Gospel Reading: Luke 4:1-13
For Sunday, February 17, 2013—Lent 1
Let us begin Lent with a test.
The Holy Spirit fills Jesus up, leads him into the wilderness and then apparently leaves him there in the hands of the devil. The devil? Who is this devil? This is how we want to start Lent, by talking about the devil?
The Devil’s In the Details
There are of course a lot of Lent sermons you could give about temptation and how Lent is a time to redouble your efforts not to give into temptation just like Jesus, but that is not really very good theology.
You know, you can’t do what Jesus did, because you are not Jesus and Jesus is God incarnate and you, at best, are a pretty good person, who frankly could be better.
The Comrade of God?
So is this devil the same tester we find in the book of Job? A comrade of God that the creator sent to make sure Jesus was ready for the big leagues of Savioring? Or is he the tempter, knowing what good Jesus could do in the world, so he tries to stop it by offering him shinny things? Or is he, in the narrative world of Luke the archenemy of Jesus?
The text certainly seems to support the theme of the devil as Jesus’ nemesis that will come back to get him at that opportune time. Jesus battles demons all through the gospel of Luke and then the opportune time comes when the devil enters Judas. But I have a quarrel with Luke’s narrative.
Quarrelling with Luke
The quarrel is prompted by what comes next in this chapter. Jesus sits in the synagogue and opens the scroll and reads from Isaiah about how the blind will be given sight and the lame will walk and the captives will be set free and he will proclaim the year of Jubilee.
I learned in my liberal, Berkeley, graduate education that Luke’s devil is not about a personification of evil, but a corporate evil. We do not need some demon to persuade us to do wrong, we do it ourselves for our own gain or to mitigate pain.
The Hardest Question
The devil is sort of embarrassing for progressive Christians. Really, there is actually one guy who is evil and runs the show, trying to make us do evil things? So then we make that guy responsible for the evil things we do? I think that is a cartoon. People do evil things all the time for all kinds of tragic reasons. It hurts and it is hard. I don’t think it helps to blame the devil.
So, isn’t the devil a hindrance to understating what evil really is?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
