’s kingdom was to be quite different from the kind of authority to be found in an empire like that of the Romans.

God’s values and standards could never be imposed from outside, but would be nourished most effectively as people were set free to make their own choices not only about their relationship to God but also about how they could best create the new kind of social structures that would most closely reflect God’s way of doing things.

It was not too difficult to reject this third temptation, and Jesus did so decisively.

He would not try to impose a new authoritarianism on the world to replace the authoritarianism of Rome and the other empires that had preceded it.

The ‘kingdom of God’ would not be the rule of tyranny and cruelty that some religious fanatics were hoping for, but something that would spring from the new, inner nature of those who were a part of it, as they discovered God in new ways and found themselves empowered to be the kind of people who would carry forward this new vision of a world transformed through the power of love and caring service.