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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. (Amen.)
On this first Sunday in this year’s penitential season of Lent, the Old Testament Reading reports humankind’s fall into sin, with the woman’s succumbing to the serpent’s temptation to disbelieve God’s Word and so for her and her husband to eat of the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:1‑21). The Gospel Reading reports Jesus’s resisting the devil’s somewhat similar temptations of Him, and the Epistle Reading, read in‑between the Old Testament and Gospel but written after their events, in a sense gives the theological significance of the other two Readings, comparing and contrasting Adam and Jesus Christ, each of their respective one actions, with far‑reaching and lasting consequences for all people (Romans 5:12-19). A somewhat‑superficial analysis of the Old Testament and the Gospel might wrongly conclude that, where Eve doubted God’s Word, Jesus trusted God’s Word and wielded it rightly and so Jesus serves simply as an example that you and I should follow in resisting Satan’s temptations of us. However, if we wrongly think that Jesus is only an example of using God’s Word to resist temptation, then we have missed the point! Notably, in the Epistle Reading, the Divinely‑inspired St. Paul does not specifically mention either Jesus’s resisting temptation or our resisting temptation. Rather, Jesus’s resisting temptation apparently is taken as a part of His obedience and His one act of righteousness that leads to justification and life for us. Considering primarily today’s Gospel Reading, with the help of the Holy Spirit, this morning we realize that “Jesus’s resisting temptation leads to our forgiveness for not resisting temptation”.
Jesus’s coming for the forgiveness of our sins in some sense is at the center of His temptation. In the verses just before today’s Gospel Reading in St. Matthew’s account, John the Baptizer baptized Jesus in order to fulfill all righteousness, and afterward the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and came to rest on Jesus, and God the Father’s voice from heaven said that Jesus was His beloved Son with Whom He was well pleased (Matthew 3:13-17). Then, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The three temptations reported can be understood in relation to Jesus’s being sent as the Savior: first, to command stones to become loaves of bread would be to use His Divine power for His own needs and not in keeping with His sending; second, to throw Himself off the pinnacle of the temple would be to seek God’s help selfishly, perhaps to win a large following by a spectacular miracle; and, third, to fall down and worship the devil would be to compromise with Satan and so give up His obedience to God altogether (Seesemann, TDNT 6:34-35; CSSB, ad loc Mt 4:1-11, 1453). Of course, Jesus continued to be tempted throughout His ministry, perhaps most-prominently in His death on the cross, and arguably seen most‑succinctly hours before that death in His prayerful-struggles in Gethsemane (Scaer, CLD VI:63-65), and, as in the temptation in the wilderness, Jesus perfectly resisted all of that temptation, too.
Jesus is the Son of God that Adam was not (confer Luke 3:38), that Israel was not (confer Exodus 4:2; Hosea 11:1), and that we are not. As we heard in the Epistle Reading, sin and death came into the world through one man, and death spread to all people because all people sinned. We are sinful by nature, and we sin even when we are only tempted. The idea that even by the right use of God’s Word we can resist temptation and so avoid sin seems to under-appreciate our corruption! We are not tempted in precisely the same ways that Jesus was tempted, but we are tempted to doubt God’s Word and to misuse His Word, and we succumb to those temptations, as we succumb to countless other temptations, sinning in sometimes unspeakable ways. But, led by the Holy Spirit, as we sang in today’s Psalm, we confess our transgressions to the Lord, and He forgives the iniquity of our sin (Psalm 32:1-7; antiphon: v.7).
The Son of God incarnate as the man Jesus shared our human nature but was without sin. St. Matthew does not explicitly say how Jesus resisted the devil’s temptation, but that silence does not stop some Bible commentators from speculating how. Somewhat similarly, theologians point out that, as true God, Jesus was not capable of sinning, though they say that the devil’s temptations were real, nonetheless. We remember that some aspects of Jesus incarnation, like some aspects of the Holy Trinity, are not revealed to us and so remain a mystery! But, thanks be to God that He reveals to us what we need to know for our salvation: from the first Gospel promise in the Garden—that the Offspring of the woman would “bruise”, or “crush” (NIV), the serpent’s head, though the serpent would “bruise”, or “strike” (NIV) the Offspring’s heel—to that promise’s fulfillment on the cross, where Jesus died for us, as our substitute, the death we deserved, in our place. Out of God’s great love for even fallen humankind, Jesus lived the perfect life that we fail to live, and He died for our failure to live that life. Because Jesus resisted the devil’s temptation, He could be the perfect sacrifice for us. As the Proper Preface for Lent puts it, He overcame the assaults of the devil and gave His life as a ransom for “many”, that is, for “all”. His temptation in the wilderness, His death on the cross, His resurrection from the grave, and everything else that He did and suffered for us (confer Hebrews 5:8) arguably constitute what today’s Epistle Reading called His one act of righteousness that leads to justification—that is, to forgiveness—and life for all people, including us. When we, in repentance and faith, receive God’s free gift of grace for Christ’s sake, then, we have God’s peace and joy!
The Divinely‑inspired author of Hebrews twice refers to Jesus’s temptations and what they mean for us. First, Hebrews says that Jesus needed to be like us so that He as our High Priest could sacrifice for our sins and that, because He suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help us who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:17-18). Second, Hebrews similarly says that we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness but One Who in every respect has been tempted as we are, so with confidence we draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:15-16; confer Hebrews 5:2). We receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need through God’s Means of Grace, His Word and Sacraments. We live by every Word that comes from the mouth of God, proceeding from the mouth of God like the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. In Holy Baptism, we are rescued from the devil, and so we can tell Satan to be gone from us. The sins of us who confess are forgiven in Holy Absolution, and, so absolved, we are admitted to the Holy Supper, where those whom the Lord sends minister to us, giving us both bread that is Christ’s Body given for us and wine that is Christ’s Blood shed for us, and so giving us forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
As the Holy Spirit in all of these ways leads us to be in Christ, we share in His victory over sin, death, and the devil, including sharing in Christ’s resisting all of the devil’s temptation. Yet, in this lifetime, we do not yet fully experience that victory. So, in the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that the Lord would lead us not into temptation but guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice. And, we pray in the Lord’s Prayer that the Lord would deliver us from evil, or the evil one, praying ultimately that He would give us a blessed end and graciously take us from this valley of sorrow to Himself in heaven. Until then, we can and might well fast in some fashion for the 40 days of this season of Lent, though our sinful bodies cannot fast as Jesus’s sinless body did. And, we should earnestly try to resist all temptation, including by using scripture as Jesus did, but, when we fail to resist all temptation, as we will fail, with daily contrition and faith, we live in God’s forgiveness of sins. For, as we have realized, “Jesus’s resisting temptation leads to our forgiveness for not resisting temptation”.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Amen.)
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +