The World As It Really Is
Reflections on the Lectionary for March 9th
I didn’t grow up with Lent. My childhood was spent in and (mostly) out of a couple of churches and the thriving evangelical movement—the Southern Baptist church across the street, the Disciples of Christ church where I spent my teenage years, and summer camps and Fellowship of Christian Athletes groups that were more interested in saving souls than noticing the rhythms of the church year. None of those communities paid much attention to Lent—though they all emphasized Easter—so I made it more or less to adulthood before I really began to grapple with Lent as a season and a practice.
Maybe because of that, most of the popular practices surrounding Lent are not really meaningful to me. I don’t “give things up for Lent,” nor do I “take things on,” as many people have reframed it. I don’t use the season as a way to identify with Christ’s suffering, as many do, and the season’s low anthropology (that old Calvinist perspective that people are fallen and deficient) doesn’t sit well with me. In contrast with Advent, which I find profoundly theologically meaningful, for most of my life Lent has not meant much to me.
In my middle age, I have made a kind of theological peace with Lent. I have come to see it as a season of realism. If Advent is about imagining the world as it could be and anticipating a world to come in which justice and peace and love prevail, then Lent is about seeing the world as it really is. Lent, for me, is a season that’s about noticing and naming the brokenness of the world.
There is no shortage of brokenness to notice and name. To use traditional theological language, we live in a fallen world, shot through with injustice and tragedy and exploitation and violence. The world has always been full of wretchedness and pain, in Jesus’ day as much as in our own, as most of us know from the hard-earned experience that comes from living in the world. Lent invites us to pay attention to this. Lent asks us to make connections between the machinery of death that caught Jesus in its teeth, and the powerful death-dealing ways of our own world. Children die of hunger, soldiers die in war, the planet’s plant and animal inhabitants perish from environmental destruction, people become mired in debt because of a diagnosis, borders sort people into haves and have-nots, people experience violence because of their gender or race or sexuality or politics or religion, and all those things are connected to the kinds of power that condemned Jesus to die. When we read the story of Jesus’ suffering and death, Lent is reminding us, we are learning something about life in a world that needs redemption. Jesus’ suffering and death were special, we claim, but Jesus’ story was also ordinary for his place and time, and it’s all too familiar for our own place and time too.
We know the story from the lectionary for the first Sunday of Lent as the story of the temptation of Jesus, but in some ways this story is a tour of the world’s brokenness. In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the story of the temptation follows immediately on the heels of the story of the baptism (though Luke pauses in the middle for a genealogy). As soon as Jesus emerges from the water of the Jordan River, his journey into the wilderness begins. (In Matthew and Luke Jesus is “led” by the Spirit into the wilderness; in Matthew Jesus the Spirit “drove” him). There’s a connection, in all three of these gospels, between the ritual of baptism and the reality of temptation in wilderness; there’s a connection between the proclamation of God at the baptism that “you are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased” and the experience of temptation. They are linked closely together in all three gospel stories.
What is the nature of Jesus’ temptation? To what, or by what, is Jesus tempted? “The devil,” as the tempter is named in Luke 4, offers Jesus ways to escape from the world’s brokenness and ways to exempt himself from the suffering that is common to humans. “Command this stone to become a loaf of bread,” the devil suggests, offering Jesus the temptation of filling his belly while others go hungry. “To you I will give all this authority” over all the kingdoms of the world, the devil told Jesus, offering him the temptation to hoard power and monopolize the violence doled out by governments, leaving others to suffer the consequences. “Throw yourself down from here,” the devil commands, since God “will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,” which is a way of promising Jesus that he won’t have to endure the same kind of pain as everyone else. In all three cases, the devil’s temptation is to avoid pain, to skip the line, to hoard privilege for himself while everyone else goes on living in danger, hunger, and vulnerability. The temptation is to be self-serving.
In a time of worsening inequality and sharpening divides between haves and have-nots, this is precisely the temptation we face too. Those of us with resources can eat while others starve. Those of us with the right passports can feel safer while people born on the wrong side of a border live their lives in danger. Those of us who are protected in various ways—by our race, by our cis-het embodiment, by our health care plan, by our financial reserves, by our networks of support, by the favors we could call in—we simply have different experiences than the people who live life without a safety net. And even those of us with a lot of protections and privileges—which is, I think, probably most of the people reading this Substack—are noticing more and more often how the world seems to be set up to serve another class of still more privileged people—oligarchs and billionaires and people with their hands on the levers of power. Even those of us who live on the inside of power and privilege in the United States have probably been contemplating, lately, how vulnerable we really might be.
