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| Temptation in the Wilderness, Briton Riviere |
Its never easy to confront someone with whom you disagree. Few of us truly love conflict. At some point conflict is inevitable, even necessary, and often with those we love. It is even more difficult to confront yourself when you are conflicted by a difficult decision. Sometimes we are caught between a rock and a hard place--- damned if you do, damned if you don't. Sometimes we have to choose between self-care and self-sacrifice. Do I give that person the money or not? Do I offer to help again or not? We may ask ourselves along the way, "What's in it for me?" Have you ever quit something or walked out of a relationship because it wasn't feeding your or scratching your itch or giving you what you needed or wanted? Sometimes we make the selfish choice. And most of us hope to avoid conflict with others. I have personally experienced abandonment by people I thought were my friends. It has felt as if I was used or bled or eaten until the other was full or found another way to get what they needed or wanted. I have experienced much loneliness as a result.
Luke 4 is a narrative of personal and familial conflict, in which Jesus is both the instigator and recipient of opposition. There is a 40-day journey in the wilderness that mimics the stories of Moses, Elijah, and the liberated Israelite slaves in the Hebrew bible. This is meant to be a formative experience of self-surrender and utter reliance on God for sustenance. At the end of it, he is hungry. At that moment Jesus is tested. He is tested to use his status and power to serve himself, and acquire and consume for himself. Jesus refuses to use his status to sustain himself. Then he is tested to take a bribe to promote and advance his rule as Messiah. Finally, he is invited to test God's faithfulness and love by jumping off a high peak and expecting God to save him from harm. We notice that the way the devil seeks to gain access to Jesus and undermine his sense of self is through hunger first. Then it is through lust for power. Finally it is through a misreading of scripture's promises or a flawed theology, for it is patently false to assume that personal risk-taking and subsequent injury signifies God's lack of care for you. You can't fault God for the law of gravity when you break a leg jumping off your roof. Notice the devil knows God's Words. Self-reliance, quid pro quo, and unrealistic denial of human vulnerabilities test us every day. It may be, however, that in the wilderness moments of our lives God is more present to us than we acknowledge. When we are weakest, most vulnerable, most lost to ourselves God is there.
I suspect this encounter was more of an inner conflict that Jesus is resolving within himself about his identity and its implications for his life in community.
And we see what that looks like in the rest of the chapter. From synagogue to street, from Nazareth to Capernaum, Jesus is facing expectations and assumptions. His own neighbors assume that his inspired words and actions are for them, because of them, intended to them. He belongs to them and they get to decide what they will accept from him. And they should expect him to treat them with deference, privilege, and advantage. He challenges them with two ancient stories about God's prophets being sent by God to serve outcasts and enemies, when the same needs were found in Israel. Jesus suggests that he is also sent to the outcast and enemy, despite their own needs. And as a result he becomes one, cast out of the synagogue and chased out of his hometown. He'll never return there. The demons verbalize a response to Jesus. Have you come to destroy us? Perhaps he has. He has come to destroy our resistance to God, our insistence on our own way, our insatiable appetite for more, our desire to control the outcomes, our desire to control the story, our fast abandonment of people when we are disappointed or don't get what we want, our isolating self-reliance, and our denial of how vulnerable we all are. Transactional power is often imbalanced and dangerous. Jesus confronts our desire to avoid pain, discomfort, inconvenience, hunger. He confronts those who experience a privileged status because of ethnicity, race, gender, or economic status. We may not have seen it coming in the beginning, but it is becoming clear that Jesus---inspired and sent--- may bring conflict, confrontation, and challenge to us. When Jesus speaks, a confrontation happens. How will we resist, oppose, reject, or avoid him? What might it look like and feel like to embrace the conflict within us and follow Jesus?
Tomorrow, Luke 5. Jesus invites us to walk.
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