Jesus and a Jubilee Life
Epiphany 3C | Luke 4:14-21
Last week, we took a detour into the gospel of the evangelist we call John. But now we’re back in Luke and it is full and so very prescient.
When we were last in this gospel, two weeks ago, we had the baptism. If you’re following along in your Bibles, we go from there to the genealogy of Jesus. Then, Jesus is swept into the wilderness for what we like to call The Temptation. But it is really Satan’s attempt to tempt Jesus. Calling it the Temptation of Jesus or The Temptation in the Wilderness has a way of putting the onus of this event on Jesus, as if the temptations merely appear out of nowhere — as if the questions are naturally occurring — and not the product of Satan’s work.
We’ll be talking about those temptations in the next season of the church, so we won’t dig into them now, but we must remember them today because that story progresses into this story, and the subject continues, reverberating into this one.
And what we see in Satan’s gambit with Jesus is to tempt him with power. Three different ways, forms, and perspectives on power. And what is power but the desire and means of control. Control over our destiny, other people, and even God. This, after all, is the desire at the root of power, to wrest authority away from outside ourselves and place it in our own hands. Even if it means stealing it from the almighty above.
We see this today in the declarations that God is rewarding some and punishing others for sporting events or policy choices. Which seem far less problematic than, say, manifest destiny and the claim that God is on the side of genocide. …
The full text may be found here.
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