Luke 4:1-13 “Ends and Means”
A slight disclaimer: What follows is the basic text (minus the occasional digressions) of a sermon that I preached at Comox United Church, Comox, B.C. on February 20, 2022. It is not an essay. It is written to be spoken and in a manner that reflects my preaching style, which I suspect might be described as “informal.” Nor does it have the full assortment of citations, acknowledgements, and footnotes normally (and quite reasonably) expected in a more formal work. Please forgive the grammatical peculiarities!
Blessings
Phil Spencer
My wife and I are planning to do some travelling in Europe this summer, but as I look at the events of this week … who knows? In the past, Tevis and I have been able to travel to the UK and the continent to visit family and friends, and to enjoy the richness of some different cultures and that’s really been wonderful for us. I do feel blessed by these opportunities to travel, because I know that this isn’t something everyone’s able to do.
And as the last couple of years have demonstrated, assuming that we always can do so is a bit foolish. I say this to preface to my next remark, which I suspect might sound kind of whiny, but mostly it’s just an observation.
Connecting flights often require significant airport waiting time, and some traveling within and sometimes even between terminals. People who design terminals know this well and often sneakily design things so you have to walk by—or even through—as it is in say, London’s Gatwick terminal, walk through those ubiquitous “duty free” shopping areas. In Gatwick it goes on forever, and over its long and winding path there’s a constant stream of enticements to purchase things I didn’t really know before arriving in the duty free that I couldn’t live without, things like House of Creed cologne, Talisker 25 year old single malt, and a yellow gold Rolex Oyster. As you and I both know, I need none of those things, and nor can I afford them, but in that slow-moving line of tired travellers, knowing that I’d be getting an $800 bottle of cologne, a $350 bottle of Scotch, or a $40,000 watch “duty free,” unencumbered by taxes, somehow in the moment that seems like “a deal.” You can do some really wacky things when you’re tired and tempted in the wilderness.
It’s like a trip through Ikea. As Ikea veterans know, you go “through Ikea” as much as you go “to Ikea.” Sure, you really just wanted a $6 set of plastic salad spoons, but to get to that section requires you to walk through 8 kilometres of aisles and by the time you get there you’re pushing a cart with a new bedroom suite on it, one that you’ll only be able to assemble with the help of a 5-year-old, who really are the only people bright and capable enough to understand the inscrutable instructions enclosed, But I digress. I’m told there are quick ways to get through the store, but for the life of me, I’ve never found them, perhaps because I’m too engaged in battling back the temptation urge to buy things I really don’t need, sometimes things that I didn’t even know existed prior to my arrival at Ikea.
Last Wednesday we entered the season of Lent, a word that has some Anglo-Saxon origin, having to do with the spring season and lengthening of days. As a spiritual discipline, Lent’s origins can be dated all the way back to the 2nd century. It was initially a practice that was very short but quite rigorous, though eventually it evolved into a full 40-day observance during the time prior to Easter—minus the Sundays on our calendars, of course. Sundays are always celebrations of the resurrection and, therefore, understood as being “in” Lent, but not “of” Lent. It’s a penitential time during when Christians are invited to prepare themselves in some way for the observance of Easter Sunday, which in itself exists as a result of Good Friday, the two highest moments in the Christian year. Traditionally penitence is observed through an assortment of practices, including, but not limited to, such things as prayers and devotions, acts of charitable giving, and—yes—through self-denial, to “fast,” which is about refraining from, or reducing your consumption of food. What makes this powerful is that eating is something we need to do to survive, and to refrain or reduce does concentrate the mind. I subscribe to the Substack newsletters of Canadian author Jen Pollock Michel and this week she drew my attention to—and I quote—the “sinful patterns of eating Gregory the Great described in the Middle Ages …” which were eating “too daintily, too sumptuously, too hastily, too greedily, too much.”1 She goes on to say that this is eating that forgets how many grow hungry. Ouch. But while fasting has traditionally been food and/or drink, it’s subsequently been expanded beyond that over the years to include fasting from other things. So you’ll hear of people “giving up x,y, or z for Lent” … which—when you stop to think about it—would make speaking and writing quite difficult. But again, I digress.
Ironically—and sometimes perversely—the festival called “Carnival,” a word we get from the Latin expression “remove meat,” fasting from flesh, from meat (the word carne, yes, related to chili con carne) or mardi gras (French for “Fat Tuesday”), … well, paradoxically, those celebrations happening just before Lent are often scenes of excess in the consumption or behaviour that one will soon be fasting from! It gets complicated, doesn’t it?
