Starve It [Lent 1A]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Matthew 4:1-11 Starve It I guess you gotta starve it, if you want to kill it. And for Jesus, who remember was as much human as he was God, it took him forty days and forty nights. Probably felt like forever. In that wilderness, Jesus wasn't starving his body. Sure, he was fasting; he was physically famished. But the desert days were not a weight loss plan; this wilderness time was not a spa retreat. Jesus, you see, wasn't prone to obsess over his trim figure in the Gospels – as his opponents will later point out, calling him a glutton and a drunk. Jesus was in that wilderness because you gotta starve it, if you want to kill it. And it had to go. Jesus was out there to starve his ego – that piece of us that longs to be great, to be right, to be in control – that thing in us that longs to be God. Because he understood that the temptations would only intensify beyond the wilderness. Each healing, each adoring crowd, each ...