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Thursday, March 13, 2008
How To Beat the Devil, Again
Psalm 30; Matthew 26:36-46
I grew up in New Jersey. [We pause here for one cheap joke of your choice.]
In elementary school assemblies, we gleefully sang "My Garden State." The landmark in a little park two blocks from my house was a huge dark rock whose plaque said that George Washington and his troops once camped right there on their way to some other place more famous.
When I was a teenager the state opened a new toll road, landscaped much of the way with medians so wide they appeared to be meadows, even little forests now and again. Well, at least once you got south of the urban glut sprawling between Newark and Philadelphia.
One distinctive feature of the Garden State Parkway, then and now, was the spacing of its toll booths. Instead of picking up a ticket as you enter the freeway and paying as you exit, a driver pays small tolls here and there all along the journey. You leave one toll booth, quickly resume cruising speed, and sail merrily along. Just long enough that you almost forget about toll booths. And then, suddenly, wham! Here comes another toll booth just ahead! [Visualize Groundhog Day's interminable repitition, with no chance you'll ever "get it right" enough to stop the repitition.]
I think of this now because Sunday's sermon was about Jesus praying his heart out in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before Judas handed him over to some Roman soldiers with a bitter little kiss.
You might call that episode "the last temptation of Christ." Together with his initial forty days of temptation in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11), it sets the boundaries of our Lenten retracing of Jesus' journey towards his date with destiny in Jerusalem. This one last time, the Devil doesn't show up physically to work on Jesus. Instead, he's invisible there in the dark cold night, whispering, "You don't need to die, you know. There are better ways to get what you're after. Why go through all that suffering and shame when you really don't have to?!"
At least that's what I think was going on between the lines of Jesus' sweaty prayers that night. "If it's possible," he said three times to God, "let me live!"
How many other times, do you suppose, between that first round of temptations and this last assault on his willingness to do God's will, did Jesus have to say No to the Devil? Or to his own human nature, which, left to follow the line of least resistance, would lead him down a very crooked path?
I imagine Jesus' spiritual journey must have felt something like driving through the Garden State Parkway's pop-up toll booths. Stop and pay the price of temptation... Teach and heal and spend quality time with God... Attain a high level of grace and peace and joy... And then, wham! Repeat the process, world without end, amen.
I don't know. Maybe I just don't like that parkway the way I should.
But I do like the way Jesus handled this last temptation.
For one thing, it's a great example to you and me who, in our better moments, really do want to do what God wants us to do. Want to be who God wants us to be. Want to have a hand in God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven. Want to be like Jesus, and here we see how possible that really is. Because he's so much like us -- temptations and all.
More important, it's the great guarantee that you and I really can live like that. Because Jesus did, until the moment he died. For God, of course. For himself, yes. And for people like you and me, which is absolutely amazing! For once, in all of human history, somebody somewhere lived exactly the way God wants us all to live. The curse is broken. The price has been paid.
You may now resume cruising speed.
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
11:02 AM
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