This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 3/9/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 4:1-13. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
Today is the first Sunday in Lent. Lent is a traditional Christian season of the year that is the 40 days between this last Wednesday – called Ash Wednesday – and Easter Sunday, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
The season of Lent is a time for dedicated prayer and reflection, often fasting, whether literal fasting from food or figurative fasting from things that may distract us. Lent is a time to draw closer to God with intentionality. It’s an opportunity to strip away distractions and give our full attention to how God wants to speak to us.
Despite the fact that Lent – just like all other holidays – was not traditionally celebrated by Quakers, Lent resonates very deeply with our tradition. It reflects the same principle that guides our practice of open worship: In the silence, in the waiting, in the slowing down and listening, we can hear and respond to God’s voice.
The tradition of Lent isn’t found in the Bible. It’s what you might call a post-biblical church tradition. It finds a lot of its inspiration in this story from the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus, after being baptized by John and filled with the Holy Spirit, retreats into the desert for 40 days. While he’s in the desert, he fasts from food and dedicates himself to prayer, and it says that he was tested by the devil during this time.
I have always found this story captivating. This is one of the stories in the Bible that I have mulled over in my mind again and again. What it must have been like for Jesus in the desert? What was it like for him to be tempted? How do his temptations relate to my life, my own weaknesses and blind spots?
As I’ve been meditating on the scripture in preparation for this Sunday, I’ve also been thinking a lot about how the story of Jesus in the wilderness relates to where we are at as a people, as the citizens of the United States of America in March of 2025. What wisdom does the story have for us in the midst of our national time of trial?
Now, it says that after Jesus fasted for 40 days… He was hungry. Thank you, Captain Obvious! This line from Luke has always made me smile because, yeah, I would imagine that after not eating anything for 40 days, he might have been a little bit hungry. Thanks for telling us, Luke.
Anyway, Jesus was literally starving, and in this moment of physical weakness, the devil speaks to Jesus and says, “You know, I’ve heard that you’re the Son of God. Is that right? Well, Son of God, you’re looking mighty hungry. If you’ve got all that power, if you are who you say you are, there are lots of stones around here. Why don’t you go ahead and use your magical Son of God powers to turn these stones into bread? Heck, I’ll have breakfast with you!”
The important thing to remember with all these temptations is that they were actually temptations. Jesus was challenged by these taunts and questions. Jesus wrestled. In Hebrews 4:15, it says that Jesus has been tested in every way we are; this encounter with the devil is not merely some sort of performance that Jesus put on for our benefit. Jesus was struggling with this desire to turn the stones into bread.
So I want to take the temptations seriously: Jesus was really hungry and it was a temptation for him to use his power to feed himself. And, to be honest, there’s a part of me that says, “Yeah, well of course! Why didn’t Jesus turn the stones into bread and feed himself?” After all, later on, he feeds a lot of people through miraculous powers. What would have been wrong with him using some of that power to feed himself?
The way Jesus answers the devil in this particular instance is that he responds with scripture and says, “One does not live by bread alone…” which is a reference to the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 8, where Moses reminds the people of Israel that God led the people in the wilderness for 40 years in order to humble them and to test them to know what was in their hearts and whether or not they would keep his commandments. Moses says, “He humbled you by letting you hunger, by feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted with, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
So, what is Jesus saying here? He’s connecting it back to the book of Deuteronomy, to Moses, to the wandering of the people of Israel in the wilderness for 40 years before they get into the promised land. He’s making a connection between his story and the story of Israel, and Jesus is tempted to do exactly what the people of Israel did when they were tempted in the wilderness, which was to go and gather more food than they needed, rather than trusting that God would provide for them each day.
This first temptation seems very venal in a way, right? It’s like Jesus was hungry and the devil said, “Well, why don’t you use your power to feed yourself?” To me, it seems like this should be the easiest temptation for Jesus to overcome. Maybe it was, but it was a serious temptation, because even for Jesus, the temptation to take control and provide for himself, rather than trusting God, was a hard one.
I think about this in my own life, how it is so hard for me to trust that God is going to provide for me. Despite the fact that God has taken such good care of me in my life, provided for me and for our family in ways that are frankly amazing, it’s hard for me to let go of the fear that, well, maybe tomorrow will be different and God finally won’t take care of me then and things will fall apart.
When I feel this fear, I’m tempted to turn my own stones into bread and make myself miserable, grasping and clutching and driving and seeking to make sure that all the resources that I think I could possibly need will be there—not just today, not just next week, but for the years to come. I’m tempted to put myself in the place of God and try to provide for myself, rather than receiving God’s grace as a gift.
Jesus overcame that temptation.
The second temptation that Jesus faces is the temptation to raw political power. It says that the devil led Jesus up and in an instant showed him all the kingdoms of the world and said to Jesus, “If you bow down before me, I will give all these kingdoms and their authority and their glory to you, because they’ve been given over to me and I give them to anyone that I please. So, if you will worship me, I’m going to give all of this power and glory to you. You can remake the world however you want, using my power and authority.”
