Theme: The Testing of Jesus
There
was a recent article in the Financial Times entitled:
Testing Times for
oil’s biggest names
According
to the article, the major oil companies of the world, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP,
are facing major difficulties, and encountering new challenges.
All the easy oil has gone, so companies must look for oil fields that are more dangerous, technologically challenging or difficult to get to. This means deeper wells offshore, developing windpower, wavepower, solar energy and biofuels.
Testing times is a good description of what lies ahead for the oil industry,
that phrase, Testing Times, captures the major hurdles, challenges that the oilmen are struggling with……
Though the Church has called the experience of Jesus in the desert
The Temptations of Jesus,
it is much better to think of what Jesus faced as a time of testing,
though much of this experience must remain a mystery to us,
it is clear that what took place over that space of forty days
in the desert, was a profound conflict, a spiritual struggle of the greatest significance. A testing………. of the greatest, widest importance……
At
the Baptism of Jesus, you will remember how as Jesus came up out of the water,
the Spirit came down upon Him, and the Father’s voice was heard declaring in
loving affirmation, This is my Son whom I love, with Him I am well pleased. As we read
on in the gospel, we find Jesus led by the Spirit into the desert, probably to
the area the Jews called ‘the place of Devastation’ – 525 square miles of
desert and scrubland to the South of Jerusalem,
unforgiving, hostile territory with extremes of temperature – freezing
cold at night, and desperately hot during the day
In this crucible of extremes………
Jesus faces a profound conflict, a spiritual struggle of the greatest significance
for it is an assault on who He is, and what His
purposes are. The deepest conflicts, challenges we undergo as human beings
always become a testing of who we are……
But this is a spiritual struggle of the greatest significance
for the Father has said:
This is my Son whom I love, with Him I am well pleased
and in an assault on who He is,
The
Evil One asks of Jesus: If you are the
Son of God…..
and then sifts His faithfulness to God, His trust
in the Father:
His priorities, the decisions, the options, that are before Jesus.
Here in the desert, then, Jesus undergoes
a profound assault on who He is, and His
purposes
and we begin to understand the magnitude of what
He undergoes……
This
is, it is clear, a spiritual struggle of the greatest significance
but throughout these forty days,
Jesus
shows perfect wisdom, remains in unbroken communion with the Father,
He
returns from the desert, as One who has overcome…….
Look through the Old Testament – you will find Moses disobeyed God, Israel refused to trust Him, David misused the power given to him, Elijah’s strength failed in the desert all, at the critical moment, failed,
but Jesus does not fail……… neither then, or now !
I
don’t intend to say too much this morning about each single challenge that was
put to Jesus by the Evil One:
the first, you will remember, was to turn stones
into bread, using the power of God……
the second was to hurl Himself from the tower of
the
the third, to take the reins of worldly power……..
all of these Jesus rejects………
Instead,
let us think for a moment about what that victory in the desert means:
its spiritual significance………
We might consider two things:
the victory in the desert over the Evil One means that
First, in Jesus - the kingdom of heaven is rooted, anchored, with foundations deep in this earth
and second: in Jesus, the restoration of human life has begun………..
First, in Jesus - the kingdom of heaven is rooted, anchored, in this earth.
When in the desert, Jesus rejected all that the Evil One put before Him,
the foundation of the kingdom was laid on this earth……
and we are part of it…......
the spiritual significance………of the victory in
the desert is this:
that the kingdom of which we are a part
is a kingdom of the Spirit
which grows,
not through force, or domination, or coercion,
but through trust and dependence on God for everything…….
the spiritual significance………of Jesus’ victory in the desert is this
that life in the kingdom is life lived in love for others,
and the offering up of ourselves in the service of
Jesus Christ
who gave His own life for us.
And second, the spiritual significance………of Jesus’ victory over the Evil One
in the desert is this, that at this point in the gospel we see
that the restoration, the remaking, of human life
has begun……….. in Jesus
God created us for communion with Himself, to find our true life in that communion. We were made to enjoy the fullness of life, richness of life in communion with God.
But that relationship with God has been broken, from our side…..
Where the living God should have been life for us, at the very centre of life, where we should have lived life loving God with all our heart soul mind and strength as a human race, we have turned our backs on Him, and so rejected life, full, abundant and complete.
Cut off from its living source in God human life, slips its moorings and slips into the weakness, instability, frailty that you and I know.
But the steady, persistent declaration of the Scriptures, is that the living God has not given up what He has made - the women and men He has created !
In Jesus of Nazareth, His lowly servant, God has come into the world as one of us, as a human being like ourselves.
And Jesus Christ has reshaped human life, recreated this life, purified our sinful, frail, flawed, life……….
This is exactly what we see in the gospel
in the desert, Jesus restores our faithfulness and trust in God
shows what the purpose of life is,
in the deadly struggle, the conflict with the Evil One in the desert Jesus is victorious. The powers of darkness have no hold over Him.
Now when we come to Christ,
this is His gift to us………that same life,
He shares this His life with us by His Spirit,
that same walk with God……..
the same overcoming of sin in our own lives day by day…..
in Him we learn to depend on God for all things,
in Him we learn to seek God’s will in all things,
and in Him we learn to live a life serving others………
Indeed, His life is ours………
AMEN