Luke 4:1-13, from the First Sunday in Lent

Few stories in the Gospels unnerved me more as a kid than the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, the Gospel text for this week’s Lectionary.

I felt it was bad enough that, had I been Jesus, I was pretty sure I would have turned those stones into bread the moment my stomach growled. But worse than that, I really couldn’t see what would have been so terribly wrong about doing so. In John 2, when the wine had run low during the wedding feast at Cana, hadn’t Jesus made gallons more out of water? Why had it been OK to use divine power to make alcohol so people could get sloshed (I never really bought my teetotaling Baptist teachers’ insistence that it had been mere grape juice) but not bread so that a guy could eat after a 40-day fast in the wilderness?

I remember one teacher explaining that the rock-to-bread transformation would have been bad because Satan had suggested it, and doing anything Satan had suggested would have been a sin. That didn’t help me. Impulses popped into my head all the time. How was a person supposed to know which ones Satan had put there? And if Satan were to suggest that I, let’s say, help an old lady across the street, would his having suggested it make an otherwise kind act sinful?

The Devil’s second trap for Jesus seemed more obvious to me. Jumping off a tall building is a demonstrably bad idea, and even a little boy knows that God doesn’t always step in and save good people from horrible fates. A pretty girl in my boyhood church had died of leukemia before hitting her teens. She had been only a few years older than I was. I had gone to her funeral. I had looked into her casket and seen her corpse. If God couldn’t be counted on to save her, he sure couldn’t be counted on to keep you from splattering on the ground if you were stupid enough to let Satan dare you into leaping from a roof. And the third temptation, well, that was embarrassingly amateurish. Had Satan really thought he could bribe Jesus into worshiping him instead of God?

But none of that mattered, because I knew Satan would have nailed me with the rock-to-bread thing. It had been the first of the three tests, so I would have been finished before even getting started. Secretly, I considered my inability to see the sin in making bread from stone as evidence of a substantial lack of moral insight. And when you’re a fundamentalist kid who thinks he has to do the right thing all the time so God will go on loving him, having any lack of moral insight is frightening and shameful. I buried my questions and pretended Luke 4:1-13 didn’t exist.

But it did exist, of course, and I knew it. Even as a 35-year-old man staring at the brushy hills of the Israeli desert through the window of my air conditioned tour bus during a trip there in 2000, I remember thinking, “Out here, fasting, for 40 days? There’s no way …”

What I’ve learned in the years since, through cycles of failure, repentance and grace, the specifics of which are none of your business, is that the cleverest trap Satan set for Jesus in the wilderness lay not in Satan’s three proposals but in his preface to each of the first two. “If you are the Son of God …,” Satan had begun.

If?

Just 40 days earlier, God’s spirit had descended on Jesus in the form of a dove. God’s own voice had proclaimed, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” There were no “ifs,” no conditions, no players to be named later. It had been a flat declaration of fact. But get a man hungry enough, whether for bread or acclaim or the power of wealth, and he just might forget even a declaration as grand as that one had been.

And we are no different, are we? The Bible tells us over and over that we are loved, forgiven, accepted unconditionally through grace, declared righteous by the only Judge with jurisdiction over our case, and destined to live forever with God. But send a little deprivation our way, point out that some have more than we do, or show us a dead girl in a casket, and, somehow, we forget that we, too, are sons and daughters of God. We start to think that a catch must be buried somewhere in the fine print of all this Good News. “If you are a child of God …” Satan whispers. “You might not be, you know. Some people are, to be sure. But not people like you. You and I know what you’ve done. Like that time you …”

Keep listening, and pretty soon you’ll be turning rocks into bread even though you aren’t hungry, leaping from a building to gain fame even though the Creator of the universe has numbered each hair on your head, and bowing to Satan in the hope of gaining a mere trace of the wealth and power you already have. My dear brother or sister, there is no “if.” You are a child of God. Satan knows he can do nothing to change that. The question is: Do you?