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Stones Into Bread
Sermon by Leah Grace Goodwin
for Sunday, February 29, 2004
First Sunday of Lent
Scripture: (Old Testament) Psalm 91; Deuteronomy 26:1-11 (New Testament) Luke 4:1-13
Would you pray with me?
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer.
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“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”
It seems an unlikely way to celebrate.
Jesus, you see, has just been baptized when this story begins. He has been claimed by God as his own son. He has been made legitimate in the eyes of his community and given the best professional recommendation anyone can really get - a distinctly audible seal of divine approval. “You are my beloved Son,” God has just said; “in you I am well pleased.”
In the next chapter, however, we do not find Jesus celebrating with his friends, or even moving on to the immediate business of his own ministry. Instead, he goes - abruptly, the way Luke describes it -- into the wilderness. Actually, he does not precisely “go” into the wilderness so much as he is led. The author of Luke tells us quite clearly that this whole encounter started because God took him into the wilderness.
The Judean wilderness is not a kind place. It is very hot during the day and extremely cold at night, and if you are human, you are not at the top of the food chain. Water is notoriously hard to find, while in those days robbers, bandits, and demoniacs were quite a bit easier to bump into. Not an easy place in which to survive overnight, let alone forty days.
Why, then, is Jesus led into the wilderness? Why now? Why such a trial so soon after such triumph? It seems a cranky, capricious, and frankly self-destructive thing for the Lord to do, leading his Divine Human into the wilderness and seeming to abandon him there. But Swedenborg has something to say about this. He points out that
“The reason the Lord had these two states, one of emptiness and one of glorification, was that this was the only way he could progress toward union, since this is in accord with the divine design, which is unchangeable. The divine design is that we should arrange ourselves to accept God and prepare ourselves as vessels and dwellings into which God may enter and where he may live as in his temple.
We are to do this in apparent independence, still acknowledging that it all comes from God. We are to acknowledge this because we do not feel God’s presence and working, even though God is most intimately accomplishing everything that is good in love and everything that is true in faith. Everyone moves and must move according to this design in order to become spiritual instead of natural.”
Jesus was led into the wilderness to accomplish just this - to learn in the most visceral of ways what it is to be empty; to discover what is left when one is utterly unable to pretend that anything remains of one’s own capacity to survive; to learn what it is to be desperate enough to let God speak through him and acknowledge that it is, in fact, God and not his human self; to “become spiritual instead of natural.” In short, he was led into the wilderness so that he might, more clearly and more starkly than any normal human is ever called to do, answer two questions: Who are you? And, whose are you? Jesus has already begun to understand the import of his divinity and the scope of his mission, but now he must encounter the enormity of his call, and in the most physical of ways. He has to find out what, exactly, it means to be the divine essence within a very human soul and spirit, and to do that he must undergo temptation, or trial; he must learn about the power of his divinity, and the depth of the upcoming struggle for human redemption, in both the most physical and spiritual of ways. And he must do it in “apparent independence.”
God had been quite satisfactorily present in the previous chapter of Luke’s account, which tells of Jesus’ baptism. His voice is appropriately audible and his statement thoroughly affirmative. “You are my Son, the Beloved,” he says, “and with you I am well pleased.” As Luke describes it, God makes a dramatic entrance, as well, when the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. Now, however, just after this ringing endorsement of Jesus’ mission, God’s voice is conspicuously silent. Jesus entered the wilderness “full of the Holy Spirit,” and it is true that the Spirit guides him not only into, but within, the wilderness - but despite the fact that Jesus is clearly bursting at the spiritual seams with divinity, he does not appear to have gained much comfort, creaturely or spiritual, from such status.
Enter the devil.
We tend to read the wilderness encounter as a sort of semi-civilized rhetorical debate between Jesus and a demon, an argument in which Jesus confidently declaims the various doctrines that eventually send the devil slinking away with his tail between his legs. It seems to me that, in reading the story that way, we rob the incident of much of its power. Swedenborg tells us that
every temptation-trial is an assault on the love a person is involved in: the level of the love determines the level of the trial. If a love is not attacked, then there is no trial… The Lord’s life was a love for the whole human race and was so great and so perfect that it was nothing but pure love... Since this love is not human but divine and since the amount of the love determines the amount of the temptation-trial, we can draw our conclusions about the severity of his struggles and the ferocity of the hells.
