Then the Spirit led Jesus up into the wilderness so that the devil might tempt him. 2 After Jesus had fasted for forty days and forty nights, he was starving. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “Since you are God’s Son, command these stones to become bread.”
4 Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread, but by every word spoken by God.”
5 After that the devil brought him into the holy city and stood him at the highest point of the temple. He said to him, 6 “Since you are God’s Son, throw yourself down; for it is written, I will command my angels concerning you, and they will take you up in their hands so that you won’t hit your foot on a stone.”
7 Jesus replied, “Again it’s written, Don’t test the Lord your God.”
8 Then the devil brought him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 He said, “I’ll give you all these if you bow down and worship me.”
10 Jesus responded, “Go away, Satan, because it’s written,You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” 11 The devil left him, and angels came and took care of him. (Common English Bible)
Ash Wednesday 2022
An annual personal tradition of mine for Ash Wednesday if I am preaching is to open my message with this anecdote from Rev. Lillian Daniel in a book she co-wrote entitled This Odd and Wondrous Calling, which reflects on the vagaries of life as a congregational minister. Here, Rev. Daniel shares the memory of her first time preaching as a seminary student at her field education congregation, and it has always hit the spot for me in describing the approach I try to take in preaching Ash Wednesday:
I remember sitting at the back of the sanctuary, reviewing my notes for my very first seminary intern sermon. It was to be a mighty word from God that would correct all the hypocrisy, greed, and faithlessness of the local church that was, nonetheless, supporting my education as they had supported that of so many others. As I mustered my courage to really sock it to them, I overheard one woman lean across her walker and whisper loudly to her pew mate, “Ah, our new intern is preaching. I see it’s time for our annual scolding.” Later, I would pastor a church near that very divinity school, and hear for myself a few “annual scoldings.”
It is easy for Ash Wednesday to fall into the trap of being an annual scolding, a reminder of our own sinfulness that we wear outwardly on our hands and foreheads, for it is much more than that. Nor is it a reminder of our own sinfulness in the abstract, for it is easy to agree with something in the abstract. Actually confronting our own sin—individual and shared sin—is not an easy ask.
In our present moment, I think it is as tough as ever. Our leaders treat any sort of apology as a sign of weakness rather than of moral strength, of being able to admit to your human flaws and swear to do better and be better. That in turn influences us, if only unconsciously, and so the words we use move from words of forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation to words of pride, ego, and power.
Every spoken word matters in such conversations, even as we wish we may not. It is a great lie to teach children to sing that sticks and stones can break bones but words can never hurt. Words are the very first thing to be imbued with power in the Bible—out of nothing but words, God creates light and dark, the seas and the skies, the heavens and the earth, and all which lives upon it. With words, God speaks to Abraham, to Moses, to the prophets, to the disciples. And with words, God’s Son Jesus of Nazareth rebukes Satan when the tempter arrives in the wilderness, intent on triumph.
The accounts of Jesus and Satan in the wilderness in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew are almost identical, but there are a few small differences. Only in Matthew do angels appear at the end to tend to Jesus; Luke’s account ends with the much more foreboding “(Satan) departed from (Jesus) until an opportune time.” And while stones to bread is the first temptation is each account, the second and third temptations are flip-flopped in order from Matthew to Luke. Finally, in Matthew Jesus quotes more fully from Deuteronomy 8:3 in resisting the first temptation. In Luke, Jesus stops after simply saying that one does not live by bread alone. But in Matthew, Jesus continues, and says that we are to live “by every word spoken by God.”
It is not that Luke does not value words, or the Word of God—he is an elegant writer, and his two-volume set of the Gospel and Acts of the Apostles provides divinely inspired wisdom into the early church that no other New Testament writer provides.
But Luke is also a Gentile, and as such he is nowhere near as well-versed in Hebrew Scripture as the other authors of the New Testament, including (and perhaps especially) Matthew. Luke may not have fully understood the deeper need to include the fullness of that verse from Deuteronomy, but that need is still very much present.
In this way, I think we may resemble Luke ourselves in the church, neither fully understanding nor fully appreciating the Jewishness of the Tanakh. For it is out of the Tanakh’s tradition of ashes as an outward sign of repentance that our own Ash Wednesday tradition of imposing ashes springs. And make no mistake, the sins for which we don ashes to repent for are sins of both deed *and* word.
We are to live, Jesus says to Satan in quoting Deuteronomy, by every word spoken by God. And yet we tend to live by precious few words of God—our favorite words of God, the ones that we can wrench to uphold our prejudices, our iniquities, ourselves. We imitate not Christ but Satan in this story when we do so, as Satan takes individual verses to throw in Jesus’s face as Jesus says that we are to live by every spoken word of God. With these words we crowd out other words of God, even as Jesus commands Satan—and us—to live by every spoken word of God.
With words, Jesus beats back Satan. But also with words, Satan quotes Scripture back at Jesus. Our words can just as easily be tools with which to build up as they can be wrecking balls with which to destroy.
For in the word of God is, and will always be, truth, something that is very much a luxury in an age of misinformation and disinformation. With our words we contribute to so many lies, so many bearings of false witness, so many put-downs and insults of people who are different from us that what we have to offer is the equivalent of bread turned to stones…which we in turn take and throw.
Words have not lost their creative power just because we can use them now, instead of only God using words. We may not be able to speak light and dark, sun and moon, or every living thing into existence, but we can speak our own designs, our own loves and hates, the very best of ourselves and the very worst of ourselves into being.
And in the spirit of Genesis, there is great power in that, creative and destructive power. And though that power originally rested solely with God, we have tried to take that power for ourselves, and in so doing emulated the transgression of Adam and Eve in Eden. It was not the apple itself which they took that so upset God, but what the apple represented: the knowledge of good and evil, which is ultimately God’s purview. And they tried to claim that for themselves when it was not theirs to take and own. We imitate that when we try to claim the creative and destructive power of words for ourselves. That power rested, and still rests, with God. And for good reason.
For the harm of the destructive power of words is not limited to each other, or to ourselves. When we lie, when we bear false witness, when we disinform and misinform, when we libel and slander, we lean into the destructiveness of words. We sin against each other, and we sin against the Word.
It is right, then, for us to gather on this evening and, with our words, confess to God and before each other our own sinfulness. It is one step in reclaiming the fulsome goodness of the word.
May our repentance for what we say, what we do, what we have left unsaid, and what we have left undone be seen by the God whose mercy is deep, whose love is everlasting to everlasting, and whose own Word became flesh, pitched a tent, and lived amongst us, that we might one day be saved.
And in so doing, may we rest in the truth that here, in the wilderness, it is not Satan who gets the last word, but Christ.
When the time comes for our next temptation, may it be us who get the last word, and may it be a word of creation, redemption, and salvation.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 2, 2022