By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Feb. 18, 2024)
So today is the first Sunday of Lent and the first... Or in Lent technically and the first Sunday in Lent, we always have one story of Jesus's temptation in the wilderness. This year, we have Mark's version of that story, somewhat shorter than Matthew and Luke's. And Matthew and Luke, there's always this fun argument between Jesus and Satan, but it's always a story about temptation.
Because Lent, for those of you who are familiar with this season, Lent is a time when we wrestle with temptation or at least it's meant to be. What's interesting is that the Greek word, which is here translated as tempt, "peirano" is that word. It doesn't really mean tempt, at least not in the way chocolate cake tempts us or something. Peirano means something more like tried or tested or even proven.
Prove, hold on to that word. I'm going to say more about that later. So as I said, Mark's version of this temptation is highly compressed, as is the Gospel of Mark in general. You can see from your service leaflet that we're still in chapter 1. Mark dispenses with all the stories of Jesus's infancy and childhood, and he gets right in with the ministry of John the Baptist, and then he goes into Jesus's baptism. And then we have this reading for today, and it's so compressed. Mark is so compressed that we have to do as preachers a lot with very little text. So the verses that are in this text have actually been assigned three times since the beginning of the year. I preached on one of these lines just a few weeks ago.
About Jesus going and preaching the good news that the kingdom of God was near and the time had been fulfilled. And in that lesson it led right into the calling of the disciples and that was the season of Epiphany, which is about having revelations. And I guess the disciples had some revelation this time, that same lesson about Jesus preaching, that the kingdom of God was at hand and the time fulfilled. This time, it's in the context of that temptation because Lent is about temptation or not, as I said before. So let's dig deeper here. It's a startling thing, actually a jarring thing, how quickly things change for Jesus in this passage.
He's baptized by John, and then when he is baptized, the heavens open and a spirit comes from the heavens that says, "You are my son, the beloved. With you, I am well pleased." And then it says immediately he's driven out into the wilderness. You are my beloved, and then immediately driven out into the wilderness. And I feel like saying to God, "If that's how you treat your friends, God, that's why you have so few of them." And I make that joke, but there's actually something worrisome, genuinely worrisome in a theology like this that the beloved of God is immediately driven out into this place of suffering and temptation. What's implied by a reading like this, an interpretation like this, is that God tries those he loves, that He puts them through punishing, suffering. I don't like that. I don't like that theology. It's been part of our Christian tradition. It's been misused and abused by our Christian tradition.
And while I do believe that God loves everybody, and I do believe that everybody suffers, I sure do resist the notion that their suffering is the sign of God's love. Here, it almost seems like that. "You are my beloved. Now, get out there where it's really hard." So I don't know what to do with that. Let's go back further to the baptism. Here's another confusing thing. This baptism, John is out in the wilderness. We're told in the verses before these verses that we have today that he is baptizing for repentance and the forgiveness of sin.
The baptism is one for repentance and the forgiveness of sin, and we're meant to understand that Jesus doesn't need that. So why is Jesus baptized by him? This has been a question since there has been Christian theology. Why does Jesus need to be baptized for repentance and the forgiveness of sin if that's not something Jesus needs? In fact, in the Gospel of John, when Jesus goes to John and asks for baptism, John says to him, "You don't need this. You should be baptizing me." So a couple of days ago, I was talking to my wife Colette about this, and I was telling her that I had a list of confusions and nothing to preach about.
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As you have heard so far. And she told me, she said, "Why don't you do what you tell everybody else to do? Why don't you look for love?" Drawing on the great Christian Bishop and saint in theologian Augustine. Augustine said that everywhere, every word of scripture is love because God is love. So if you can't find love, keep looking. That's what I tell people. And Colette told that to me and I went back to this passage and looked and lo and behold, it's right there on the page, a voice crying out from heaven.
Love, this is my son, the beloved. Listen to him. Listen to love. So what's love saying? The traditional rationale for baptism, the rationale that John the Baptist gives a few verses before this passage is that baptism is a rite of purification, of cleansing. Jesus doesn't need that here. So theology has had to come up in the tradition, theology has had to come up with other reasons for Jesus's baptism and the dominant one, the rationale most people have is it's about obedience. It's precisely because Jesus doesn't need it, that this is a sign of his utter obedience, his other utter subservience to God.
And this is why God loves him so much. And I want to ask, is that what love is? I'll love you if and when you are obedient? I love my kids every day and God bless them. They are not always obedient and it goes the other direction too. I know I have been disobedient to God and to those I love, but was I disobedient because I didn't love my parents or didn't love God? I don't think so. If you've been to a baptism at this church before, you know one of the things I say at baptisms is that baptism isn't the moment you become loved by God.
Baptism is the sign that you have always been loved by God. So this baptism, it's not about purification. Jesus doesn't need that. It's not even about obedience, I don't think. So what is it about? Let's look again. The heavens are torn apart, we're told, it's this very rich language. Even in our English translation, the heavens are torn apart. The Greek word here is "schizomenous." And schizomenous means ripped like a cloth. It's also used in scripture to describe rocks splitting in an earthquake. So the image here is if you can imagine like a large cliff face being torn like cloth, it's incredibly dramatic.
And then out of that opening, out of that wound in the sky, comes the spirit of God falling down, pouring down upon Jesus, and then he goes out into the wilderness with the wild beasts and the angels. But we don't have all that stuff about the temptations of Satan, and I think that's actually important here because I think the picture that Mark is drawing is different. One of the commentators I read said that if we think about what's actually going on here, the spirit being poured out upon Jesus and him going out into the wilderness with the wild beast and the angels, he says, what's actually being described is something like a New Eden.
Because in the Garden of Eden, Adam was with the wild beasts and the angels and Satan was there tempting, but that's not what was important. What was important was they were all together in this place which God created as good. What's happening in this moment is that God's love literally pours down out of the heavens onto this earth, onto our earth, sanctifying it, blessing it. What God is announcing as he announces, as this love pours down onto earth is God is saying that it always was and always has been good, ever since God made it, ever since God proclaimed it was good, despite our disobedience.
Instead of God's love being trapped there up in the sky someplace else, not of this world, the skies are opened and it comes down and consecrates this world. What is revealed to us in this passage from Mark is not that Jesus is really disciplined and good at fasting, not that he's really adept at arguing with Satan. What is revealed is that this world, this wilderness, the wilderness in which we move our world is utterly, utterly beloved of God. And because it is beloved of God, this world, not some other world, this world is the theater of God's action. The heavens aren't where God lives and moves and has God's being here, this world, this wilderness among the wild beasts and the angels who surround us. The home of God, as scripture says, is among mortals.
And this baptism is not... This voice from the heavens is not a response to purification or obedience. It is a sign of God's endlessly outpouring love, which is why this is exactly the message Jesus proclaims when he returns from the wilderness. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Greek here means it's next to you. When Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is at hand, he doesn't mean it's almost here, get ready, get pure, get obedient. He's saying it's right next to you, in this world, the person next to you, whether beast or angel.
When Jesus says the time is fulfilled, he doesn't say it's almost fulfilled, get obedient, get pure. He says, it is fulfilled. It is here right next to you, the person next to you, whether beast or angel. It's among us, whether we're beastly or angelic. I said at the beginning of the sermon that that word peirano means something less like tempted and something more like proven. Here is what is proven by Jesus's time in the wilderness. What is proven is that this world, all the world is beloved. Even where there are beasts, even where it's wilderness, maybe especially where it is. This was Jesus's good news, his life and his death were proof of it. Now it's our good news. May our lives, this Lent and beyond show some proof too.