Sermon

August 5, 2012 at 4:53 pm (Uncategorized)

“The reading today is the three temptations of Christ from the gospel of Luke. Now one of the things that strikes everyone about this passage is the order in which Luke presents the temptations. Most of us are taught Matthew’s account of the temptations, which concludes to the dramatic vision of all the world, and the equally dramatic choice to serve God or the devil.  No one needs to have the basic dramatic arc of Matthew’s account explained to them: the simple objects of the temptations get larger and larger – first a loaf of bread, then a crowd in the Temple, then the whole world; and the decision between good and evil gets more and more clear-cut; starting with the mere desire for food and concluding with the decision whether to seek heaven or the world and whether to worship God or Satan. But what does the Holy Spirit want to teach us by the order of the temptations in Luke? In what sense can we see the temptation to cast oneself from the Temple an ultimate temptation? I have three answers. The first two are familiar, the last is a bit more obscure, but I am convinced it speaks very profoundly to the crisis of our present age.

“First, the temptation at the temple is the most ultimate because it is a perversion of religion and not merely of the secular power. Even if one ruled the whole world this would be no perversion of religious power. This Institution – this Church of God which has been present from the first man, through the Children of Abraham and David to the followers of Jesus – is God’s dwelling upon earth, and  to bend this institution to serve the needs of ego and sin is worse than even for one man to worship the devil and make himself a tyrant of all the world. The holiness of the Church is a greater thing than all the Kingdoms of the world, and corruptio optimi pessimum. We are reminded here that Christ said very little in condemnation of the civil authorities of his time compared to the religious ones. Indeed, we are assured by our faith that the ultimate moment of crisis for the world will not be a fundamentally political or secular crisis, for the Antichrist, whatever else he is, must be a religious leader, and Christ alone will slay him in a definitive battle. Don’t ever let yourself sink into thinking that this world is fundamentally marching to the beat of politics and secular power and wealth. All these are glitzy enough and impressive enough, but they only seem to be in control when we are too close to them to see the great outlines of history. The great outlines of history are marked off by the events of God’s church, not by the acts of mere generals or politicians or rich men. This world is playing out a religious narrative in which politicians and scientists have only supporting roles.

“Second, the temptation at the temple is a perversion not only of the Church, but of the oracles of the Church. We should recoil with nausea at hearing Satan speak the words of Scripture. It manifests his peculiar spite that he chose to pervert a passage of Scripture that spoke of the guardian angels -For the passage that he cites is our clearest and most unequivocal testimony to the existence of the guardian angels. Note that while Satan is fundamentally set against God’s plan his existence and operation are not first of all opposed to God but to the guardian angels. Satan is not an “anti-God” (there is no such thing) but he is an anti-guardian angel. Satan is “the accuser”, that is, he is the one who builds a case against us. He and his angels follow us around all day, taking note of whatever we do wrong, and adding in a few temptations of their own so that they might have even more to accuse us of. All of this is very self-righteous and rational. But it misses the whole point of God’s plan (they are performing experiements on us – but more on that in our last point). But while The Accuser may note everything down carefully and build of a case against us documented down to the last detail,  he does not love his subject. Your guardian angel, however, does everything he does out of nothing but love for you. What, did you think God put him in charge of you as a punishment, or as a piece of humiliating and degrading work? Do you think that the angels have to be forced into guarding you? If they did not do it out of love they would not be worth much as guardians – and they would not even be angels but demons. And so in this temptation Satan is directly attacking the very means that we have to attain to our greatest good: the Church, the Scripture, and our guardian angels.

“The third reason, as I said, is a bit more obscure, but it speaks to what lies at the heart of the temptation, namely to put God to the test. To understand this, I helps to turn notice a story that recurs again and again throughout history – the basic plot is this: a man performs an experiment with his wife’s fidelity, either by pretending to be someone else and testing it or by letting someone else get in all-too-close quarters with her (variants of the story occur in the Greeks, it occurs in Don Quixote, and again in Cosi Fan Tutte). Now anyone who hears the setup knows that this will end badly – indeed it must end badly. But why do none of the husbands in the stories see this? Because they are blinded by the desire for the most definite and certain sort of evidence we can have of things: the evidence of an experimental trial. The problem is – and this is the moral of the story – that to reject the testimony of others and insist that we must see things for ourselves can destroy the very thing that we seek to see. If we will not take our wife at her word, then we will lose her altogether. If we demand that everything give us the clearest sort of evidence we can have, we will destroy the very evidence we would hope to find. This is, by the way, exactly the problem with those obscene and blasphemous “experimental trials” that seek to establish the efficacy of prayer. Such studies are ridiculous anyway, as many people have pointed out (how can we ever determine a group that isn’t being prayed for by anyone? Millions of people pray everyday for those who have no one to pray for them) but this absurdity is not what is fundamentally wrong with them. The problem is that such an experiment can only destroy the thing it would seek to give evidence for, for the same reason that a man who would experiment with his wife’s love is undermining the very thing he would seek to discover.

“The tempation at the Temple uses one of the loftiest things we can attain to destroy the loftiest thing we can attain; for it uses our desire for scientific experimental evidence to undermine and destroy a union of love based on trust in the word of another. The Holy Spirit is teachign us that there is a decision just as fundamental in the trial at the temple as the choice between worshipping God or the Devil. The decision is whether we will demand to know everything by the clearest and best evidence to us, or whether we will also allow for a loving union based on trust in another, that is, whether we will make room for faith. This question arises in every age, but it would not be crazy to think that we face it in a very clear and sharp way. We are particularly aware of the scandal of faith – we can feel to shoe pinch very tightly when we come to admit that nothing that is proper to our faith admits of the sort of scientific evidence that we seem able to find for so many other things. Our assent to the great truths and mysteries of our religion is not based on scientific or philosophical conclusions – even when these can and do have a role to play – but on a union of love arising from our trust in the testimony of another. The atheists will mock us for this, as will many non-Christians who boast that their religion is much more rational, as will many Heretics who boast in their simplified and more rationally acceptable lies about the doctrine given by Christ to his Apostles. Perhaps we will argue the point with them, or perhaps not – but the plain fact of the matter is that it is irrational to demand such rational evidence for every decision. Where the clearest sort of evidence is inappropriate, to seek it is to destroy the very thing one seeks to know. We ought to have learned by now – we ought to have learned from the very first sin our race ever committed – that the desire to know is not a good thing in absolutely every circumstance. You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.