Matthew 4:1-11

I'm only including Sundays in this Sermon helper, so I skipped Ash Wednesday. Maybe I'll go back and do that some day since I really like the part about going into your room and shutting the door to pray. Those who “love to stand and pray in the synagogues” are hypocrites. This would be in line with the parable of the Toll Collector from last fall. It's a great passage about how to store up treasures. Don't skip it.

Now, we are in to Lent, which chronologically comes right after Jesus is baptized and before the Sermon on the Mount. Each lectionary year, Lent starts with the story of Jesus spending 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness from the synoptic gospel that we are following that year. It's short and full of symbols.

The reference to bread in this passage is probably not the same symbol of bread from the parable of the Friend at Midnight, more likely it is a reference to Deuteronomy 8 where Moses is reminding people about all God has done for them for the previous 40 years, that He gave them manna, but more importantly He gave them words to live by. There is no special significance to “40”, other than it is used repeatedly, as a homage.

We get another reference to Deuteronomy (6:16), with 'not putting God to the test'. This is one of those escape clauses of theological debates. We heard a lot about “foolishness” and finding wisdom in Jesus during the Epiphany section so far this year, but if you still think there is a way to experiment with the idea of whether or not Jesus is right, this puts an end to that. When people use words like this in a discussion, they are saying they are not interested in reason or evidence. Jesus, since he's already claiming to be God or at least more in touch with God, would have a had reason to say he didn't need the usual level of evidence or logic, regular people don't have that reason.

I saw verse 4:9 out of context on one of those day-by-day flip calendars once. If you don't realize it is the Devil talking, you might think it is God saying “worship me and get what you want”. Sadly, many Christians would be confused by that. It is in-congruent with much of the teaching of the Bible, but it is also taught by many that it is the way worship works. I was in a Bible study class once when someone tried to make the same case by referring to the verse, “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.” It got a bit of laugh, a couple people said they would go home and pray for a sports car.

Neil Carter explains how this idea of "If you pray for X, it will happen" is handled in churches in this blog post.

Romans 5:12-19

Not everyone makes a big deal of this connection from Adam to Jesus that Paul makes here. I've heard it from Jehovah's Witnesses and some others. Adam was the first “perfect man” or as Paul says here “who is a type of the one who was to come”. He had eternal life, but he sinned, so had to die and we all became sinners who die. Then the one, perfect man Jesus comes along and brings grace and righteousness and justification. He doesn't sin, he's obedient, so he makes us all righteous. It's a free gift, just like death was.

This is the entire narrative of the Christian story in one paragraph. It changes as time goes on and is still debated to this day.

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

To make the understanding of all this complete, we need the story of Adam and how Eve got him to sin. There are too many possible interpretations of this story for me to pick one. A couple of my favorites are the one from the book Ishmael and one I blogged about as presented by Michael Pollan in Botany of Desire.

Daniel Quinn, the author of Ishmael came up with his idea completely by speculation. The story seemed to him to be symbolic of the change from herders, freely roaming in paradise, eating whatever they came upon, to farmers, tied to a plot of land, toiling and worrying about doing it correctly. Pollan has a bit more anthropological evidence for his ideas about the tree of knowledge being symbolic of herbs being used as intoxicants in early religions, intoxicants that could open your mind to god-like knowledge. Really, the meaning of this fable is lost to history, or least it is for now. Maybe we will find it one day.