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Lent always starts this way, with the story of Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days, just after his baptism in the Jordan River. So maybe you’re like me and you think, eh, I already know this story about Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, and the devil tempts Jesus to abuse his own power, but Jesus—BECAUSE, WELL, AFTER ALL, HE IS JESUS—is able to escape the devil’s tricks so the rest of us mortal humans should be able to follow Jesus’s playbook too.
Then I came across a commentary about this Gospel lesson that made me stop and consider. Richard Swanson, an emeritus professor of religion, writes on Working Preacher:
“We are part of a long popular theological history that is very sure it knows what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. This history is also sure it knows what it means to be the devil. The tradition might be wrong.”[1]
Swanson mentions the concept of a devil as a power who stands over against God and who tempts human beings to sin, which would not have been the framework of ancient Jewish believers in the time of Jesus. There’s an older, more interesting tradition of satan, mentioned as a character in the ancient Book of Job, and the job of satan is not to oppose God but more like what Swanson identifies as a “Cosmic Building Inspector” to “test…the durability of God’s creation.”[2]
So if you noticed in the Gospel text today that Jesus was “tested by the devil,” imagine this is a test that is NOT like your final exam where you pass or fail. Imagine this testing more like testing a baby’s bathwater—touching the water with your hand to determine if it’s safe for the baby, making adjustments as needed because your goal is to get the baby clean, not make your baby tough. Or imagine testing in the way cars undergo crash tests, to learn where the weak points are so the frames and airbags can be further developed to keep humans safe. Or think of the way a person sewing a garment might tug on a seam to see that it’s secure—she’s not trying to break it, but checking to see that her work will hold together.
So this devil is testing Jesus’s understanding of who he is as the Son of God. Does he think he can use all of God’s power? Does he think he’s better than everyone else? First, Jesus refuses to exploit his power to fill his own belly even though he’s admittedly hungry after weeks of fasting. Second, Jesus is offered power, and humans are always falling for that trick, imagining that power will make you stronger and maybe even immortal.
Jesus responds with more than a smart answer: “Worship the Lord your God.” Swanson explains why the Hebrew words for God’s name are so important here:
“The word “LORD” signals the presence of the unpronounceable divine Name, YHWH, which the rabbis note names the mercy attribute of God. The other name for God, Elohim (translated as “God”), names the justice attribute. But that means that Jesus just accomplished what Jewish tradition calls “the unification of the Name.” Both attributes are brought together, and it is made clear that the justice of God is lived out in acts of mercy, not power. This is a marvelous rejection of our love of power.”[3]
At no point here does Jesus say anything like “I am your retribution” nor even cast God as the one exacting retribution—justice happens through mercy. And mercy is embraced in vulnerability, not the love of power. This is the paradox of God’s strength, showing up in what looks like weakness.
Jesus, the Son of God and the human one, can withstand these tests without hiding behind his divinity nor by exploiting God’s power. Jesus embraces the same vulnerability that is common to every one of us humans.
But could any of us humans even approach a test like Jesus experienced in the wilderness? Would any of us ever take off 40 whole days from work or from our regular daily routines? How extravagant, right?! Who can even afford to do that?
And this is precisely the problem, the way our minds are so fully colonized. “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”[4]
Our Christian faith is rooted in the ancient faith of Judaism, a people who were enslaved in Egypt and never forgot it because the story keeps coming up again and again, as it is mentioned in the reading from Deuteronomy this morning. That story of enslavement, the miracle of freedom, and the forty years of formation as a people following God through the wilderness—that’s the context from which the Law springs, the gift of the Ten Commandments.
And as Christians, sometimes the worst thing we do is to dismiss the teachings that came before Jesus because we miss out on the faith wisdom that formed him. Of the ten commandments, there are two that have the most written about them: one is about not having idols, and the other is about Sabbath.
In his book about Sabbath economics, Ched Myers explains that when we look at Sabbath as merely an option,
“We…miss its profound cosmological and ethical power as the Creator’s strategy for teaching humans about dependence upon a divine economy of grace, instead of upon our own labor, technology, or social organization.”[5]
But the structure of Sabbath as a way of life is precisely what we need to understand if we ever hope to understand how Jesus lived, and if we ever hope to understand how Jesus could even approach an extravagant wilderness full of trust that God would provide, which is the story of Israel’s trust in God rooted in their own wilderness experience.
