Bread or No Bread? [Matthew 4:1-11 - Lent 1A]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Matthew 4:1-11

Bread or No Bread?

Jesus did eat.  Not in this particular Gospel reading of course, but in the thirty-three years of his mortal life, Jesus most assuredly did eat food.  He even ate bread.  Not in this particular Gospel of course, but throughout his life, and in many other Gospel stories, Jesus did eat bread – loaves of it.  In fact, around the village, Jesus was kinda known for eating, was known for his appetite.  Apparently, some folks, not the polite folks, but some people, used to say about Jesus, “Hey! Look, a glutton and a drunkard.”  And so, according to the Gospel, although not this particular one, Jesus did eat.

It seems Jesus was one of those rare gluttons who possessed the will power to fast for forty straight days.  And so certainly, by the time the devil approached him, Jesus was hungry, famished even.  So why not transform a few stones into a long anticipated breakfast?  It is not as if rocks were in short supply in that region.  No one would have missed a few.  Jesus could have easily produced a glutenous, and gluttonous, feast.  But he didn’t.

And that is interesting, isn’t it?  Generally speaking eating is not a sin.  Preparing a meal in the wilderness doesn’t sound particularly evil.  And yet, we name the devil’s suggestion to Jesus a temptation – the first of three temptations we encounter in today’s Gospel passage. 

Every year on this first Sunday in Lent, we read about this thing called temptation – not the temptations we face in our own daily lives, but the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness, following his baptism, some 2000 years ago.  And that apparently fills the quota because this is usually the one and only Sunday in which temptation in on the menu.

I heard about temptation a bit more often in the church of my youth.  When I was a kid, growing up in the Pentecostal church, pretty much everything was a sin and every sin put your soul in eternal jeopardy.  And so we talked about temptations all the time.  Because they were everywhere.  Life was like a 1980’s after-school special: cigarettes, beer, and pretty girls lurking around every corner, at every party, and down every dark alley.  The world was a spiritual obstacle course and just when it seemed like the coast was clear, your friend’s mom puts Madonna on the car stereo or your friend’s dad loads up the old VCR with an R-rated movie.  There were so many insidious temptations beyond the church doors that temptations were one of the most popular topics inside the church doors.

In the Episcopal Church we don’t think a drink of beer will send you to Hell or that listening to Madonna will rot your soul.  But that doesn’t mean we are insusceptible to the power of temptation.  Temptations still lurk in our lives; we are still beset by sin.  We just define that sin differently than our Pentecostal siblings.

My grandmother has actually taught me a lot about temptation recently.  You see, she posts some of the wackiest political memes on I’ve ever seen.  I mean, they are bonkers.  These facebook memes are so inaccurate, so far from being any kind of true, potentially harmful to the human species even, that a part of me just wants to crush them.  And I could – so easily.  I could bury her and her memes in an avalanche of facts, set her straight, argue her into oblivion.  I could embarrass her in front of her friends.  Some days, it is just so tempting because they are just so bad.

But I don’t.  Because even though my grandma and I have very different political views, (I didn’t realize how different until she joined facebook.  Thanks for that, Mark Zuckerberg.) I love her and she loves me.  That woman has been praying for me since the day her teenage daughter conceived me.  When my family had nowhere to stay, she and my grandpa took us in.  She drove nine hours, each way, to see me graduate college.  If I were running for president, she would vote for me even if she hated every policy I promoted. 

And I don’t because I know what her life is right now.  It’s never been easy, but these days I know she is spending a lot of her time driving my grandpa to doctor’s appointments.  She is spending a lot of time sitting in waiting rooms and fighting with insurance companies.  She is making his meals and taking care of him because he just cannot seem to emerge from the avalanche of medical issues that have been piling up.  And so I know she is sharing those memes in the rare moments she has to herself.  She posts them on her breaks, in between posting loving, unpunctuated comments on pictures of her grandchildren.  Her memes are bad, but I know it would be wrong of me to beat her up on facebook.  It just would.  Now if you do it…  I’m just kidding.

The Christian life would be so much easier if we were given a checklist of dos and don’ts, if all of the rights and wrongs were clear and consistent.  But seldom is life or faith that clear.  Life and faith requires of us our best attention and intentions.  Eating bread is a not always wrong; morally, one could argue, it is very rarely wrong.  But in this instance, for this Jesus, it was.  Because the bread, in this case, was not just bread.  Posting facebook comments is not always wrong; sometimes probably challenging a meme is the most Christian thing one can do; some of them are pretty un-Christian.  But my grandma doesn’t need me to fight her on social media right now; she needs me to listen as she details the frustrations of her present.

Bishop Kym, in her Lenten message to the diocese, suggests, “Lent is about mining the deep riches of what a transformed life looks like.”  And I think that is right.  This season especially calls us to be transformed, transformed into the likeness of Jesus; we are called to become more and more like Jesus.

What we see in today’s Gospel is that Jesus’ life, like our own lives, was defined by the choices he made.  Like us he was confronted with difficult, sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes heart-rending, decisions.  And that is why he was in that desert, praying, falling into the deep wisdom of the God whose love sustained him.  Because he understood that the best life is seldom the comfortable life.  Jesus could have lived the easy option.  Instead, he always chose the way of love.  And he calls us to do the same.

That is why we engage the holy disciplines of this season: through them God transforms our lives, makes us more like Jesus.  And as we become more like Jesus those difficult decisions become easier to bear.  We open our hearts and lives to the divine work of transformation so that we can more readily choose to bless others when cursing them is so tempting.  So that we can muster the courage to speak for justice when the ease of silence is so tempting.  So that we have the will to invest our hearts in the kingdom of God, when blowing our lives on those things that are cheap and fleeting and self-serving is so tempting.  So that we are willing to take the loss for the sake of the Gospel when the spoils and splendor of victory are so tempting.    

Jesus had a choice in that desert.  He could have chosen a life of power, riches, influence, and fame.  He could have been a winner.  He could have leveraged his messianic office for an earthly throne.  He could have crushed all comers.  I’m sure it was all very tempting.  But instead he chose the way of love, which led him to the way of the cross.

And there, on the cross, he showed us that love is a choice that one makes for the sake of others.  There he stretched out his arms of love that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace.  Arms that continue to invite us in, to this feast, where Jesus offers us that very thing that fills our hands, feeds our souls, and transforms our lives.  He offers us himself – in the guise of bread.