The short explanation of this passage: the forces of hell represented by Luke’s devil packed a wallop.
The word “devil” - in Greek, “diabolos” - literally means “one who throws things around” or “stirs things up,” “one who confuses things.” Everett Goodwin once pointed out that “the work of the devil is to get us muddled.” He also reminds us that “the best example of the work of diabolos, the muddler, is our first meeting of it, in the Garden of Eden, in the form of a serpent. He doesn’t ask Eve “why don’t you eat from that tree?’ No, he just kind of sidles up and says, ‘Say, did God say you shouldn’t eat from that tree?’ He just raised the question. Oldest trick in the debater’s book. Confuse them.”
And that is precisely what the devil tries to do to Jesus. He confuses him, by poking him where it hurts. “If you are the Son of God,” he says, “command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Prove who you are, the devil says. Show me your power. And the vicious twist he puts on the whole trial is the fact that Jesus has not eaten for forty days.
It was Robert Heinlein who said that one ought to “avoid making irrevocable decisions on an empty stomach.” Jesus, alas, does not have that choice. And Heinlein is right, because hunger changes a person. Even mild hunger can distract, as anyone who has ever skipped or delayed a meal knows. But hunger, real hunger, the kind that comes from not eating for days on end, possesses you. It strips the mind down to the simplest of all mental calculations: “I need to eat. I must survive.” It links eating to every level of existence in the most immediate possible way.
All this adds up to the fact that when the devil dares Jesus to turn a stone into bread, he is also daring him to prove his power - to prove who he is. And to a starving man, finding food means staying alive - staying who you are. For Jesus, the devil’s question would have been a nearly impossible conundrum. Jesus knows, somewhere deep inside, that the question of who he is, as the Son of God (as God himself, in fact) - is fundamentally the same as whose he is. He knows that the stakes are high, and he knows that the devil is playing a dirty game. He knows that the very foundation of his identity - his love for humanity - is precisely the reason that this demon has such power over him.
Every one of us has had our own wilderness experience. We have all, I would imagine, felt left alone, trapped in a situation which tears at us precisely because it is so important, because the stakes are so high. These, bitterly enough, are generally the times when nothing we bring to the situation seems relevant or helpful. All our histories and beliefs seem to fade into platitudes and dogmas. They may seem useless or lifeless.
Barbara Brown Taylor describes these wilderness experiences as “an Outward Bound for the soul.” “The real test,” she says, “comes when you go solo… that is when you find out who you really are. That is when you find out what you really miss and what you are really afraid of. Some people dream about their favorite food. Some long for a safe room with a door to lock and others wish they just had a pillow, but they all find out what their pacifiers are - the habits, substances, or surroundings they use to comfort themselves, to block out pain and fear… It is hard. It is awful. It is necessary to encounter the world without anesthesia, to find out what life is like with no comfort but God.”
Jesus, in the Judean wilderness, is definitely encountering the world without anesthesia. All Jesus has are stones - the stones that litter the rocky Judean wilderness, the stones that he could, if he gave in to his hunger, quite easily turn into bread. And, the stones of his religious truths - the laws and religious precepts under which he has been brought up. He is hungry - no, he is famished - for food, both physical and spiritual, for bread and for God’s living presence.
And he is in a bind. Social conditioning and religious commitments are powerful things - but are they powerful enough to conquer what Jesus faced? Are they powerful enough to face down the whole of hell? Are these spiritual stones of religious truth enough to remind Jesus of who he is, of his divinity, his love, his goodness, his truth?
What those spiritual stones, those religious truths that Jesus do give him, though, is a verbal pantry. It gives him the words of Hebrew scripture, the laws and stories and creeds he has heard, read, talked about, lived by all his life. The spiritual stones, the religious truths and laws that roll around in his head, give Jesus the words to answer the devil. He falls back on words from Deuteronomy. “Man does not live by bread alone,” he chokes out - even though, in Luke’s version, at least, he forgets the rest of the quote - “but by every word which comes from the mouth of God.” No matter. He chokes enough of the oft-repeated text to force the devil to try another tack. The sparring goes on for at least three rounds.
