Luke 4:1-13 – You’re nobody till somebody loves you
I need to acknowledge that the paragraph on temptation #4 ‘being normal’ comes from the sermons of Nathan Nettleton at Laughing Bird.
I associate church with Glomesh handbags (My mother’s provided hours of amusement as I sat through sermons as a child.) But as I prepared this sermon, thinking about our question of the last few weeks of theme of identity, I was reminded of that ad. campaign from the 70’s and 80’s…You can tell a lot about Canberra Baptist by what’s inside its Glomesh…
If you look at the pastor’s note (excerpts from a glowing review of Val Spear’s history of this church) one of the first things Canberra Baptist shakes out of its Glomesh is its ministers! ‘There are several distinct phases’ the review says, in the life of Canberra Baptist, ‘the induction of Arthur Waldock as the first minister’…the 28 year ministry of Fred McMaster, and the ‘equally productive ministries of Neil Adcock (1981-94), Thorwald Lorenzen (1995-2005) and Jim Barr (2006-)’
And yet we know – as we begin another pastoral search process at this church - ministers are not permanent – not as permanent as the church they for a brief time represent and identify.
Our New Testament reading from Philippians also looks at this issue of identity. Christ Jesus, we read, was in the form of God. I’m told there are two Greek words for ‘form’. One is morphe, meaning the unchangeable essence of something. The other is schema, the outward form that changes with time and with circumstances. In verse six, it is morphe than is used. Jesus is unalterably, in very essence, God. God who (a few lines further down) takes the schema, the continually changing form of a human being. But between those two forms is another (beginning of verse seven) Christ Jesus ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.’ What form is this? It is the unalterable, in essence, form. In essence Jesus Christ is a slave God, a servant king.
So, as the human likeness changes (from Jim to someone else) will we as a church – in unalterable essence - have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus? Will we as a church identify with the slave God? Will we be prepared to kneel at the feet of others as did the servant king? Will we be prepared to take up our cross and follow the crucified Christ?
Or are we tempted to try something else?
In Luke (and Matthew and Mark) Jesus is described as being tempted to choose another way – instant bread (just add rocks), instant power and instant recognition as the Messiah. It is no accident that each of the gospel writers link their account of Jesus’ temptation to his baptism. It is clearly seen to be question of identity. "You have been identified as the Son of God," says the devil, "Who is the Son of God going to be?"
I want to take a few minutes this morning to look at the third temptation in Luke (Luke 4:9-13) – the temptation to shortcut the cross and be acknowledged as the Messiah by the religious authorities, the people, the entire Romans world in one fell swoop!
The temple of Jesus' day had been doubled in size by Herod the Great by building a massive retaining wall overlooking the Kidron Valley and filling the area to expand the original plateau. The size was not like a church structure, but more like a shopping mall (larger than Woden Plaza). The temple itself was about 30 metres long, 10 metres wide and 18 metres high. And enclosing the entire complex were towering walls and marble colonnades. A Hebrew proverb said, "He who has not seen the holy place in its detailed construction has never seen a splendid building in his life." Or as the disciples comment in Mark 13, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings."
This temple projected the identity of another impressive structure - the religious establishment of Jesus' day; 10,000 Levites, 7,000 ordinary priests, treasurers or managers, senior managers, priests who managed the priests, priests who managed them, the Captain of the Guard, and finally the High Priest, the only one who could perform the annual rite of purification for the whole Jewish people, the final Jewish authority on religious, political and civil matters.
A Catholic boy in the slums of any city in the world has a better chance of being pope than Jesus had of making it to the top of that structure. But parachuting into the temple courts would have made Jesus an instant Messiah. For Jesus, poised at the beginning of his ministry, here was an opportunity to go straight to the top. (by going straight to the bottom!)
And this temptation did not go away. The devil departed, it says in verse 13, "until an opportune time." And there were plenty of opportune times, right up until the crucifixion. As he was arrested in Gethsemane, he reminds the disciple who has cut the ear of the high priest's slave that he could call twelve legions of angels to protect him, but he doesn't.
Jesus rejects the temptation to be spectacular.
Jesus rejects the idea that God is only to be found in success and strength.
The Glomesh ad. that stays in my mind is "You can tell a lot about Jacki Weaver from what’s inside her Glomesh". Probably because my mum had gone to school with Jacki Weaver and as I looked at the glossy magazine page showing theatre tickets, expensive lipsticks and mementos of a life of prominence and prestige, I reflected on mum’s Glomesh that I went through each Sunday with its crumpled hankies, battered compact and folded church bulletins.
Are we, too, tempted to make our goal the pinnacle of church success… prestige and prominence? Or are we capable of seeing the pitfalls in this path.
Is then our temptation something that seems harmless enough; the temptation to be normal, to be nice, to just get on quietly. On a personal level it is the temptation to just get a good job, work hard, get married, have kids, go to church on Sundays, go for walks in the park, write cheques for World Vision. At a church level, it is the temptation to run nice worship services, have nice morning teas, run a good Sunday School programme, have groups and pray breakfasts and perhaps a young adults social group, and all be very nice to each other.
That doesn’t sound bad. Probably because it isn’t. Temptation is not always something bad. Something it is just a slight variation on something good.
Now I do my mother a disservice when I use her as the example of the normal mum. With three children under 5 she and my father went to one of the remotest parts of the world, because they knew this was where Jesus was calling them. The Glomesh bag had to be abandoned when you were trying to get three small children across a rope bridge.
Rejecting the temptation to be normal means taking the longer, lowlier and much more painful way of the cross – but this is the way that radically proclaims that nothing can separate us from the love of the slave God, the servant king:
Nothing can separate us from the love of God, the God who comes as a slave, who comes as a servant, who climbs the ladder to the cross.
It is in with this identity that Jesus begins and ends his ministry, and it is with this identity that we need to continue ours.