March 6, 2014
We all dream of starting over. If we could go back to grade or high school; if we could study on the college level. If our marriages could be non-stop honeymoons. If my hair could be black and curly as it was in 1970. From facelifts to testosterone treatment, we would love to reverse the clock.
So we are tempted, upon hearing the first reading, to play with a strange picture. What if I was in the Garden of Eden? What if the serpent was talking to me? (A taking serpent would certainly be worth a lot of money on the TV circuit, to say the least!) What if God whispered his command to me? What would I do? And we might well fantasize how we would do things differently, plucking oranges and grapes as we wished but leaving God’s fruit alone, staying in paradise forever.
Of course, most of this would be our delusion because what happened in Eden happens every day in all of our lives. Adam’s sin is not eating an apple. Adam’s sin is his resentment about any limitations on his life at all. “What do you mean I can’t eat the fruit of this bush? I want it all.” Adam cannot say “enough.” Adam feels cheated by life and by God because he wants everything he sees; he cannot stop. Now the word “Adam” in Hebrew means “the human”—Adam represents every single one of us. We are never satisfied.
So if we all would actually repeat what Adam and Eve did, how can anything ever be different? It would never be different—unless God found a way for us to really begin anew. He sends his Son, Jesus, to be in our place; from our place Jesus reverses the attitudes that Adam generated in his first responses to God. Jesus doesn’t need to have it all. He knows he has it all in God his Father. The tempter comes: don’t you want more to eat, Jesus? Or, don’t you want to be famous? Or, the most insidious one, don’t you want to have unlimited political power? In the face of every temptation, Jesus answers the Tempter back: God is enough, God’s Word is enough, loving God and putting God at the center is enough.
The desert was a special place for the Jewish people. There they wandered forty years, symbolically, under Moses. For all their griping in the desert, they felt intensely close to God through Moses. God was a pillar of cloud by day, and a column of fire by night – a way of saying that God was always with them. Later prophets often urged Israel to return spiritually to the desert, to discover their God afresh. This is why Jesus goes into the desert. He’s taking our place, helping us re-experience intimacy with God, and providing the grace for us to identify with God – instead of becoming rivals to God.
Lent is a kind of journey into the desert. Part of our discipline is to simplify our lives so that, with less distractions, we become more alone with God in prayer, as if we were away, on retreat . . . in the desert. In the desert we can see more clearly who God is, and how we relate to God. We can see the compromises we frequently make, the excuses we give, and the lack of growth that often represents our spiritual lives. In the desert we can also see our sin more clearly—the depth of the way we still do not trust God completely, and still want to be our own gods despite the disaster we make of our lives by our blindness and arrogance.
So we go into the desert, not to be tempted by Satan, or to be tempted by the talking snake. We go to be tempted . . . by Jesus. Temptation is creating an attractive alternate image of our lives, usually for the worst. Why be faithful to our vows, our commitments, our moral ideals? Wouldn’t messing around be more fun? Jesus wants to give us an alternative image: instead of the resentful greediness of the Adam that lurks inside us, how about the grateful joy of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom, abounding in gifts both numerous and grace-filled?