Something that’s important to notice about this story of the temptation is that Jesus does not divest himself from the powers that the devil presumes he has. Jesus does not deny that the angels would catch him if he fell, or that he could command stones into baguettes. Instead, Jesus refuses to take advantage of those powers and privileges; he chooses to live as if he didn’t possess them at all—and then spends the rest of his life using his powers and privileges on behalf of others. In this story, Jesus chooses solidarity with a broken world and all its inhabitants; he rejects the suggestion that he should retreat into his privilege and cover himself in protections that no one else has. Jesus, in other words, chooses to see—and chooses to live in—the world as it really is. Jesus could have hidden from the realities of the world if he had wanted to, avoiding hunger and death, and claiming power over others. Instead, Jesus chose to live nakedly exposed to the world’s difficulties and struggles, the same way everyone else had to live.
Perhaps there is a Lenten practice embedded in this story. What would it look like for us to notice with intention the world’s fallenness and brokenness, and refuse ourselves any privileges that insulate us from having to care? What would it look like to see the world as it really is and resist the temptation to satisfy our own needs while ignoring the needs of the world? What if we spent Lent forfeiting, like Jesus, any unearned birthright or privilege that places us above someone else?
One of my criticisms of lectionaries (including the Revised Common Lectionary) is that they abstract bits of text from their larger context, often out of order. This week’s gospel reading is Luke 4:1-13, but unless you went looking for it you wouldn’t know what had already happened in chapter 3 or what happens next in chapter 4. The lectionary causes us to encounter biblical passages as one-off stories or snippets, without knowing the fuller story or broader narrative that would help us understand them. That happens in an important way for this passage in Luke. I already mentioned that the story immediately preceding the temptation in Luke is Jesus’ baptism (and a genealogy), which tells us something about the connection the author was making between the initiation and blessing of baptism and the need to face the stark realities of the world. But the story that follows after the temptation is just as important. As soon as the devil “departed from him until an opportune time,” Jesus traveled to Nazareth, his hometown, and he went to the synagogue there.
In Nazareth, in the synagogue, Luke shows us a scene that defines Jesus’ life and ministry. Fresh off his experience in the wilderness, having just watched the devil take his leave, Jesus stands up in the synagogue and reads from the book of Isaiah the words that will come to define his public ministry, which showed up in the lectionary just a few weeks ago:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
In the synagogue in Nazareth, having just refused to use his power for his own sake in the wilderness, Jesus promises to use his power for the healing of a broken world. Good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight—these are all ways of intervening in the world’s fallenness. Instead of using his powers to save himself, Jesus announced in Nazareth that he understood himself to have been sent by God to do the work of healing and liberation. It’s not accidental that Luke places this episode in the Nazareth synagogue, which is Jesus’ definitive statement of purpose in the gospel, immediately following the experience of temptation in the wilderness. The devil tried to tempt Jesus toward self-interest and self-regard, but it only catalyzed Jesus to ask how he could use his position and his privilege to serve the world.
By what are we tempted? What does this world ask us to pay attention to, and what forms of self-interest and self-regard do the world’s devils want us to embrace? Our temptations aren’t so different from the ones Jesus faced. Look out for yourself, fill your own belly, trust in your privilege to protect you, hoard power, and let everyone else fend for themselves. Grab what you can, while you can. Be in it for yourself, live in a bubble of protection, and pretend that the world is built only for your comfort and your happiness.
But Lent is about seeing the world as it really is, and Lent is about seeing yourself as you really are, as someone called beyond self-interest and into the work of building a better world. We can spend Lent refusing to eat when others are hungry, and instead bringing good news to the poor. We can spend Lent refusing to rely on our privilege to protect us from injury, and instead advocating for embodied flourishing for everyone, including Isaiah’s “recovery of sight to the blind.” We can spend Lent refusing the temptation to hoard power and lord it over others, refusing the seduction of power over kingdoms, and instead we can work for justice, for release to the captives, for more just governments and societies and for everyone. We can spend Lent, if we choose to, noticing the world as it really is, and working for the world as it could be.
Eric, it is much easier to give up chocolate for 6 weeks.
Thank you for this essay. It gave me new insights into the season of Lent and how to respond to it. That’s a joy!