And what is the power and authority of the devil? It’s deception, it’s illusion, it’s violence, it’s the sword. It’s the domination of the weak and elevation of the strong. It’s the logic of human empire that we have been living under for thousands of years and which seems inescapable. This is the power and authority that the devil is offering Jesus.
Again, this was a real temptation for Jesus. How could it not be? Jesus cared about justice and a right ordering of the world. His people were being oppressed by the Romans. The devil was offering Jesus a way to put the world in any shape he wanted to – all he had to do was use the devil’s strategies of domination and coercion and things would take the shape that Jesus chose.
Jesus rejects this temptation, again referencing the book of Deuteronomy, where it says in chapter 6, verse 13: “The Lord your God, you shall fear. Him you shall serve, and by His name alone you shall swear.” Jesus says, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.”
Okay, so two temptations down: first, the temptation to control the world by providing for yourself and refusing to trust God to be the provider; and then the temptation to control the world by ordering it through violence and manipulation, rejecting the promise that God will bring the world to an order of righteousness and peace through the power of love.
There’s still one more temptation left, and this is the one that I find the most mysterious of the three. I’ve always wondered, what was the devil getting at with this third temptation? It says that the devil led Jesus to Jerusalem and placed Him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,” and he quotes the Psalms to Jesus. He says, “You know, the Psalms say that God will command his angels concerning the Messiah and protect him.” And, quoting scripture again, the devil reminds Jesus that the Psalms say that the angels will bear God’s chosen one up in their hands so that he doesn’t dash his foot against a stone.
Scripture has made these promises about how God will care for and protect his anointed, which God has revealed Jesus to be. Satan uses these promises to tempt Jesus. He says: “You’re God’s chosen one? Go ahead and prove it. Throw yourself down from the temple and let’s watch those angels catch you – and by the way, let’s also let everyone else in Jerusalem see those angels catch you. They’re going to be so impressed.”
Jesus answers this with a little bit of scripture of His own. He says, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Again, he’s quoting Deuteronomy, chapter 6.) Jesus rejects the final temptation.
What was this temptation about? Like most biblical stories there’s a lot of depth here, but one way to look at it is that this temptation is that it is a big twist on the first two temptations, which Jesus has already overcome. Jesus has demonstrated that he really does trust that God is going to take care of him. He trusts that God is going to provide him with the food he needs. Jesus trusts that God is going to put the world right and establish his order of peace and justice and love. Because of this deep trust, Jesus rejects the temptation to establish his own order through raw power and coercion and domination of others, which is the model and pattern of human empire.
So here comes the twist: After Jesus meets these first two temptations with trust and faith, the devil says, “Oh, yeah, really? You think God’s going to take care of you? Fine, prove it. Jump off this building and let everyone see the angels save you. After all, he clearly promises this in scripture!” Jesus recognizes this as a temptation as well because, even though he trusts God to feed him and to heal the world, Jesus knows that he also has work to do. He knows that God isn’t there just to put on a magic show for him and to make Jesus look cool or feel vindicated.
We see from this temptation that there’s a flip side to faith in God that’s just as much a temptation as disbelief. When we are feeling firm in our faith, trusting that God will provide for us and guide us, there is a temptation to believe that our actions don’t matter – that we can do anything we please, and God will sort it out in the end.
In everything that Jesus did, his objective was to show the glory, power, love, and healing of God. Yet in this moment, the devil tries to tempt Jesus into making things about bringing glory to himself. Rather than serving as a vessel to bless others, the devil tempts Jesus to make it all about himself.
Jesus rejects the temptation to materialism and false self-sufficiency. He rejects the temptation to coercive power over others. And he also rejects the temptation to opt out of the struggle of life and treat God as self-help and entertainment.
It says at the very end of the Gospel of John, “There are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” There’s a lot of stuff that happened in Jesus’s life and ministry that we don’t have written down. But not only did the early church decide to write this story down, but all three synoptic gospels tell the story. It is obviously a really crucial episode that the church agreed we need to know about. So I’ve got to ask myself: why is this such an important story?
There are probably lots of reasons that the early church valued this story so much, but I think that one of those reasons is that in this story, we see Jesus set an example for both how we should expect to be tested by life in this world and also how God will give us power to overcome that temptation and live lives of victory, peace, and humility.
In this story, we’re reminded that we are constantly challenged. As human beings living in an unstable and unpredictable world, we are tempted to create our own predictability. We do this through materialism – striving, and stressing ourselves out over money, possessions, and security. We do it through resorting to violence, coercion, and power games to make other people do what we think they should do, even in the name of justice and peace. We do it when we imagine that, because God loves us, we can opt out, centering our own emotional needs and failing to engage in the struggle of our fellow creatures.
Perhaps most importantly, we learn from this story that if even Jesus was deeply challenged by these things, then we should expect that we will be too. There’s no shame in it. But God gives us power to be like Jesus. We can come through the temptations into a place of trust that God will take care of us, that God will order the world, and that God will give us work to do to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth.