First Sunday in Lent, February 21
Luke 4:1-13. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil…When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.
| Because the
story of Jesus’ desert temptations is compressed into roughly a dozen sentences,
it is easy to imagine that the temptations themselves came and went quickly,
in no more time than it takes for Jesus and the devil to conduct their repartee.
But that would be a mistake because it robs Jesus of his humanity, as
if he could dismiss the devil with such debonair ease! The story tells
us that Jesus was in the wilderness “being tempted there by the devil
for forty days.” Of course, in the Scriptures, forty is a figure used
simply to represent “a long period of time.” At the end of the story, after Jesus has gone to heroic lengths to defeat the devil, we are told that his struggle is not over…The story suggests that temptation never ends, that the threshold test for right action must be passed again and again. We do both Jesus and ourselves a disservice if we reduce his agony to a few lines of snappy dialogue. - The Active Life, Parker Palmer, (Jossey Bass, 1990), p. 101-2 |
