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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +

Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Maybe you have been following the story about all the U-S government apologies to Muslims this week after NATO forces burned copies of the Quran in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, there is criticism of the U-S government for the lack of Muslim apologies to Christians both for burned churches and for raped and murdered Christian believers elsewhere in the world. Though you and I may not face a burned church in Kilgore today or the same kind of violent persecution, Christian believers like us are persecuted in some ways even where we live. Who among us, on account of our faith, has not known some sort of ridicule or exclusion from co-workers, friends, or relatives? The National Religious Broadcasters convention this past week was told that “Christians are being more persecuted today than at any time except in the first century.”

Our situation today is similar to that first-century situation for which the divinely-inspired words of today’s Gospel Reading were first addressed. In all likelihood, St. Mark recorded St. Peter’s preaching about our Lord’s temptation at least partly in order to comfort persecuted Christian believers, especially those in Rome, where St. Peter himself likely was martyred. Since we in the Epiphany season recently considered St. Mark’s accounts of both our Lord’s Baptism and His beginning to preach after John’s arrest, we on this First Sunday in Lent focus on the two verses in the middle of our Gospel Reading, those about our Lord’s temptation, and we do so under the theme “Tempting and Testing”.

St. Mark’s account of our Lord’s temptation is different from those of St. Matthew and St. Luke: St. Mark’s is much shorter, and it uniquely mentions both that the Holy Spirit “drove” Jesus out into the wilderness and that He was “with the wild animals”. But, commentators differ as to precisely what both of those unique details mean. For example, one commentator says the Spirit’s “driving” Jesus out means that Jesus’s human nature did not want to go, while another says that the Spirit’s urge met Jesus’s consent. Similarly, one commentator says the mention of the wild animals indicates that Jesus was abandoned by human beings, while another says the mention of the wild animals indicates that Jesus was at risk in the wilderness. Regardless, the primary point of St. Mark’s account, like the primary point of St. Matthew’s and St. Luke’s accounts, is Satan’s unceasing attacks or waging war on Jesus, in other words, the “Tempting and Testing”.

What is easy to miss in the English is that the same original-language word for the “Tempting and Testing” is used in all three of today’s readings: the Old Testament Reading where God tested Abraham, the Epistle Reading where St. James says God tempts no one, and the Gospel Reading where Satan tempts Jesus. That same word’s underlying idea is to “try” the person, in order to discover what kind of person he or she is, to make it so the person appears to be what he or she always has been, and, if the agent of the “trying” already knows what the person has been, then the point is to reveal it to the person being “tried”. If God is doing the “trying”, then we usually say God “tests” someone, and if Satan is doing the “trying”, then we usually say Satan “tempts” someone. Yet, ultimately Satan is acting at least by God’s permitting him to do so, and, regardless, any such tempting and testing ultimately comes down to whether or not an individual is faithful to God. In the case of Jesus, Satan tries to turn Jesus from the task for which God the Father sent Him. During the 40 days in the wilderness, Satan wants Jesus to show Himself to be unfaithful to His Father, just as the people of Israel had shown themselves to be unfaithful over their 40 years in the wilderness.

When tempted or tested, do we show ourselves to be unfaithful or to be faithful? If it depends on us apart from God, we are doomed from the start. Not morally neutral, our first parents were created holy; they were able to sin, though they were not meant to sin. When they did sin, they moved themselves—and all of us, their descendants—from holiness to sinfulness. So, by nature, we are never morally neutral but only able to sin. For us, temptation is itself already sin in our heart. And, too often those sins of thought in our hearts, or in our minds, also become sins of our words and deeds. As St. James says, God does not tempt us, but we must say God at least permits, as St. James puts it, our own “desire” to lure and entice us and give birth to sin and thereby bring forth death. Or, as the Small Catechism puts it, the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh “deceive and seduce us into misbelief, despair, and other great shame and vice”.

