February 10, 2008 - Temptation - Frank Alton

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17; 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11



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I grew up watching the Lone Ranger. Had to have my mask and my gun. Pitted good against evil. Lone Ranger and Tonto were always good. They were on the side of the law, even when the law didn’t always recognize that. Their enemies were always evil, and they were outlaws, even though for a while they might have convinced the law that they were law abiding folks. I liked the Lone Ranger view of life because it was simpler. To obey the rules was good. To break the rules was bad. I had basically chosen to obey the rules / be good. I discovered early on that life worked better that way. My dad was strict, and it looked to me like he had all the power. Life went more smoothly when I didn’t cross him.

While I wasn’t only obedient throughout my childhood, I was pretty compliant. In fact, I remember to this day one of the first times I publicly rebelled. I was a senior in high school, and I was co-captain of the swim team. It was the day we were going to take the picture for the school album. They always put the year in the center of the picture, and the captains kneeled right above the number. Now it turned out that I graduated from high school in 1969, so the number that was to appear in the middle of the picture was 69. Now I went to an all-boys school, and there were a lot of jokes about the number 69. I had no idea what it meant except that it was dirty. But I never wanted to let people know that.

Right before they were about to take the picture, someone suggested that the co-captain and I point to the number with our middle fingers. Now there could have been no two more unlikely candidates for doing that. The co-captain was the son of an Episcopal priest who was one of our teachers at the school. But Jeff and I did what was suggested. I completely forgot about the incident until a few weeks later when I was called into the office of the swim coach, who also happened to be my math teacher. The picture had finally gotten developed. I had seen the photographer who was also a professor, and I thought I noticed a smirk on his face. To make a long story short, we were both suspended as captains of the swim team.

I never told my parents because I was terrified about how especially my father would respond. Eventually they found out. I was surprised how easily they took it. It was only later that I realized that when both my teachers and my parents found out they probably said, “YES – finally”, because they were worried about how good and obedient I had remained. Finally, I had shown a sign of rebellion.

Now, I know that many of you will have a hard time identifying with that story, though I know some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’ve had the same response with kids – and even adults – who are so compliant and obedient, that when they do something rebellious I rejoice. For someone whose only option is compliance, rebellion introduces some good flexibility.

It’s taken me a long time to realize that compliance and rebellion aren’t the only options. In fact, they are actually flip sides of the same coin. In the school of psychology known as Transactional Analysis, which became popular during those very years of my adolescence in the 60s, each of us is said to have an adult state, a parent state and a child state. Freud called them ego, superego and id. The child state is divided into the adaptive child and the free child. The free child responds to her or his inner desires. While that can get out of hand without the partnership of the parent and adult states, it is nevertheless a very positive state of being for a person.

The adaptive child, on the other hand, is always living in reaction to parents – whether literal parents or any authority figure. But it turns out that the adaptive child isn’t just compliant. Rebelliousness is another way to be adaptive, because it is essentially merely a different way of reacting to authority. I can either obey or rebel against external authority. But if my obedience or rebellion is simply a reaction to an external stimulus, I am just adapting to my circumstances.

The free child isn’t reacting. She is responding to those internal desires. That’s why they call the child “free.” The free child is free to tap into his most authentic desires rather than be distracted by the need to adapt to a certain pattern of reacting to authority. When my friend and I pointed with our fingers to the 69, we were simply being rebellious – and that because someone had dared us to. We were clearly not acting in freedom.

I believe the stories we read from the Bible this morning describe the same dynamic. In Genesis 2, Adam and Eve were free children. The writer describes it with the language, “they were both naked, and were not ashamed.” That is a perfect description of the free child. They were free creatures of God who had created them; and they were enjoying “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (2:9). It was a beautiful state of affairs.

The writer of Genesis uses some delightful plays on words that help readers get the point – that is if they understand Hebrew. On Ash Wednesday, I shared that the very name of the first creature – Adam – is a form of the word for dirt – adamah. Adam was named after his origin, since God formed Adam out of the adamah. Another play on words is the word translated “pleasant” in chapter 2 – “God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.” It’s translated “desired” in chapter 3 where it says, “the tree was to be desired” (3:6). It is also the same word used in the 10th commandment that reads “you shall not covet.” (Ex. 20:17) It appears that desire starts out as a good thing and becomes corrupted. Finally, a third play on words happens at the hinge of the chapters. The Hebrew word translated “crafty” to describe the serpent has the same root. Arum means “crafty” and arummim means “naked.” Before the crafty serpent Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed. Afterwards, they sewed fig leaves.

In the Gospel story of the temptation of Jesus, Jesus is the free child, but this time freedom is a choice rather than a state of affairs. Jesus was surrounded by adaptive children who offered him choices to follow. On the one hand were the compliant children. The most radical of these were the Essenes, who were purists that complied with God’s law so thoroughly they couldn’t even mix with normal society. Then there were the Pharisees who were also strictly compliant, though not as strict as the Essenes. They had a tense relationship with their Roman colonizers. Finally, the Sadducees were more compliant with respect to the Romans themselves. They managed to figure out how to interpret God’s law in a way that led to greater cooperation with the Romans. In the end, all of these put Jesus to death as a way to re-establish peace in the community, peace that Jesus had disturbed by his teaching and ministry. Killing the scapegoat, who is perceived as a rebellious child, is a common way that compliant children try to create peace and stability in society.

On the other side of society were the rebelliously adaptive children. The most famous of these were the Zealots. This group could not fathom that the Pagan Romans would rule over them. They whittled away at Roman rule through small acts of violence. Their movement eventually led to a revolution against Rome that ultimately brought the full force of the Roman Empire against them, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem.

What we have to notice in order to get free is that neither compliant nor rebellious children are free, and that both are reactive, competitive and envious. Society has so often missed the point here. The blame is often placed on religion alone. But education and politics also act on a false division between the compliant and the rebellious. In schools, children who are responding to the inner call to freedom are quickly labeled rebellious and set on a path that often ends with their alienation. In politics, when opposition parties are seen as rebellious they might be labeled “weak on terror.” But the fickleness of this kind of labeling is exposed in the saying, “yesterday’s freedom fighters are today’s terrorists.”

The one called “serpent” in Genesis and “devil” in Matthew is the one who gives voice to the idea that any time limits or prohibitions are placed on our desires, the one who imposes the limits does so out of a desire for the prohibited objects. So the serpent exaggerates the prohibition by asking, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” We know it worked when Even in turn exaggerates the prohibition even as she corrects the serpent’s exaggeration, but adds, “or even touch it.” She has lodged in her mind the idea generated by her own desire that she is being excluded from something valuable by God’s desire for the same thing.

By manipulating the prohibition the serpent or the devil tries to transform legitimate desire into competitive envy. God is then converted from creator into rival, from one we’re related to by gratitude to one whom we are related to by envy,. Desire becomes envy by persuading itself that God is envious first. Oh, we don’t have to think of it as God; we simply envision it as the owner of what we want. Envy is defined not by the desire to have something oneself, but by the desire to deprive the other of that thing. One person put it well when he said, “Envy thinks that it will walk better if its neighbor breaks a leg.” So God becomes in our minds the obstacle to human fulfillment rather than the one who points the way to the tree of life (Gen 3:22).

Jesus points us back to God as the source of the tree of life. When the devil questioned the truth of God’s voice that “you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased” by saying “If you are the Son of God” Jesus refused to be baited. Jesus didn’t have to choose between compliance and rebellion. He could choose freedom. He believed that the one who had called him beloved was true, and had also called him to be the very things the devil tempted him with. The devil was making gifts that should be received from God turn into obstacles that turn us away from God. By his obedience to God, his conscious willingness to depend on God, Jesus is enabled himself to become the bread by which people can live because it is the same as the word which comes out of God's mouth. Jesus is able to become the Temple from which he refused to cast himself down. And he becomes, in his death, the ruler of all the nations of the world.

There is nothing more exhausting for the person," says Howard Thurman, "than the constant awareness that his life is being lived at cross-purposes. At such moments the individual seems to himself ever to be working against himself. What he longs for is the energy that comes from a concentration of his forces in a single direction, toward a single end." Jesus invites us to face up to those moments of temptation and allow him to be our strength in choosing freedom so that we are not distracted from our deepest desires by more superficial ones..