Ched Myers identifies the 16th chapter of Exodus as “Israel’s First Catechism,” because this is the moment, not long after their liberation from Egypt and miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, that the people complain to Moses how hungry they are, so hungry that they wish they had died in Egypt, in captivity, where at least they were fed.
And immediately God responds, telling Moses: “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”[6]
It’s in this 16th chapter of Exodus where Moses teaches the people about manna, the bread-like food they were instructed to gather every morning, just enough to feed everyone in their own household and any more than that would spoil, and quail to eat for meat every evening. The only exception would be for the seventh day, a Sabbath to the Lord, when the manna would not spoil overnight so that there was enough to eat on the seventh day without anyone needing to work. As the Lord had said, “in that way I will test them.”
This is Israel’s first catechism because you are to live with the knowledge that God provides everything you need! Not to live by the lies that you earned what you have or that if you work harder then you deserve more than your neighbor.
In the words of Richard Lowery in his book “Sabbath and Jubilee,” Sabbath requires self-restraint which is,
“…a leap of faith, a firm confidence that the world will continue to operate benevolently for a day without human labor, that God is willing and able to provide enough for the good life. Sabbath promises seven days of prosperity for six days of work. It operates on the assumption that human life and prosperity exceed human productivity.”[7]
This sounds so simple but so difficult to follow, even for Israelites in the wilderness, utterly dependent upon the food provided by God. Ched Myers describes Moses as doing “fierce battle with his people over their internalized seduction by imperial idols…because it’s easier to get the people out of Egypt than to get Egypt out of the people.”[8]
The verb form of the Hebrew word for Sabbath, shavat, can be translated “rest,” but four times more often it is translated to “cease working.” That’s it, just stop working for a day. The world will continue without your exhaustion because “the Creator made a world that cannot be improved upon by human work.”[9]
And this is the root of the problem, y’all: real faith in God may not be as much about what I am willing to do but more about what I am willing to stop doing. Am I willing to stop working for a time—even for a day! Or to stop shopping because creation is not a commodity, to stop defining myself by my work or my career or by the tasks that I do? I’m not actually willing to give up these things and as long as I cling to them, I will never be free.
Freedom is easily within my reach but I will continue ignoring it because I like this other game better, where peace is a commodity, self-worth is a commodity, all determined by productivity which is determined by markets, all outside my control so I can pretend I’m a victim but really I’m giving my power away to idols like status or wealth or even martyrdom if I can just get people to believe my intentions are pure.
Jesus withstood this testing with the words “Worship the Lord your God.” Worship the God of mercy who is your God of justice.
Even if we were to clear our schedules and actually go on a 40 day retreat, we would find it is much easier to physically leave behind our societal and cultural framework than it is to get that societal and cultural framework out of our heads. What a mess we live in.
And yet Sabbath beckons. Creation calls out to us with its abundance, the echo of God’s voice at creation, “It was good.” And you know, the Hebrew word tov which is used in the creation story in Genesis, where tov is usually translated “good”—that’s kinda too simple a translation. Richard Lowery suggests better synonyms would be “delightful” or “God’s cosmic Wow.”[10] Like a beautiful sunset or the expanse of the ocean or the spectacular colors and diversity of a rainforest—no human can improve upon it. God saw it and said “it was…wow.”
God’s mercy hasn’t given up on us yet. God’s mercy still pursues us in our silly lives and our outrageous ideas of ourselves. And God’s mercy will not quit. All the systems that humans have created have been tested over and over again and always come up short, where some humans have far too much and some have far too little.
Only God’s abundance of creation has withstood the centuries and millennia of testing, providing everything that is needed for people as well as for all creation to thrive. In the beginning, God made everything that was needed for an extravagant, grace-filled life, and it was wow.
On Friday night, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber came through St. Louis to deliver words of hope in a revival setting, and she had a whole group of us, some 1300 people, singing together. After a song, she said, “Do you feel that? That connection, feeling like we’re all together in this? That’s the hormone oxytocin. And that [stuff] is free.”
Amen.
Pastor Cheryl
[1] Richard Swanson, Working Preacher commentary on Luke 4:1-13, Sunday, March 9, 2025, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-luke-41-13-6
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] From the Brief Order for Confession and Forgiveness found in the Lutheran Book of Worship, published 1978.
[5] Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025, page 39.
[6] Exodus 16: 4-5.
[7] Ched Myers chapter 2 footnote 17—Richard Lowery, Sabbath and Jubilee
[8] Myers 36.
[9] Myers 37.
[10] Ibid.
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