Though St. Mark does not make it explicit, we can infer from the Gospel Reading or from the rest of the Gospel account that Jesus is victorious over Satan’s tempting. When I used to teach the New Testament class at Concordia University Texas, my students and I would discuss the meaning of Jesus’s victory in that temptation, especially in light of two passages from the book of Hebrews, and then I would ask the students a test question about the temptation’s meaning that we had discussed in class. Too often the students wrongly said that Jesus’s perfectly resisting temptation meant that we can also resist temptation if we only make enough effort. Brothers and sisters in Christ, if Jesus’s perfectly resisting temptation means that “we can also resist temptation if we only make enough effort”, would it bring you any comfort? I know that my being told that “we can also resist temptation if we only make enough effort” does not comfort me. Satan is unceasingly waging war on, or attacking, us, and it seems to us that at times even with God’s help we are unable to resist. The author of Hebrews, however, says that because Jesus “suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.” Since Jesus was tempted as we are, He sympathizes with our weaknesses, and so the author of Hebrews encourages us to draw near to Jesus with confidence, in order to receive mercy and to find grace.

With that encouragement from the author of Hebrews, God calls you and me to repent and so to be forgiven. God’s mercy and grace is offered to us precisely because Jesus was victorious over Satan, not only when being tempted for forty days in the wilderness, but Jesus also was victorious over Satan when being tempted in the garden of Gethsemane and when being tempted on the cross. As Abraham in the Old Testament Reading offered his only son, whom he loved, so God the Father so loved the world—you and me—that He offered His one and only Son, Jesus, that whoever believes in Him should not die on account of his or her sin but have eternal life. And, as Abraham’s son Isaac was figuratively raised from the dead, so Jesus was literally raised from the dead that He—and we—might live eternally. Abraham himself said God would provide a lamb, and God did provide a lamb, not only to substitute for Isaac but also to substitute for us: Jesus is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world. When we turn in sorrow from our sin and believe that God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake, God truly forgives our sin, whatever our sin might be. He even forgives our sinful natures that can only sin.

For His part, Jesus could not sin, but that does not mean Satan’s temptations were any less real. For example, one’s being very sure of gaining the final victory in a boxing match does not make the opponent’s blows any less hard. You see, according to His human nature, the man Jesus possessed, by virtue of the Personal Union, all the holiness of the Son of God. No part of Jesus’s human nature was without God’s holiness; no part of Jesus’s human nature rejected God’s holiness, which conditions of being without or rejecting God’s holiness we might label sin. So, Jesus could not sin. I am one of the first to admit that my limited human mind, even with its now-sanctified reason, cannot quite grasp this truth that Jesus was really tempted despite the fact that He could not sin. But, on the basis of Holy Scripture, I with the Lutheran Church still believe, teach, and confess it to be true. When human reason goes as far as it can safely go into the mystery of the Incarnation, we, with St. Paul ultimately must both confess the depths of the mystery of God and give glory to Him.

Jesus could not sin; our sinful natures can only sin, but our redeemed natures, created by God when we come to believe, work hard not to sin, although they often lose their battles in the larger cosmic struggle against Satan, in which Jesus has already won the final victory. Despite that final victory, as St. Peter writes, the devil “prowls around [us] like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” As with Jesus after His Baptism, we after ours immediately face Satan’s temptations in, what today’s Collect called, “the wilderness of this world”. And, here and now there is forgiveness when we fail in our battles with “Temptation and Testing”. Baptism indeed gives us that forgiveness of sins, as it also rescues us from death and the devil and gives us eternal life. But, we have yet to fully experience those gifts that Baptism gives. Until we do fully experience those gifts, again as with Jesus in the wilderness, messengers of God minister to us. They feed us with bread that is Christ’s body and wine that is Christ’s blood, given and shed for us for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Of that body and blood, we will pray in the Distribution Hymn (a favorite hymn stanza of mine that I frequently pray):

As the hymn stanza says, our heart and spirit can be strong even when we lose our battles with “Temptation and Testing”. God in His unsearchable judgments and inscrutable ways has seen fit to allow our persecution and even our sin to work together for the good of conforming us to the image of His Son, in order that that Son might be the firstborn of many brothers.

As baptized and fed brothers and sisters of Christ, fellow children of God, we also pray Our Father to “lead us not into temptation”. And the Small Catechism explains that that petition, means we pray “that God would guard and keep us, so that … we may finally overcome and obtain the victory.” To that end, facing daily “Tempting and Testing”, morning and evening we further pray, as the Small Catechism teaches us to pray, that God’s “Holy Angel”, perhaps Christ Himself, might be with us, “that the wicked Foe”, Satan, “may have no power over” us. And all God’s people say: Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +