A More Opportune Time
"And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time."
(Luke 4:13)
At its most obvious this is a lesson about temptation, temptation in the context of an extraordinary contest of wit and will between Jesus and the devil.
For many centuries this portion of Saint Luke’s gospel has been read in the churches of Christendom on the first Sunday in Lent, as a not-too-subtle reminder of our own struggle in the spiritual wilderness during these forty days between the mortality of Ash Wednesday and the victory of Easter Sunday.
In our lesson Jesus is tempted three times by Satan, and the first temptation concerns itself with the physical facts of hunger, the basic need for survival and nourishment.
Jesus was hungry. “All that time,” says the New English translation, “he had nothing to eat, and at the end of it, he was famished.”
Real hunger, not just the premature craving for a meal which is on the way, is nature’s most devastating device. It can alter the personality, it can warp the judgment, it can reduce the rational human being to abject bestiality; hunger can drive a person to desperate lengths.
So we find that Jesus was hungry, “famished,” as the text reads, and the devil, always clever at marketing, offered him bread. “If you are the son of God, turn this stone to bread.”
Jesus, not willing to buy survival at any price, declines the challenge and the offer.
The second temptation is in many ways far more subtle than the first. The first dealt with basic survival, but the second deals with almost as basic a human desire, if not need: power.
The devil took Jesus up onto a mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and offered them to him if he would but pay homage to the devil.
The commentaries tell us that the so-called Mountain of Temptation sits in a wasteland hundreds of feet below sea level, and that the view it affords is not of large kingdoms but of tiny, impoverished hamlets and sheepfolds, and that the only town nearby is the famous but humble Jericho.
The devil, however, wasn’t offering real estate so much as he was appealing to that human need for the temporal power of authority, sovereignty, and a sense of territory.
To have had Jesus accept it would have saved both Jesus and me a lot of preaching and you a lot of listening, but this Jesus, of whom it would be said, “His power was made perfect in weakness,” was once again not so easily bought.
The third and final temptation in Luke’s account is fully as ingenious as the others. This one appeals to the sense of identity and the need to prove who we are.
“If you are really who you think you are,” says the devil, “prove it by casting yourself down to the ground.
Surely those angels will come and pick you up before you crash. God can suspend gravity if it’s all in the family. Try it and see.”
No one likes to have his identity challenged or threatened; we are insecure enough without someone always demanding proof that we are who we say we are, but once again Jesus is able to transcend the question, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”
Jesus has been tested at the most vulnerable human points of survival, power, and identity.
His will and endurance have been tried by the most artful of tempters and the devil’s knowledge of human psychology and human nature would do justice to a Social Relations conference.
The lesson is thus a lesson about temptation and the resistance thereto.
If the devil had known my grandmother he probably would have quoted her words with pleasure when, in response to her doctor’s admonition that she avoid temptation when it came in the form of her diet, she said, “Better to die from havin’ it than wantin’ it.”
Surely this seems like a lesson about avoidance: Jesus gets credit for not doing anything—and perhaps that is where some of the negative ideas of Lent-keeping come from, such as the giving up of candy, sex, or gin.
The text has far more to offer us than that, however, and for that matter, so does Lent.
Not only is this a lesson about temptation and the avoidance thereof, but at its more basic level it is a lesson about confrontation.
Jesus confronts the devil, Jesus confronts his temptations, Jesus confronts his vulnerable points and his spiritual conflicts. The devil is able to cloak himself in that guise which is most appealing to our weakest points.
To the student he might come as an easy grade, to the professor perhaps as tenure or scholarly acclaim, to the Christian he comes in that soothing voice of the Pharisee that says, “I bless God that I am not as other men.”
While the confrontation with the devil is most attractive, the confrontation with one’s self is more necessary, and that means looking at ourselves behind the elaborate social cosmetic we create in order to protect ourselves from our own vanities.
The confrontation the lesson suggests—confrontation with our ego and ambition and fear—is the ultimate confrontation with the devil and the evil he incarnates.
It would be pleasant for us to deny the reality of such inner trials but to do that contributes to the problem rather than resolves it, and such bedevilments will not go away simply because we refuse to acknowledge their presence.
If life were meant to be a process of perfection by avoidance, the monastery and the nunnery would be over-filled.
Jesus did not avoid the devil nor did he dismiss nor underestimate him, but rather he contended with him, wrestling with him in an agony of spiritual sweat.
“And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time,” or, as the New English version puts it, “So having come to the end of all his temptations, the devil departed, biding his time.”
The devil left, but not because he was defeated. Rather than a defeat, it was a strategic retreat, a retreat until an opportune time when Jesus would once again be both vulnerable and susceptible to Satan’s blandishments.
Lurking in the shadows of the agony in Gethsemane, hovering about the passion of Calvary, Satan had not by any means quit the contest. Jesus’ temptation was not over.
The frightening import of the text is that in reality it was just beginning. The devil awaits that opportune time with us, that time when he can appeal to our injured pride, our wounded ego, our fear of not being appreciated, our anger at being ignored. These are those opportune times when the devil’s persistence reaps great benefits.
The devil’s perseverance must be matched, however, by our own, and such perseverance in the spiritual wilderness is what the Lenten discipline is all about.
The struggle with evil in the world begins with the struggle with evil within ourselves, and that struggle depends upon self-knowledge: knowing and acknowledging our limitations and our capacities.
Such introspection should take place at all times with us, but Lent is that particular time in the church year when we pay attention to that process.
As Jesus prepared himself for the discipline of his ministry by his time in the wilderness, we prepare ourselves once again for that ultimate renewal that comes to us and to the earth in Easter.
There are many routes to Easter, but none of them escapes the shadow of the cross, that point where our time and God’s eternity converge; and at the center point where time and eternity meet is the Christ who makes it all possible.
In the shadow of that cross we make our way, acknowledging who and what we are, sinners who stand in need of God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of our brothers and sisters. All this we know.
We need to be, reminded to remember it, all the same; and Lent is an opportune time for that.
- Peter Gomes
Reflections Ministries / Calvin Wyatt / e-mail: calvincosmo30@gmail.com
Follow us Daily on Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn
"And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time."
(Luke 4:13)
At its most obvious this is a lesson about temptation, temptation in the context of an extraordinary contest of wit and will between Jesus and the devil.
For many centuries this portion of Saint Luke’s gospel has been read in the churches of Christendom on the first Sunday in Lent, as a not-too-subtle reminder of our own struggle in the spiritual wilderness during these forty days between the mortality of Ash Wednesday and the victory of Easter Sunday.
In our lesson Jesus is tempted three times by Satan, and the first temptation concerns itself with the physical facts of hunger, the basic need for survival and nourishment.
Jesus was hungry. “All that time,” says the New English translation, “he had nothing to eat, and at the end of it, he was famished.”
Real hunger, not just the premature craving for a meal which is on the way, is nature’s most devastating device. It can alter the personality, it can warp the judgment, it can reduce the rational human being to abject bestiality; hunger can drive a person to desperate lengths.
So we find that Jesus was hungry, “famished,” as the text reads, and the devil, always clever at marketing, offered him bread. “If you are the son of God, turn this stone to bread.”
Jesus, not willing to buy survival at any price, declines the challenge and the offer.
The second temptation is in many ways far more subtle than the first. The first dealt with basic survival, but the second deals with almost as basic a human desire, if not need: power.
The devil took Jesus up onto a mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and offered them to him if he would but pay homage to the devil.
The commentaries tell us that the so-called Mountain of Temptation sits in a wasteland hundreds of feet below sea level, and that the view it affords is not of large kingdoms but of tiny, impoverished hamlets and sheepfolds, and that the only town nearby is the famous but humble Jericho.
The devil, however, wasn’t offering real estate so much as he was appealing to that human need for the temporal power of authority, sovereignty, and a sense of territory.
To have had Jesus accept it would have saved both Jesus and me a lot of preaching and you a lot of listening, but this Jesus, of whom it would be said, “His power was made perfect in weakness,” was once again not so easily bought.
The third and final temptation in Luke’s account is fully as ingenious as the others. This one appeals to the sense of identity and the need to prove who we are.
“If you are really who you think you are,” says the devil, “prove it by casting yourself down to the ground.
Surely those angels will come and pick you up before you crash. God can suspend gravity if it’s all in the family. Try it and see.”
No one likes to have his identity challenged or threatened; we are insecure enough without someone always demanding proof that we are who we say we are, but once again Jesus is able to transcend the question, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”
Jesus has been tested at the most vulnerable human points of survival, power, and identity.
His will and endurance have been tried by the most artful of tempters and the devil’s knowledge of human psychology and human nature would do justice to a Social Relations conference.
The lesson is thus a lesson about temptation and the resistance thereto.
If the devil had known my grandmother he probably would have quoted her words with pleasure when, in response to her doctor’s admonition that she avoid temptation when it came in the form of her diet, she said, “Better to die from havin’ it than wantin’ it.”
Surely this seems like a lesson about avoidance: Jesus gets credit for not doing anything—and perhaps that is where some of the negative ideas of Lent-keeping come from, such as the giving up of candy, sex, or gin.
The text has far more to offer us than that, however, and for that matter, so does Lent.
Not only is this a lesson about temptation and the avoidance thereof, but at its more basic level it is a lesson about confrontation.
Jesus confronts the devil, Jesus confronts his temptations, Jesus confronts his vulnerable points and his spiritual conflicts. The devil is able to cloak himself in that guise which is most appealing to our weakest points.
To the student he might come as an easy grade, to the professor perhaps as tenure or scholarly acclaim, to the Christian he comes in that soothing voice of the Pharisee that says, “I bless God that I am not as other men.”
While the confrontation with the devil is most attractive, the confrontation with one’s self is more necessary, and that means looking at ourselves behind the elaborate social cosmetic we create in order to protect ourselves from our own vanities.
The confrontation the lesson suggests—confrontation with our ego and ambition and fear—is the ultimate confrontation with the devil and the evil he incarnates.
It would be pleasant for us to deny the reality of such inner trials but to do that contributes to the problem rather than resolves it, and such bedevilments will not go away simply because we refuse to acknowledge their presence.
If life were meant to be a process of perfection by avoidance, the monastery and the nunnery would be over-filled.
Jesus did not avoid the devil nor did he dismiss nor underestimate him, but rather he contended with him, wrestling with him in an agony of spiritual sweat.
“And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time,” or, as the New English version puts it, “So having come to the end of all his temptations, the devil departed, biding his time.”
The devil left, but not because he was defeated. Rather than a defeat, it was a strategic retreat, a retreat until an opportune time when Jesus would once again be both vulnerable and susceptible to Satan’s blandishments.
Lurking in the shadows of the agony in Gethsemane, hovering about the passion of Calvary, Satan had not by any means quit the contest. Jesus’ temptation was not over.
The frightening import of the text is that in reality it was just beginning. The devil awaits that opportune time with us, that time when he can appeal to our injured pride, our wounded ego, our fear of not being appreciated, our anger at being ignored. These are those opportune times when the devil’s persistence reaps great benefits.
The devil’s perseverance must be matched, however, by our own, and such perseverance in the spiritual wilderness is what the Lenten discipline is all about.
The struggle with evil in the world begins with the struggle with evil within ourselves, and that struggle depends upon self-knowledge: knowing and acknowledging our limitations and our capacities.
Such introspection should take place at all times with us, but Lent is that particular time in the church year when we pay attention to that process.
As Jesus prepared himself for the discipline of his ministry by his time in the wilderness, we prepare ourselves once again for that ultimate renewal that comes to us and to the earth in Easter.
There are many routes to Easter, but none of them escapes the shadow of the cross, that point where our time and God’s eternity converge; and at the center point where time and eternity meet is the Christ who makes it all possible.
In the shadow of that cross we make our way, acknowledging who and what we are, sinners who stand in need of God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of our brothers and sisters. All this we know.
We need to be, reminded to remember it, all the same; and Lent is an opportune time for that.
- Peter Gomes
Reflections Ministries / Calvin Wyatt / e-mail: calvincosmo30@gmail.com
Follow us Daily on Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn
