Tested and tried
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Juli Belian
1 Lent (Year C)
March 9, 2025
It’s a weird story in the gospel today, weirder than it seems.
First of all, the devil seems rather late. Jesus is led into the wilderness, and we’re told he’s tempted for 40 days, but what we read about doesn’t happen ‘til they’re over. It’s like a post-temptation temptation. What went on during the 40 days? We’re not told.
Maybe we’ll get some clues if we look at the devil. Well, the word in the Greek is diabolos, and we know - because at the time that the gospel was written, by then the Hebrew Bible had been written into Greek - because the world was Greek and so we have the Septuagint, and we know that the word diabolos in Greek is the same word that was used in the Hebrew Bible, Sâtân, to refer to the person we call Satan, but I would suggest it when it comes to Satan, we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about most of the time. (That was a joke).
It’s not a proper name; it’s just a noun, and it means “adversary” or “accuser.” Even at its most personal, which we really see more in Job, it only reaches a point in Hebrew of gaining a “The” in front of “adversary,” as if this is “The (top) Adversary,” but still, there’s no name involved. And each time that a Sâtân or The Sâtân is sent or appears in the Bible, they come from God. They might be seen as in opposition to God, but Job describes them as the Sons of God, and so there’s a weird dynamic going on here that’s a little hard to get our brains around.
One of the things I think it might help us to think about is the fact that I don’t know whether we know a lot about the word “temptation,” either. It comes from the root temptare, meaning to feel, to try out, to attempt to influence, and that comes from an older Latin root, tentare, meaning to handle, to touch, to try, to test. “Trying” is one of those words that we use in a lot of different ways. Around the 14th century, it came to mean “try” as in “trial,” as in a judicial sense of the word, but it’s always also meant to separate elements from one another. So, when you are trying a case, the jury is trying to cull the facts out of all the stories that are being told. When you try gold, you are burning off the impurities, separating the pure gold from that which is not gold that is in it. These ideas sort of come together in the word tempt, and in the word temptation, and so I think we have to begin by saying and recognizing that this Sâtân is there to try out what Jesus is and what this ministry is about.
But, again, I think we have to review the word Sâtân a little bit further - this adversary. Just to give a little background as far as legal systems go, there are two basic types in the world: the adversarial system and the inquisitorial system. The adversarial system originated in England and is the system that you’ll find in what we call common law countries - what I refer to often as Anglo-derived legal systems - so that includes the U.K., the United States, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. This is different from the inquisitorial system that governs much of Europe. In the adversarial system, the focus is on the fairness of the contest; that is, the judge’s role is not to participate, but simply to make sure that each side obeys the rules regarding how you present your evidence, and let the jury hear all of it. It’s understood that each party in a dispute has a right to have an adversary to sell their case, to make their case as strongly as possible. The belief is that, in that contest of two points of view, the jury will be able to sort out, to try out the truth of the matter.
By contrast, the inquisitorial system places emphasis on discovering the truth as the goal, rather than the rules about the contest. Judges in an inquisitorial system are authorized to ask questions directly, and even to investigate on their own should they feel that that is necessary. They are not worried as much about a fair competition between the parties, more about digging down into all the details of the situation.
Now the primary flaw with the adversarial system is that, with all these people running around trying to give their best case, the truth may not come out sometimes, and we all know this. Sometimes the wrong party wins. Sometimes the guilty go free. Sometimes the innocent go to jail.
The problem with the inquisitorial system – well, it all kind of shows up in the name. If you immediately thought about the Inquisition, you’re thinking correctly, because that word refers to heresy trials under the European system, where judges were allowed to do whatever they thought necessary to bring out the truth of the situation. They could torture witnesses if they thought that that would enable them to get at the truth.
We could say there are problems with either system, but it’s just important, for these purposes, to understand which is what and what it means judicially or legally to talk about an adversary.
