#reLENTless Jesus in the #wilderness

Matthew 4:1-11

If you are…..

Jesus is in the wilderness and gets into a double-dog-dare fight with the tempter, the devil . The devil tries to erase, silence and ignore Jesus’ true identity. Because that is what the devil does!

The devil isolates Jesus and then systematically tells him, he lacks identity (Madeline L’engle calls this process unmaking someone)

Mocking Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, the devil does his work, telling Jesus that if he’s really the Son of Man he should be able to make bread appear.

The devil is tricky, tell us what we should be able to do. How true is that today? How often have I felt people saying to me “Are you a woman of God?” If anyone says that to me I’m silently cursing in my head, because I KNOW what follows is going to be doubt-infusing-gaslighting. The most memorable one to date was “Because a woman of God would dress appropriately and not wear a slutty skirt” I was the celebrant for a wedding at the time and had disrobed to my shirt and skirt which went down past my knees.

It makes me think of my bi, asexual, trans and aromantic-sibs who are told they don’t even exist.

The devil then takes it a step further, trying to say that God made you to be hurt, therefore God doesn’t love you.

God doesn’t really love you Jesus because…..

if God loved you, you could throw yourself off a cliff and die. Telling Jesus that if God lets him die, God doesn’t love him HAS to hurt, because we all know what is going to happen to Jesus.

Jesus dies. How do we square this with our sibs of color who are systematically told they were made to be hurt? That its not our fault they were made inferior (oh my soul, its hard to confess this). How often do we rationalize lack of love? How often do we equate it to God not loving them either?

The devil is doing his work.

Then, the final temptation, is misdirection. The devil tell Jesus that he will give him everything, if Jesus but worships the devil. Ignoring Jesus’ identity as God. Jesus’ answer is the worship of God: the very thing the Devil is trying to silence in Jesus.

Erasing, ignoring and silencing is what the devil wants.

Jesus continues to ground his identity in God’s very being. Knowing who God is, Jesus knows who he is. Nothing more life-affirming than that. 

Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times. View all posts by katyandtheword