Three Incredible Readings
A Sermon by Colin Gibson
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Three Incredible Readings A Sermon by Colin Gibson |
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There are three Bible readings spread through this service. I have called them incredible because there is so much in these ancient scriptures that modern people have to take with much more than a grain of salt; also because at first reading anyway I found it incredible that they should have been chosen as the lectionary readings for such a congregation as this. Still, here they are. And the first is a passage from the thousands of years old Hebrew law book, Deuteronomy.
Incredible Reading 1 ( Deut 26: 1 – 11)
Why on earth should any of us be interested in instructions on how to make ritual offerings at the temple in Jerusalem, for a people and a building and a priestly system that vanished whole histories ago?
My first reaction was to knock this passage. To notice, scornfully, how history has sabotaged its solemn words. These are the people who came from the desert and stormed into Palestine, destroying fortified towns, wiping out a rich farming community and taking possession of the land they now claimed as their divine right. These are the ancestors of the people who now occupy the same country; who still claim a divine right to the land, and who in turn protect their wealth and power with huge concrete walls, to keep out the landless, poverty-stricken tribes who scratch a living and fight among themselves outside those walls. They have become the new Canaanites; the Palestinian Arabs are now the wandering Aramaeans.
Yet the essential, timeless human theme here is gratitude: gratitude for what is seen as God’s generous gifts. Gratitude for a place to call home (our early settlers may have felt much the same). Gratitude for a natural world that generously supplied them (as it does us) with food and drink—the sheer necessities of life. Gratitude for political and social freedom; the right to live our own lives as we choose to do. Gratitude, to be expressed in sharing God’s gifts with others, especially with the strangers, the outsiders who live among us. Gratitude is an attitude, a positive relationship to the whole world beyond us. We need more of it.
Incredible Reading 2 (Psalm 91: 1-2, 9-14)
This time the passage is more familiar. You have probably heard the full psalm from which it comes because the songs and poems from ancient Jewish worship at the Jerusalem Temple have become a regular part of Christian services in almost all our denominations.
Yet this passage is, frankly, incredible. It is made up of a series of extraordinary images proclaiming that faith in God will protect the believer from any harm. God is a shadow— from blazing heat, a refuge and a fortress, a mother bird, a warrior’s shield. God’s love and protection will save us from the snare of the bird-catcher and the stench of pestilence, from the terror by night and the arrow that flies by day. Thousands may fall around you, but you will survive; angels will lift you up ‘lest thou dash thy foot against a stone’; you will trample on lions and dragons. (Dragons?)
The language is way over the top, compelling, never to be forgotten: yet it is literally untrue!
Brutal experience keeps reminding us that AIDS and Bird Flu, terrorist bombs, traffic accidents and murderous drug-fuelled violence, tsunamis and earthquakes are no respecter of persons or their personal beliefs. The good Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu perishes alongside the agnostic, the atheist, the thief and the killer.
The writer of this amazing and beautiful psalm must have known that it was untrue even as he or she wrote it. The whole history of the Hebrew people—the history, that is, of invasion, conquest, slavery, starvation and death, the weeping of widowed women, the cries of orphaned children, the savagery of violent men—was as familiar to them as it is to us.
And yet. And yet—and just as incredibly—in our deepest being we hold what this psalm says to be true. That nothing, no nothing, can ever separate us from the love of God. That beyond all the accidents and disasters of human life, beyond the fact of mortality itself, we remain in the keeping of God. You see, these unbelievable lines are the very words that Jewish rabbis chanted to the lines of prisoners as they shuffled together towards the gas chambers in Belsen and Auschwitz. Such faith is a nonsense in the face of brutal reality; but it is a nonsense that cheats death, a nonsense that saves our humanity at the moment of greatest need.
Incredible Reading 3 (Luke 4: 1-13)
Well, at last we’re on safe ground. The life of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Luke. But are we? Immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan, when according to Luke the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven which said, “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased’, we find Jesus being led by the same Spirit into the wilderness to endure forty days of temptation by the Devil.
Luke and Matthew both give an account of this episode, without much disagreement, except that Matthew exchanges the order of the mountaintop and temple-top experiences, and has angels coming to minister to the exhausted man after the Devil leaves him. That last bit in turn comes from the earlier Gospel according to Mark, who is very brief and to the point.
Immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan, and was in the company of wild beasts. And the angels ministered to him.
So Matthew and Luke offer us very expanded versions of Mark’s Temptation in the Wilderness, as it’s sometimes called. But in my view at least, the extra material makes it harder rather than easier to take this as a credible description of something that really happened to Jesus.
Here are three incredible things about Luke’s description.
Jesus survives forty days and nights (that’s nearly 6 weeks) in a desert without food. (‘During that time he ate nothing…and at the end he was hungry.’)
Jesus is led to a height (AV ‘high mountain’) and in a moment of time is shown ‘all the kingdoms of the world’. Impossible, no matter how high the mountain, on a global world, and realistically impossible since neither Luke nor a human Jesus knew anything of the civilizations of the southern hemisphere.
Jesus is given a helicopter ride to a pinnacle of the Temple (then the tallest building in Jerusalem)—apparently without anyone noticing.
