Lenten blog | February 21, 2024

Does the story really need a Satan?

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 21st:  Psalm 77; Proverbs 30:1-9; and Matthew 4:1-11.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

I have mentioned previously my preference for Mark’s willingness to engage with the reality of Jesus’ humanity.  His human nature is Jesus’ connection with us, which is the whole reason for Jesus in the first place.  We need to be cautious when that connection is challenged.

Mark 1:13 is the entirety of the earliest Gospel’s story of Jesus in the wilderness.  Mark serves as the scaffolding for the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Matthew grows Mark’s temptation account from one verse to ten, and Luke from one to twelve.  The story does not appear in John.

In Mark, there is mention of the 40 days, Satan and temptation.  These are then expanded upon in the two later accounts, filling in details that Mark was not aware of some ten years earlier.  Also, Matthew and Luke differ in their accounts.  Scholars believe that they are sharing the same source since the accounts are so similar, but the order we read today in Matthew (a steady rise in elevation from wilderness to Temple to mountaintop) is changed by Luke because Luke customarily emphasizes Jerusalem and thus places it as the site of the climactic last temptation. 

What this adds up to is a basic telling of the story in Mark, a later addition to the story that Luke further adapts for theological reason, and then much later its complete absence in John who is unaware of this account or more likely disagreed with it and chose to keep it out of his Gospel.  This is not so much history as it is biblical theology.  There is most likely an historical kernel at the source of all this, and it is the basic idea that Jesus had to struggle with the meaning and implication of that blast of revelation or realization that struck Him after His baptism in the Jordan River.  However, the most important aspect of the temptation account is the theological matter of how Jesus moved from carpenter to Messiah.

2,000 years ago in a more mythical age it may not have provoked much of a reaction as Matthew shares the news that the bodily devil carries the bodily Jesus to Jerusalem where the two of them stand “on the pinnacle of the temple,” or that Jesus is then whisked off through the skies to a high mountain, but I have to admit for me this all sounds like more than is needed.  For me, it actually interferes in the reality of Jesus’ temptation.

Rather than Satan tempting Jesus from without, what if the temptation story is the mythical representation of Jesus’ inner struggle to discover who He is and what He is to do?  Jesus is acknowledged as Son of God at His baptism.  Is that a relationship to be exploited, that Jesus should expect His own needs to be a priority – as in turn these stones into bread if you’re hungry?  Does His Sonship grant Him privilege so that Jesus can demand of God a release from the vulnerability forced upon all other human life – as in jump down from this Temple tower because God will not allow you to be harmed?  Is His last temptation to simply walk away?  The first two were temptations to pervert His calling as Son of God, but the third is to abandon that calling completely – as in don’t worry about God but rather choose to deny God as did Satan?

These are deeply spiritual and psychological issues that Jesus of Nazareth would have to deal with before He could ever emerge from His isolation and begin His public ministry.  These seem so much more powerful and relatable as Jesus struggles with His calling.  This whole idea of how any of us respond to our conscience, to the inner voice of God, is at play here.  Satan is a distraction.  May we use Lent to listen more attentively for God and may we engage in asking what it is that we expect of faith, and may the Jesus who emerges from these tests in the wilderness help us to choose what may be the more difficult path that our faith calls us to.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.