Now the rabbis who reflected on these ideas at the time the Mishna was composed were not fond of the idea of lawyers, or lawyers themselves. (Very seldom is anybody fond of lawyers.) As Rabbi Dr. Richard Hydera notes in his Rabbi’s Classic Rhetoric, the rabbis didn’t think that justice and fairness could be achieved through the use of lawyers in human courts. It was up to the judges to promote compromise, and if that didn’t work, to make sure to judge fairly. But in the Heavenly court, Hydera suggests that lawyers are present to persuade God away from strict justice. When it comes to our fate before the ultimate judge, we might not be as excited about the truth as we would be to have a strong advocate. Hydera writes, “A heavenly court that followed strict justice and judged human actions according to the truth would issue impossibly harsh, even if justifiable, verdicts.”[1]
We see this dynamic in Job, where the adversary challenges God, and has been allowed to test - to try - Job with plagues and heartbreaks to find out what is really in him, to sort out the true faith from simply the faith that is present in easy times. And in numbers, God sends an adversary to challenge and stop Balaam from keeping an appointment to curse the Israelites. Here we see an adversary with Jesus. So, what is going on here if the traditional role of the adversary in Jewish literature is to rein God in, to prevent God from exacting justified but impossibly harsh verdicts. How do we understand what the adversary is saying to Jesus and Jesus’s responses?
One of things I really, really like about our Bible is that there are so many places where they leave out the details we wish we had. That means that we are not only allowed, but occasionally compelled, to imagine what might have been going on during those 40 days. If we think about the arc of Luke so far, Jesus is born, gets lots of recognition in his early days, has kind of a “high show” moment when he goes to the temple and is a wiseacre little 12-year-old, and then we hear nothing else until he shows up to get baptized by John and go off into the wilderness for this temptation, this time when he will be tried to find out what is in him. Many, many authors have written imaginative, explorations of what Jesus did during those interim years. Where was he? What was he up to? In one of my favorites which is called Lamb, Jesus travels the world, and at one point, he’s watching a Hindu sacrifice - it’s a sacrifice of hundreds of children, historically accurate for the time, this was a practice that was followed - and he’s very distressed by it, and his best friend hears him walking away from the scene saying, “No more. No more. No more sacrifice. No more,” and his best friend says, “He wasn’t talking to me.” I have a feeling he was talking to God.
So, putting all this together, the imaginative fill-in I’m going to give you - and I do this with my students all the time, and I always have to stress - this isn’t in there. It isn’t in the text. I’m making stuff up. But sometimes as I said, I think that could help. I’ve read so many commentaries on this in the past week and everybody’s like, “Oh, you know, Jesus was hungry, and this is just blah blah.” That seems so trivial, really. Why? Why what would that be what it’s about?
But what if the point of this time was for Jesus to figure out what kind of savior, what kind of Messiah he was going to be? Let’s say at this point he knows he’s the Messiah - probably a little freaked out by it, but he needs to figure out what that means, what kind of Messiah he will be. We already know he understands he can’t solve poverty; we have other places in the gospel where he says, You’ll have the poor with you always. And so, he resists the temptation to be a God who supplies bread to the poor; that’s not what they need. Well, what about a Messiah who rules the world, which is what the original Jewish prophecies seem to predict? Nope, not gonna be that kind either. At this point I can imagine the adversary saying, “Well you know, with ideas like that, the Jews are not gonna be very happy. You’re gonna get yourself killed! But of course, you can get out of that.” And Jesus saying in the end, “Nope I’m not gonna be that kind, either.”
And with that, the path is set: the past to Jerusalem and to the cross. Jesus had an opportunity to be a different Messiah, but when he was tried, he was found to have in him the Messiah we know.
This is our time to explore the crack, the flaw in the universe, and find out what we are made of, to sort out our own impurities from the better parts. It’s time to explore and see what we find.
Amen.
[1] https://hebrewwordlessons.com/2019/06/16/satan-adversary-is-not-a-name/