The story also presumes that as the only eyewitness of the scene it was Jesus who informed his followers of this event. It also presumes the existence of a tangible and talking Devil. But that I can’t believe either.
The only way to cope with this is to realize that we are trying to read as literal actuality a piece of writing which is actually just like the Psalm passage, vivid poetic picture writing. And once we begin to pick up on the quotations from Old Testament texts bedded into this passage we start to get a handle on it. (Remember that these writers are trying to fit Jesus into what had been said in the ancient texts, to show that this modern person was in fact the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.)
Forty days? Well there are plenty of forty-day experiences in the ancient texts. (I’m leaving out the wanderings of the Hebrews in the wilderness for forty years.) Noah’s Flood lasted forty days. Moses reputedly spent the same time with God shrouded in clouds on Mount Sinai when he received chapter upon chapter of detailed instructions on building the Ark of the Tabernacle and the rituals that went with it.
But I think the key here is a story about Elijah, with whom Jesus was sometimes compared. 1 Kings 19 tells how that mighty Old Testament prophet, after his great triumph over the priests of Baal, flees into the wilderness and is given a miraculous meal by an angel. On the strength of that one meal he travels for forty days and nights to reach Horeb the Mount of God (another name for Mount Sinai). Jesus here is presented as if he were another Elijah, surviving a forty-day horror story to reach his own ‘mount of God’.
In the three temptations offered by the Devil, to turn stones into bread (to feed himself), to become ruler of the world at the gift of the Devil, and to test God by throwing himself down from the temple, Jesus and his opponent are trading Bible texts. The first one about stones and bread sounds pretty much like Jesus’s question turned back on himself: ‘If a son shall ask for bread from any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?’ In the final temptation (given a dramatic literal setting by the trip to the temple-top) the devil quotes from the Psalm we have heard this morning—he shall give his angels charge over thee…they shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot against a stone—and is answered from Deuteronomy 6: 16, ‘You shall not tempt (put to the test) the Lord your God’. All of which should show fundamentalists that quoting scriptural texts can be a dangerous game played for all the wrong reasons as well as the right ones.
What I get from this passage is a strong sense of a fragile Jesus, a very human Jesus, who no sooner experiences a tremendous sense of unity and identification with God than he plumbs the depths of doubt and uncertainty…presumably a process which continued throughout his ministry, as Luke hints with his final phrase: “having exhausted all these ways of tempting him, the Devil left him, to return at the appointed time.’ I love and respect Christ all the more for this.
It is also clear, I think, how Matthew and Luke (and therefore their Christian communities) understood the unique nature of Christ’s ministry. This special person might have turned his special gifts, his God-closeness, to serve himself (to look after number one); he might have followed the lure of power and worldly authority; but his understanding of his relationship with God would never seek to exploit it or express doubt about it by anxiously testing it out. Instead, as they knew, and as this visionary passage struggles to convey, he would tirelessly work for the good of others, challenge the whole nature of arrogant and oppressive power, and trust absolutely the love he felt flowing between himself and his God.
And that I can believe.
Prayer response
The word ‘tempt’ simply means try to get someone to do something. It has been given a bad meaning by religious people who associate it with ‘doing wrong’ or something that is forbidden. But there is no reason why we shouldn’t think of God as being in the business of tempting us to do something positive or downright good. Let us pray.
Lord, there you are busy offering us every opportunity to really enjoy our own creativity: to sing songs, to write poems, to sculpt wood and stone, to knit and to weave, to bake cakes and try rare recipes, to make gardens and paint houses, to bring families and communities into being
…Lead us into your temptations
We’re ripe and we’re ready to fall
Keep scattering your banana skins
And we’ll try to slip on them all.
Lord, there you are busy offering us every opportunity to tune into your wavelength, to receive your constant flow of spiritual letters and emails, to get to know you through Jesus and countless friends, to feel your presence in our souls, to participate in your peace and serenity, to snuggle up and go to sleep in your arms
…Lead us into your temptations
We’re ripe and we’re ready to fall
Keep scattering your banana skins
And we’ll try to slip on them all.Lord, there you are busy offering us every temptation to put aside propriety and decorum, to splash out and have a fling, to rejoice and let our hair down, to laugh out loud at our own folly and the follies of others, to cheer at the skill and energy of others, to celebrate the fact of being alive
…Lead us into your temptations
We’re ripe and we’re ready to fall
Keep scattering your banana skins
And we’ll try to slip on them all.Lord, there you are busy offering us every invitation to delight wickedly in the colour, and form and beauty and sound and silence and magnificence of the natural world, its streams and rivers, its beaches and coastlines, its trees and open country, its dawns and its sunsets
…Lead us into your temptations
We’re ripe and we’re ready to fall
Keep scattering your banana skins
And we’ll try to slip on them all.
Lord, there you are busy offering us every subtle inducement to let flow the natural pity and sympathy of our souls, to serve others, to rescue and assist our fellow human beings, to care for whales and sea turtles, to feed the hungry and comfort the lonely and distressed, to pour oil on troubled waters and spread the balm of peace
…Lead us into your temptations
We’re ripe and we’re ready to fall
Keep scattering your banana skins
And we’ll try to slip on them all. AMEN