And then, in the devil’s last recorded attempt, he strikes a low blow. Twice Jesus has deflected the devil’s suggestions by quoting from Deuteronomy, calling back to his own mind the commandments that Moses gave to the Israelites direct from the mouth of God. “It is written,” he says, “that man shall not live by bread alone.” And it is that first statement - that “it is written” part - that has almost more power than the oft-repeated maxim which follows, because in those three words are bound up the complicated fibers of Jesus’ childhood and heritage, as well as his divinity. When he recites the words of scripture, they are not only laws he as a human has been given to live by. Because he is divine, they are also his own words. Jesus responds to his struggles in the wilderness with laws that are his spiritual inheritance in every sense.
But the devil mocks him. He takes him to Jerusalem, to the place in which he will be both honored as a Messiah and reviled as a common rabblerouser, and he places him at the pinnacle of the temple. The setting and the symbolism are rich, bitter with irony. He parks him at the peak of the temple, and he proceeds to use Jesus’ own spiritual inheritance against him. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from this precipice, for it is written,” he says more than snidely, and then quotes the very Psalm we read this morning: “’He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you.’” And then, just for good measure, he cites a second passage.
What are you gonna do now, Jesus? he seems to be asking. How are you going to resist this time?
Barbara Brown Taylor points out that our sense of emptiness is not always a sign of impending spiritual destruction. “The hollowness we sometimes feel is not a sign of something gone wrong. It is the holy of holies inside of us, the uncluttered throne room of the Lord our God.” Jesus, in his struggles with the devil, encounters that sheer magnitude of that hollowness. In that encounter with emptiness, he finds room to bring the Word to life within himself.
Jesus responds to the devil’s ultimate test. Perhaps calmly, or perhaps stretched to his final limit and desperate for something to say in retort, he spits out, “It is SAID, ‘Do not put your Lord God to the test.”
And in that moment, what is written, what is platitude, what is recitation of distant and bone-dry history, explodes into life. Not only is it written - it is also said. Not only is God’s word true, it is good - and it is living, fresh every day. The laws that God gave to his people through Moses so many years ago are the laws by which his people live still. With the words of Jesus’ scriptures, the same ones that he has recited since childhood, the same creeds and commandments he very likely mumbled through as a child and occasionally rolled his eyes about as a teen - with these same ancient and oft-repeated words, the Lord still “[brings] him out of Egypt [out of the wilderness] with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”
Jesus, without the signs and wonders, and in a way that the devil could not have ever imagined, has just turned stone into bread. He has taken the stories of his childhood and the scriptures of his inheritance, the truths that he believes and the laws that he obeys, and he has seen that the ancient words are still leavened with life - they are fragrant with goodness. In this moment, in that tiny phrase, “It is said,” Jesus defeats the devil. Not for good, mind you - he will be back, at a more “opportune time,” to try Jesus’ mettle again, but Jesus has taken a good chunk out of the arguments of darkness.
The poet John Canaday referred to the transformative power of the wilderness thus bluntly:
Praise God for the deserts, famines, droughts
with which he seasons us when we wax fat.
And bless these vacant words as well, [Lord]. Inhabit them.
Praise God, indeed, for the trials that come into our own lives, that show us who we are and to whom we belong. For we are God’s. He has indeed inscribed his name on each of our hearts, as the prophet Jeremiah promised and Swedenborg reminds us - and his love is always with us. At the oddest times and in the most surprising ways, he gives us vision, he inhabits our words and lives, he turns our stones into bread.
Would you pray with me?
Lord, you bless us with our very life, but sometimes this world seems to be a wilderness. Write your word on our hearts, that we might hear your voice speaking to us, loving us, calling us by name, even as we are tempted to forget who we are. Be within us, Lord, that we might do as Jesus did and turn our spiritual stones into living bread, into your love and wisdom. Amen.
Copyright 2004 by Leah Grace Goodwin
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