Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
There's a quirky detective show called Monk. It follows private investigator, Adrian Monk, who lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and grief over the death of his wife.
In one episode, Adrian helps a friend of his from back in his middle school days. And so there are a lot of flashbacks to his childhood. Like many of us at various times in our lives, it turns out Adrian had to deal with bullies.
But one of the times that a bully tried to put Adrian in a locker, a friend came up and helped him. He looks at the bully's shirt, which has the Rolling Stones on it. And this friend says "Hey, put him down. Come on man, what would Mick Jagger do? He'd put him down, right?"
And this simple declaration completely disarms the bully. He puts Adrain down and walks away grumbling.
It often times doesn't take a lot to deal with the bad we face. That's the lesson we get from our Gospel reading this morning.
In that reading, we find Jesus in the desert, shortly after His Baptism. It's a time for Him to reflect on what has happened and what His ministry will look like in the future.
And it is at this point, when all other noise is quieted and Jesus is alone with His thoughts, that Satan decides to come in and try to disrupt God's plans. He comes in and does what he does to us all. He tempts Jesus.
And he does so in a cunning way. He does so by offering to make things easier.
Jesus finds Himself alone in the desert with no food or solace. So what does the Devil offer? A quick way to receive substance.
The people Jesus ministers to along the way often want a sign. So what does the Devil offer? The miracle of the Angels coming to save Him, a sure proof that this is God's Anointed One.
And what would make Jesus' entire mission so much easier? Power and Dominion over the world. And so the Devil offers Jesus all political power in the world. All Jesus has to do is bow down to the Devil himself to get it.
All of these ways would have made Jesus' life and ministry so much easier. And they would have been tempting. As we will see in Holy Week, Jesus, like all of us, doesn't want to go through all the pain and suffering. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He asks God to take this cup away from Him.
But in the end, Jesus also says "But let your will, not my will be done."
If Jesus was to follow the Devil's offers, he would have lost. He would have failed to be God's chosen, the Messiah, the Savior of this world. Because He would have put Himself under Satan's rule. He no longer would have been following the will of God, but that of another.
And in the midst of these very enticing proposals, Jesus uses something simple to combat this cosmic bully and tempter. He uses Scripture.
But it is not just the fact that Jesus uses Scripture that is important. It is precisely what Scripture He uses.
Because let's not forget, the Devil himself uses Scripture to try to entice Jesus. To try and convince Him to follow him. But Jesus uses the most elegant and simple weapons from Scripture against him. He uses primarily passages from Deuteronomy. And all of those passages would have been taught to Him from Torah as a boy.
So what Jesus uses to beat Satan is quite simple. They're just passages that He would have been taught in the first century Jewish equivalent of Sunday School. They are tools anyone would have been able to use.
Lent is a time where we follow Jesus' example and take 40 days and 40 nights to stop and prepare ourselves for the great feast of the Resurrection. It's a time to examine where we've been and where we are going as we continue to make ourselves more fully the Lord's.
And there are times where we ourselves will face the Tempter, just as Jesus did. And in making our way to be closer to God, we have to combat him, just as Jesus did. And how fortunate we are that we have Jesus as an example on how to do that. Because it doesn't take much. It just takes what we hear in church every Sunday in the Scripture, in the Word, and in the liturgy. And it just takes those simple things that we recall, sometimes those seemingly insignificant things we learned from our Sunday School lessons growing up. Those lessons have great power. They have the power to keep us on the path to be closer to God.
So when you do face the devil in your lives, do not fear. It doesn't take much to defeat him. After all, Jesus didn't call upon the full power of God to smite him. All He used were a few simple words that any Jewish boy would have had in his arsenal.