If you glance at the Gospel readings for the first Sunday in Lent, you’ll find that they’re parallel ones for each year in our 3-year cycle. The 1st Sunday in Lent always begins with the temptation story that you find in Matthew, Mark, and—as we heard this morning—in Luke. Interestingly, the Gospel-writer John doesn’t tell the temptation story for some reason, though in John chapter 6 he does offer a fascinating account of what happened when Jesus actually did create an abundance of bread for hungry people.2
And the very same temptations appear in that story, but we’ll save that for another sermon! Anyway, it does make some real-world sense for a church that might be encouraging some fasting, to get people thinking about the inevitability of some temptation. Then again, there’s more to hearing this reading today than that practicality.
In Luke’s telling, Jesus has just been introduced by John the Baptist as the one that they’ve all been waiting for, as someone who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, though what that would mean was just a little mysterious. Jesus himself has been baptized, identified by a voice from the heavens as “my Son, the Beloved,” and his formal ministry is about to begin. But before he preaches his first sermon, before he spins out a single parable, before he heals that first sick person, we’re told that—"full of the Holy Spirit”—he withdraws to the wilderness. Remembering that, as Paul will later tell us in Philippians 2—he’s emptied himself of divine power and he’s as human as you and I are human—any deed of power that he’s involved in is a result of Jesus’ openness to the presence of the Holy Spirit in his life. This is a massively important thing for us to get our heads around, because it has everything to do with our ministry here, how we function as disciples today in Comox. God will do staggeringly important things through us—and no, others might not notice because they may not be flashy, showy things (in fact most of the time I suspect they won’t be), but they will be important elements in establishing the Kingdom God’s revealing. God can do vastly more than we can ask or imagine if we’re open to letting God do it, if we discipline our lives singly and together to allow room for the Holy Spirit to be present and to work. If we live that way … well, then I’m pretty sure we’re about what God wants us to be about, for we are then truly reflecting the image of Jesus Christ.
Jesus models for us how we each might engage in our ministry: on the foundation of being open to the Holy Spirit in his life, and therefore, in our lives. And led by the Holy Spirit, Jesus begins his ministry by withdrawing. Important point here: the Spirit will sometimes lead us to do completely counter-intuitive things, and in this case, to begin Jesus’ ministry in the world, it requires a temporary withdrawal from the world. He heads off to the wilderness, an inherently dangerous place (there’s little sustenance, water’s rare, there’s exposure to elements, possibly bandits), but it’s also it’s also a kind of purifying place, a place of growth and maturation. After all, it took 40 years in the wilderness to prepare the Hebrew people for entry into the promised land. While in that wilderness, we introduced to diabolos, literally the “false accuser,” the slanderer, the devil. And for those of you who are now having that thought, “The devil—okay, this is getting weird,” I do get it. But over time and through experience I’ve come to throw my lot in with the French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire who wrote (130 years before one of my favourite movies, The Usual Suspects, which I mention because it made this expression more well-known to our generation), “… that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!"3
The Gospel writers tell us that the devil tried Jesus, tested him, tempted him, and Luke tells us that he’s been there for 40 days, and hungry, famished—craving food—that’s how I think we’d be wisest in translating the original wording, which suggests to me that he’s in danger of experiencing the effects of the “HALT” Principle. Those of you familiar with recovery work or who’ve done some of the boundaries training the church offers may be familiar with the acronym HALT, which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired, which are factors that can leave people susceptible to making some not-so-good choices. While I’m not sure why Jesus would be angry, I am confident in thinking that 40 days in the wilderness would make you tired. And he’s likely a bit lonely—prior to this episode his life would involve constantly being around people—your life was far more a fishbowl in 1st century Galilee than what most of us ever experience today. But even if he wasn’t angry, lonely, or tired, Luke notes that after 40 days, Jesus was hungry! He was craving food and it’s then that the devil saunters up to him with some wholly reasonable offers. And I mean that. The temptations—the ends the devil seems to be holding out to Jesus to embrace—are quite sensible, quite practical, and on the face of them, seemingly, admirable. The first temptation addresses the real-world problem of hunger—who doesn’t want to take away hunger? The second temptation is about revealing Jesus’ true Lordship to the whole world—that’s what the Church is constantly banging on about: proclaiming Jesus as Lord! The third temptation is about publicly demonstrating Jesus’ complete trust in God—and we preach trust in God all the time—it’s fundamental to how we make our decisions! Hence, they’re—at least on first gloss, anyway—noble ends, every-last-one of them. But Jesus rejects every-last-one of them—for he is full of the Holy Spirit, and he knows the story of God and humanity.
