READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 3:1-21
2 Corinthians 6:1-10
St. Matthew 4:1-11
Grace to you and peace. (1 Thess 1)
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard,
saying:
“Then Jesus was
led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil”, where
“He was with the wild beasts” according to St. Mark’s account of the
Temptation (Mk 1:13).
Presented to you today, is God’s account of His Temptation
performed by Satan. Yes, Sts. Matthew and Mark recorded it, but it is here at
God’s divine direction for you to hear, since He was there by Himself. All of
Scripture is recorded at God’s command and by His will. The Lord includes His
Temptation, because He wants you horrified of your sin, repenting of it, and be
turned in love towards your neighbor. He points us to His Love found only by
Faith and only received in our life, by Word and Sacrament.
Why the need to mention the wild beasts?
It is easy to control others if you give them a common
enemy. An enemy you can dehumanize and call savages or beasts. To be fair, not
all cultures are right. A culture based on sacrificing humans or constant
warfare needs to be corrected in the light of the truth that all life is
God-given. To call another human sub-human is reprehensible.
Reprehensible, because when you look at another person, you
cannot help but see yourself. This is what the 5th Commandment is all about,
because murder is not just you relieving someone of their life, but it is also
you irreparably damaging your soul and your Faith. When you murder another, you
murder yourself.
Though this may be a stark example, this is what sin has
done to us and our world. It has put us in such a state that not only do we
think and believe that others are less than human, but we also judge ourselves
as less than human, and endlessly repeat this cycle of being curved in on
ourselves.
Some may say that sort of vicious cycle creates hell on
earth. That we believe that we have lost our humanity, and yet remain human by
every definition of the word. We live with this malfunction every day, even if
some of us are more adept at hiding it than others, this reality of inhumanity
within us kills us.
Because of this, we believe sin has caused us to be less
than human. That we have become something other than what God had created in
the beginning. But that is false. If it were true, then what are we? More
importantly, what was Jesus? If Jesus was a man, a human male as He claimed,
then all His work was done for humans. But if we are not human, then that work
is not for us.
This is why, in our sin, we consider the wild beasts today.
St. Paul makes this comment in Titus 1:12; he suggests that
maybe people can be beasts saying, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts,
lazy gluttons.” And even though St. Paul is speaking against calling people
beasts, he shows what we do, outside of faith.
But God has created the beasts, so it shouldn’t be an
insult, but it is. Not in the usual sense, meaning of lower and baser
intelligence, but in the sense that beasts hear and obey God better than we
do. A double insult.
For, every beast is mine, saith the Lord (Ps 50:10). They
hear and obey. In things regarding God, they had the sense to stay away from
His holy mountain, in Exodus 19.
In things regarding Creation, year after year they obey
God’s command in the same way, each life, living, mating, dying. In this way,
they are better than us and “All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord;
praise and exalt him above all forever”, as Daniel 3:81 proclaims.
Repent. We fancy ourselves human and that we can tame any
beast, when we can’t even tame our own tongue. We fancy ourselves civil,
decent, and upstanding. We fancy that these are the qualities of a person that
sits in God’s favor. So when we hear of Jesus being tempted among the wild
beasts, we think only of the difficulty of being outdoors with no defense
against them.
When in reality, when the Gospel tells us that Jesus goes
among the wild beasts, it is a picture of Jesus’s work on earth. That He goes
to them because they have forgotten that they are fallen. He goes to them
because they have forgotten they live in the life-less, merciless desert. He
goes to them, because without Him, they would remain as beasts and die in their
sin.
And when He comes, He presents Himself as a Lamb, a Lamb
sent among wolves. There is only one thing a lamb has to offer wolves, or
beasts, that is body and blood. There is no other skill or talent more valuable
to a beast, from a lamb, than body and blood.
So it is that part of the temptation of Jesus is to show just
how far fallen His creation is. It was not so in the beginning, but the time He
chose for His Incarnation saw the world completely engulfed in sin, worse than
Noah’s time, worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. Do I even have to mention what our
place in history is like, in comparison?
This is His good and gracious will, however. For He said, “when
the proper time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born subject
to the Law” (Gal 4:4). That proper time included when we could not do for
ourselves what Christ had to do for us, that is rescue us from our play-acting as
beasts, remind us of our true humanity, and save us from that hell.
For what the Crucified Jesus has come to do is offer His
flesh to the beasts. It is what a lamb does. He offers Himself on a silver
platter, hiding His divinity, in order that He be able to be tempted on our
behalf, as one of us. The God-man enters the fray, suffers, dies and rises
again, not to make bread from stones, but to offer the Bread of heaven. The Bread
that changes beasts into lambs.
Jesus willingly goes into life-threatening danger. Sirach 12
says, “Nobody pities the snake charmers who get bitten or those who go near
beasts, and nobody will feel sorry for you if you run around with sinners and
get involved in their wrongdoing” (v. 13-14). But all this Jesus does,
because the promise is for salvation.
The promise from God is a covenant from God to let the
beasts lie down in safety (Hos 2:18). The promise from God is that there will
be water and bread and wine in the desert and no beast shall go near to destroy
(Isa 35:9). The promise is not to destroy the beasts, but to turn their hearts,
for the Lord will not remember old sin, because He is doing a new thing (Isa
43:18-19).
That New Thing is resurrection and regeneration. The beast
in us is sin, and death, and the power of the devil. Yet, our sinful selves are
spoken to, by God, and by hearing, receive Faith. So it comes to pass that
beasts do honor and praise God by heeding His call to gather and eat and drink.
He says in Isaiah 56, “The Lord God, who gathers the
outcasts of Israel, says, ‘Yet I will gather to Him others besides those
who are gathered to him. All you beasts of the field, come to eat,
All you beasts in the forest” (v.8-9)
And:
“Assemble yourselves and come; Gather together from all
sides to My sacrificial meal which I am sacrificing for you, a great
sacrificial meal on the mountains of Israel, that you may eat flesh and drink
blood” (Ez 39:17).
For when the Root of Jesse comes to complete His Work on the
cross, the wild beasts shall lie down with the Lamb of God, in the forgiveness
of their sins (Isa 11:1-6).
To sum up: in the first sense, part of what Jesus does in
conquering sin, death, and the devil is that He restores all Creation. The wild
beasts of the desert that used to be a threat will be good, once again. Their
habitat will produce life. This extends to all of creation. What used to kill
will no longer. What used to be harsh will now be pleasant.
In the second sense, Jesus regenerates us, not into being human
again, but into Divine humans, assumed into God. That is, joined to Him forever
in holy Baptism. He gives us His Holy Spirit so that we remember we are His
creation as He said, that we remember our original sin, and that we remember
that we have been raised to new life, for Good.
For if God so cares for and feeds even the wild beasts, even
in His own Temptation, then how much more does He care for and feed you His
Body and Blood, O Little Flock! For perhaps once you were called beasts, but
now you are sons of God.
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