Sermon on March 9, 2025
“Being Tested in the Wilderness”
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
“Lead us not into temptation.” This phrase is from the version of the Lord’s Prayer that I learned as a child, the version that we still use in our Rite I liturgy. The more contemporary version reads, “Save us from the time of trial.” Both temptation and trial are ways to look at what happens in today’s Gospel story, the episode about Jesus in the wilderness that always appears at the beginning of the season of Lent. Another word, one that many scholars think is the most accurate translation of the Greek text, is test: Jesus was tested by the devil for forty days.
I think this matters because we tend to respond to the whole idea of temptation in a very different way than we do a test or a trial. As one commentary notes,
These are not “temptations” to do things that are desirable but not good for him (like our “temptation” to eat an extra piece of cake). Rather, these are tests to see whether even good things can lure Jesus from a focus on God’s will–or can lure believers into following a more comfortable messiah.[i]
Part of being a healthy, grownup person is learning to resist daily temptations like eating too much food or spending too much money or getting too caught up in screen time. Most of us aren’t perfect about all of this all the time, but we plug away at it, pretty much regardless of the spiritual season we’re in. This isn’t a great analogy for what was happening to Jesus during those 40 days in the wilderness. The journey that Jesus was on, and that he asks us to be on as well, was not a self-improvement program. Lent is not a self-improvement program. Rather it’s about maintaining our focus on discerning and following God’s will as best we can, which may or may not lead to anything that looks like improvement to the rest of the world.
Before we go much further, I should say a word about this character we’re calling “the devil.” Yes, for Luke and his audience the devil was real, in a way that most of us today might find a little strange. The Greek term used is “diabolos,” which in the New Testament refer to “the chief adversary of God and humanity. […] This term emphasizes the devil’s role in opposing God’s work and leading people away from the truth.” Let’s not worry too much about how we are supposed to understand the devil, except to hold onto that idea of leading people away from the truth. Clever distraction and outright lies are the tools the devil uses in trying to lead Jesus astray, and I can’t see that his approach has changed much over the last two millennia.
So, if this encounter between Jesus and the devil is a test to “see whether even good things can lure Jesus from a focus on God’s will,” what are those good things the devil is offering? In short, safety, security, and power, in the form of freedom from want or hunger, and the ability to do great things for the good of others. What’s not to like, right? Except of course that it’s all a great big sham. To quote the immortal words of the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness. Anybody who says differently is selling something.” The devil is giving his best sales pitch here and, luckily, Jesus isn’t buying it.
I won’t go through all three of the tests, step by step, but I will say say a word about the second test, when he offers Jesus worldly dominion. He says he has been given authority over all the kingdoms of the world and that he can hand over that authority to whomever he pleases. It’s a lie. That authority isn’t his, and it isn’t his to give away. How interesting that a few chapters later in Luke, it is Jesus who gives authority to his disciples—not so that he can be worshiped, but so that they can do the important work of casting out demons and healing the sick. The devil lives in a sad little bubble of self-interest and inflated self-importance and believes everyone else does, too; all it takes to shatter the bubble is to demonstrate concern for others and speak truth to power. Truth always gets the last word in these tests.
There’s a lot of pain in the world right now, and many of us feel like we’re going through a deep wilderness period. That makes us vulnerable to people who want us to believe they have all the answers and that only they can give us what we need to be safe and thriving. What we the Church, as the body of Christ, can do in this moment is try not to make the devil’s job any easier. We need to use our best powers of discernment to understand where the Spirit is leading us and when we’re being tricked by distractions and lies. Fear and anxiety make it harder to listen to the Spirit; coming together to pray, sing, eat, laugh and even cry together is a powerful antidote to the big lie that we don’t have all we need to get through this wilderness together.
Remember, even Jesus did not go into the wilderness alone, left completely to his own devices; he had Scripture, understood in the context of an intimate relationship with a loving God, and he had a deep grounding in his identity as God’s beloved child, and he had the Spirit’s guidance and encouragement. We have these same resources. Crucially, we have one another. We need to remember this when the way forward seems too hard and the tests we face appear insurmountable.
Five years ago, nearly to the day, we went from a normal observance of Lent to being plunged into the wilderness time that we now commonly call “the pandemic.” If we have learned anything from that experience it must be that so much of what really mattered, for good and ill, was about how human beings responded during that time. Those communities of people who looked out for one another and came together, even when we were masked and standing six feet apart, fared so much better than those communities where it was every man for himself.
Several years before the pandemic, the writer Rebecca Solnit published a book about how frequently people respond to great disasters with a sense of purpose, ingenuity, selflessness, and even joy. It’s a largely untold story that we need to recover and share. Speaking of what happened during a massive power outage in New York City, Solnit notes that people didn’t huddle in their darkened apartments but instead went outside and were delighted to see the stars and even the Milky Way from the streets of Manhattan, something that never happens when all the city lights are ablaze. She writes,
You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light, another kind of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to an improvised, collaborative, cooperative, and local society. However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them. But the constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times.[ii]
Even if we don’t know how to find our way by the actual constellations, we have the Holy Spirit to guide us. And we have the resources of solidarity, wisdom, and generosity, not to mention spiritual gifts like courage and faith, if only we will dig deep and cultivate and trust them. When we face times of trial and testing, the devil wins when our fears obscure the truth, lying to us about the power of these resources and the beauty of the human spirit. Don’t let the devil have the last word. Amen.
[i] Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2
[ii] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (audiobook edition),