Jesus stands on Scripture, the prime way that the “story” of God and humanity is communicated. Indeed, he throws it in the face of the devil, in each case revealing that the suggested means to the end the devil offered would pollute that ends irredeemably.
This causes the devil to leave Jesus “until an opportune time,” because the devil picks his shots carefully. But really, the way those noble ends would be accomplished was perverse. And, of course, there was the reality that reaching those ends by employing those means will literally require “a deal with the devil.” Now, Niccolò Machiavelli didn’t actually say, “The ends justify the means” in his little book, The Prince,4 but he did muse on the connection between means and ends, and those are things that are constantly before you and me.
How much does a noble end allow us to practice a questionable means? Not surprisingly, this has been an element of the discussion we’ve been about in responding to the pandemic, trying to find some place of balance between means and ends, discerning what the real and most important ends are, and what are the most appropriate means to achieve an end. Nothing new here: sometimes the good we seek in our lives can be lost in the way we attempt to get there and that dilemma has only been accentuated in recent days in Ukraine. And yes, sometimes discerning a means to get to an end can be pretty straight forward, but other times it’s not at all. The Church has struggled with this forever. The first Christian Roman emperor was Constantine the Great, ruling in the early part of the 4th century. Interestingly, he wasn’t actually baptized until he was near death, and it’s been suggested that he chose not to be baptized until near the end so he could die in a state of grace, that he’d therefor be absolved through the waters of baptism from the-not-unimpressive amounts of accumulated sin that went along with his role as the pragmatic Emperor and successful military leader. In my mind, anyway, it was a truly shabby means to a fine end: admittance to heaven.
I remember a church meeting where we were facing a particularly difficult and vexing problem together. Despite the complexity of the issue we faced, we had lots of agreement around the table as to what we were trying to achieve—our “ends” were clear and I believe to this day they were good. But there was a lot of passion about it, too. Good ends can make you passionate, even angry, especially if you’re tired, or hungry. One of my fellow committee members—a smart and honourable person, and a friend to this day—amidst our circling this thorny problem, suddenly suggested that we employ a tried tactic to achieve our hoped-for-end. And it was an approach that I know has sometimes has purchase in the political realm: they suggested a variation on “stacking a meeting,” planting people at a gathering to influence the outcome of the meeting.
There was an immediate silence at the table, and someone then gently said words to the effect, “I’m not so sure we do that kind of thing …” and—bless them—they caught what they’d done immediately and apologized. We then went on to find a transparent and not-so-manipulative way to move to what I believe was a good end. But when emotions are running high, when you’re angry, when you’re lonely, or tired, or hungry—needy, hungry for something and it doesn’t have to just be food—well, we can think and do some silly stuff. At least, I know I can. I’ve been tempted and—yes—have done some silly things for what I was convinced were wholly noble ends when times have been difficult.
The Church, in her wisdom, has suggested that we begin our Lenten journey together by reflecting on Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, and there’s lots there for us in this story, far more than I’ve touched on. But it strikes me that, perhaps, as we move further into this particular time in Canadian Church history, a time when we find ourselves in, if not a wilderness, then certainly in new and unfamiliar territory, when our former methods of sharing the Gospel aren’t proving quite as effective as they once seemed to be, when we live with more than a little anxiety mixed in with the excitement of the local challenges we face … well, we may find ourselves tempted to live in ways that might actually subvert our common work of living in the way of Jesus Christ.
Without, I hope, being too dramatic, for the devil, this might just be an opportune time. And just as Jesus was equipped with the tools for such a challenge, so must we avail ourselves of the same tools. We need no more, but we need no less. And those tools? Friends: be open to and be full of the Holy Spirit, in all her counter-intuitive mystery. And know our story, know the story. Amen.
2. John 6. See also https://jesuswithoutbaggage.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/the-temptation-of-jesus-in-the-gospel-of-john/
3 Charles Pierre Baudelaire, The Generous Gambler (See http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607031h.html )