Trusting Your Way to Holiness

As we read the life of Jesus as set out in the gospels we are bound to notice that he is going somewhere, that he is on the move. He travels from Galilee to Jerusalem. And in a larger sense he is moving from pure deity to human being and then toward glory after the resurrection and ascension.

If Jesus is our model, then we are going somewhere too. We are on a voyage from our flawed humanity toward godliness – toward God. This is an essential aspect of Christian spirituality – this movement toward God. Said another way, our movement through life is a quest for holiness.

St. Thomas Aquinas says that holiness is the virtue by which a person's mind applies itself and all its acts to God. He makes a distinction between holiness and mere religion saying that religion is the virtue whereby we offer God due service in worship, but that holiness is the virtue by which we make all our thoughts and acts subservient to God (Summa Theologica II-II:81:8).

Using Thomas’s terminology, we acknowledge that we are saved and justified through our worship, but that doesn’t make us holy. We become holy by going beyond mere worship and conforming every act and every thought to the will of God. In other words, worship is an episodic act whereas holiness, or at least its quest, is a way of life.

And this brings us back to Jesus’ own journey and to tonight’s story of Jesus being tempted. This is not a story about Jesus’ inner psychological quasi-hallucinatory turmoil brought on by a long period of fasting.

The story works better as one making an ethical point and a point about how Jesus is an example for us. Here we have Jesus tempted in every way as we are tempted and yet not giving in. He is tempted to play the miracle card – an option not available to us – and resists that too. The Jesus we encounter in the gospel of Matthew is a Jesus who performs many miracles: he cures the sick, he walks on water, he feeds thousands with a few loaves and fish. But not here. Here he is like us in every way except that he does not yield to temptation.

The temptation comes in three parts. It’s interesting to notice what the temptations are not about. There is no temptation to illicit sex here. There is no temptation to exploit others, no harm to others. No one would be harmed if Jesus gave in to any of these three temptations. Indeed, the three temptations seem to be about things that the ancient Hebrew scriptures had always held as good things. We are lured into evil not so often by things that are inherently evil, but by things that are good.

In the first temptation Satan asks Jesus to turn stones into bread to assuage his hunger - a temptation to material things. We are challenged here to give up the riches of this world in order to become holy. Otherwise these good things become ends in themselves and thus distractions on our journey toward God

In the second Satan asks Jesus to throw himself down so that angels will come and lift him up and care for him – a temptation to security. Here we are challenged to set aside all that makes us feel comfortable and secure in this world for a far greater and never-ending security in the arms of an all-embracing and unconditionally loving God.

In the third Satan asks Jesus to worship him in return for power over all the world – a temptation to gain great prestige. This, perhaps, is the hardest challenge because in a way it is a challenge to renounce ourselves – who we are, or at least who we think we are.

What makes these renunciations so hard is the alternative to material things, security, and prestige. There is a sense in which this story is about making a choice between God and everything else. When we give up everything else there is only God that is left. This takes some doing. After all, how sure are we that God is really there to fill in for all these other good things? This takes some powerful trusting that is perhaps the most difficult thing of all to achieve.

There’s an old joke about this guy who is walking along a narrow mountain path next to a sheer drop of many hundred feet. He looses his footing and beings to tumble down the mountain when he manages to grasp on to a tree root sticking out of a rock. As he hangs there clinging to the root he cries out for help. “Help! Is anybody up there? Help me!”

Finally he hears a voice from above saying “Jim, it’s the Lord.”

He cries out “Help me Lord! Help me!”

The Lord says “Okay Jim, I will. Just let go of the root and I’ll take care of you.”

Jim takes one look down to the abyss below him and shouts “Is anybody else up there?”

Jim is being called into a mystery, into the unknown, and before it is entered into it’s terrifying. Our own movement toward God is a movement toward mystery. You cannot enter into mystery and still be in charge. You can’t enter fully into mystery and still dictate terms. You can’t enter into mystery by demanding what you want, the way you want it.

Diogenes Allen, emeritus professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, has written this about mystery:

“…we do not solve mysteries; we enter into them. The deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get. Still greater depths are revealed to us the further we go. In contrast to this, when a problem is solved, it is over and done with. We go on to other problems. But a mystery once recognized is something we are never done with. It is never exhausted. Instead we return to it again and again and it unfolds new levels to us.” (from Temptation, 1986, page 18).

The gospel story we heard tonight begins by saying that Jesus was in the desert fasting for forty days and nights. We must not take this literally. It is an obvious reference to the forty years in the desert in the Book of Exodus and it just means “a very long time.” In a larger sense it is a signal that something important is about to happen. Something decisive is about to take place after this long period of preparation. The Jews wandered in the wilderness for forty years before entering the Promised Land. Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days before beginning his ministry. We now find ourselves at the beginning of forty days of our own wilderness experience before the great mystery of Easter.

We are challenged by this gospel story to turn to God because everything else is empty, shallow, meaningless. But if everything other than God is empty, why is it so hard for us to turn to God?

I’ve never been on a cruise ship, but friends who have tell me that one of the main features is a massive offering of food – seemingly endless buffet tables on every deck twenty-four hours a day. An illusion of fullness and completeness is created by having so many choices. Our lives are like that. We are empty, but we have the illusion of many choices that will fill us up. If only we can make the right choices, then we’ll be satisfied, and if we can do that, well, who needs God?

We do indeed have many choices. But our experiences tell us that these choices, no matter how attractive beforehand, never really fill us up and satisfy us in the end. These experiences of being disappointed with what seems at first to be abundance are gifts from God because they show us that we are always craving for more, that we are always restless, that we have a deep void within us, and that only God can fill the void and truly satisfy us.

So tonight’s gospel is an example for us. In it we are taught that to be a true “child of God” – which in Matthew’s gospel is what a Christian really is – we have to enter fully into the mystery of God with abandon. We have to trust God completely and let go. And since Jesus did not resort to miracles to deal with his temptations and hardships, it means that we don’t get to expect from God miraculous exceptions to the difficulties, and limitations, and imperfections of human life. To be a child of God is simply to trust God.

Because as Jim discovered as he perilously clung to the side of the mountain, there’s nobody else up there.