A True Messiah - Reflections on Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1, Year C

by John C. Holbert on Sunday, February 2, 2025

Today we confront one of the more famous episodes in the Gospels, found explicitly in all three Synoptic Gospels, and even in John’s work one reads over and again about Jesus’s being tested and tempted.  Luke follows Matthew’s version closely, despite ordering the temptations differently, placing the Jerusalem setting in last place. The tradition of Jesus’s tempting and testing is clearly a central part of the story about him, since the later Hebrews passages, 2:14-18 and 4:15 focus squarely on this facet of Jesus’s tale. 

 

The narrative is very well known. Luke, always pointing to the work of the Spirit of God in Jesus’ ministry, says at the beginning of the episode: “Full of the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit in the desert” (Luke 4:1). This is a sharp contrast with Mark’s account where Jesus is “driven out into the desert” (Mark 1:12), a violent act that suggests the temptations were not originally part of Jesus’s expected course. Nevertheless, he is in the desert (or wilderness) “in order to be tempted by the devil” (Luke uses here diabolos rather than Mark’s satanas, though Luke employs that term for the temptor elsewhere in his Gospel.) The word used for “testing, or “tempting,” is the one found in the LXX at Exodus 16:4; 17:2; Deut.8:2; Ps.94:9 to describe YHWH’s testing of the people in the wilderness. The writers of the Gospels want us to know that Jesus, unlike the people of Israel, withstood the blandishments of temptation and thus was made ready for the mission that God had chosen the Messiah to complete. 

 

The nature of the temptations is central to the tale and announces the Messiah of God as one who stands over against the expectations of many in 1st century CE Palestine. In short, Jesus rejected completely the option of a violent, military vision for God’s rule in Israel. This fact is made certain both by the kinds of temptations devised by the devil, and by Jesus’ specific rejection of them.  

 

Jesus first refuses to satisfy his appetites by claiming control over nature. “If you are God’s son, tell this stone to become bread,” says the devil (Luke 4:3). But Jesus retorts, “It is written, ‘A human being will not live on bread alone’” (Luke 4:4). The familar addition, “but on every word that comes from the mouth of God,” is not to be found in the best manuscripts of Luke, though it does complete the quotation from Deut.8:3. The devil here challenges Jesus to employ some divine power to mimic God’s ability to give people “bread in the wilderness” (Ex.16:14-21; the connection of stone and bread is also found in Hosea 11:11.  

 

The second diabolical temptation involves power over humans for the sake of individual glory and the worship of something other than God. The devil shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the empire,” presumably those kingdoms controlled by the power of the devil, and bids Jesus to take all the power and the glory represented in these kingdoms; he need only “prostrate yourself before me” (Luke 4:7). Jesus is having none of that either and again quotes scripture in response: “It is written, ‘You will prostrate yourself before the Lord your God, and you will serve only him’” (a reference to a famous line from Deut.6:13, demanding exclusive worship of YHWH alone). The devil claims to control “kingdoms” (oikoumene, rather than Mt.’s kosmos). This is Luke’s way of describing the devil as the master of another sort of kingdom; it is that kingdom that the devil offers to Jesus if only he will worship him.  

 

The third temptation is quite personal. “If you are son of God, then throw yourself down from here (the pinnacle of the temple of Jerusalem).” And then the devil quotes scripture, too. “This is written, ‘He will give his angels a command about you, that they will protect you.’ And furthermore, ‘they will lift you up with their hands to keep you from stubbing your foot on a stone’” (Luke 4:9-11). Here we find a delicious irony from the clever devil. The first quotation comes from Ps 90:11 (LXX) which suggests that God will of course urge angels to protect Jesus when he hurls himself off the top of the temple, since he is, or claims to be, God’s son, but the devil adds the line from Ps.90:1 where it is said David will be protected from stubbing his foot. Well, says the devil, if David will even be protected from a painful foot stub, how much more will Jesus be saved from a plummet from the temple? Jesus’ final reply is a withering one. “You will not test the Lord your God” (Luke 4:12). And with that, the devil withdraws, “having exhausted every form of temptation” (Luke 4:13). 

 

Jesus thus rejects power over nature, over human kingdoms, and over personal survival in favor of the path of peace. This is made plain by Luke’s framing of this temptation episode. In the genealogy of Luke 3:23-38, we learn that Jesus is, in fact, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God’s Son. Then after Jesus is tempted in the desert, he preaches his inaugural sermon which centrally announces the “release of captives” (4:18) and the proclamation of the rule of God, finally capped off by Luke’s statement that Jesus is the one who heals “all those oppressed by the devil” (see Acts 10:38 and Luke 13:16). Jesus’s defeat of the temptations of the devil must be matched by our own in this and every Lenten season. We are, as the United Methodist baptism ritual has it, “to renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin,” and then “accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever form they present themselves.” Thus did Jesus in the wilderness, and so must we now in our own time. 


 
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