lent 1 21 february 2010
Romans 10. 8b-13
Luke 4. 1-13
I can recall preaching about the temptations of Jesus a few years ago and after finishing I realised that I had been rabbiting on about this interaction between Jesus and the devil as a very real interaction but that I really hadn’t bothered to qualify with you what sort of conversation I thought this was. What is the nature of this conversation between Jesus and this one who Luke calls “the devil”? I don’t know what you thought, three years ago I suppose it was, I was thinking about the existence of the devil. You probably don’t even remember the sermon. Or do you; were you thinking: “He seems to really believe that the “the devil” is a flesh and blood figure”?

Do I believe that this is some flesh and blood devil conversing with Jesus in the wilderness? Well no. Do I believe that this episode really happened? I find it highly improbable. Do I think that this interaction is real? Very much so. But what does it mean to say I don’t believe it happened but that the story is real?

This testing of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness is common to each of Mark and Matthew and Luke’s gospels. In Mark, the earliest of the gospels, we are told that immediately following Jesus’ baptism the spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness where he is temped by Satan and is with the wild beasts and is waited upon by the angels. In Mark there is no specific detail about what happens in the wilderness.

But Luke, the master story teller, enables us to imagine ourselves into Jesus’ inner struggle to work out what it means to be the faithful son of God. This gospel story is not some sort of reality TV program where the camera hovers over the shoulders of Jesus and the Devil as they mumble away at each other. And it’s not some first hand account from Luke who happened to be present in the desert with Jesus. So how did Luke come by this story? We know that in all likelihood this is not Luke’s story because Matthew tells it in almost exactly the same words. Biblical scholars suggest that this, along with a whole lot of material which is common to Matthew and Luke comes from a source which is known as Q; from the German word Quell, for source. Could it be that Jesus recounted this episode to someone? Or could it be that this is a creative device to help Jesus’ followers to imagine themselves into what Q saw as the three fundamental temptations which stood in the way of Jesus fulfilling his calling to fully be Son of God. I think this is a piece of imaginary writing. Whether it actually happened or not no one will ever know; but I ask again is the interaction real. I would still say, Yes. Yes because if we sit with this we can imagine ourselves into it.

I’ve been wondering lately about our tendency to want to believe that the gospels are factual accounts of what actually happened. Well, actually, I wonder about this question an awful lot of the time; the question of why we want to believe that the text is the literal truth. Because if you hadn’t already noticed it’s quite a big problem in the world – the reading of religious texts in a literal way; giving birth to fundamentalisms of all kinds. I keep on wondering to myself: is there a key to this phenomenon in human development which leads us down this path; that creates in us a predisposition to wanting the text to be true in a factual way. What shapes our take on scripture?

I recently realised that at a very early age we are exposed to a fundamental way of dividing up the world. It happens when we are children – it’s like mother’s milk to us. I don’t know if it happened to you but I can certainly recall it. It’s when you are taken into a library for the first time and are taught about how to use the book collection. In a library the reading material is divided into two categories: fiction and non-fiction It’s one of the earliest educational experiences; finding that this repository of knowledge about the world is divided in two categories; into the factual and the non factual; the real and the imaginary. Now, these are the synonyms for non-fiction: factual, true-life, valid, authentic, genuine. And these are the synonyms for fiction: fantasy, make believe, made-up, unreal, pretend, invention. Which words does our society value? Fairly laden words in this information age. Now maybe this is changing as children begin to access knowledge from a whole range of sources and book stocks in school libraries are reduced but I think there is something going on here to do with the development of our take on the world.

A storyteller friend gave my wife a card with a quote from Einstein on the front: If you want you children to be bright read them lots of fairy tales. If you want them to be brilliant, read them even more fairy tales.

Now I ask you which section do you gravitate to in the library. What category of books do you read from when you’re relaxing. I bet that the majority of men gravitate to the non-fiction and the majority of women gravitate to the fiction. Those of you whose kids gravitate to a literalist approach to scripture or who have rejected Christian faith outright because they can’t “believe” it: what’s their preference? What’s their take on the world?

And which section of the library do you think the bible should be placed in? Fiction; non-fiction; or the reference section – just the boring facts?

So thinking about this question I ask: what does it mean to accept as true what’s in the pages of scripture? What does it mean to say that scripture is in some way true when it doesn’t fit into our categories of fiction and non-fiction. Or is it both? There’s something about this question which is tied up with our contemporary predisposition to fundamentalism. And with this curly predicament is the question of what it means to believe.

You see this interaction with” the devil” and something in the letter to the Romans have got me going.

There’s a little phrase in Romans which seems to highlight the bind that we are in. You see for many of us have been led in some way or other to understand that to believe means to give intellectual assent to something – the truth of the bible, the virgin birth, miracles, amongst other things. And when we assent to the creeds we say: I believe in God the Father almighty  etc, etc. And some of you cross your fingers behind your backs as we say it. To give intellectual assent to was/is seen as necessary in order to be legitimately Christian. But to believe in this way – that what we are assenting to is factually true – seems to mean that this must therefore fit into the non-fiction category.

Many in the church struggle with this question. Many who have left the church still struggle with this question. Many of you do too I know. Many who have left the church have been told, in no uncertain terms, that to not believe these things as factually true is just not good enough – and so they have left or been pushed out of the church.

But if we look more carefully at what Paul has to say we see that for him belief is of an entirely different character to belief as being about believing in the facts. For him belief is, as it actually was for most ancients, a matter of the heart; a matter of loyalty; a matter of orientation; not a matter of assent with the mind but assent with the heart. There is a world of difference. He says in today’s reading: if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.

Now to believe with the heart seems to me to be more about imagination than about fact. It absolves us of doing intellectual acrobatics when we’re not sure that we can say that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead. Does this mean that it is not real? By no means, as Paul would say. Because to believe with the heart is to believe with spirit and, as we heard a couple of weeks ago, it is the spirit which gives life. The spirit is the life of God which brings to birth; which gives life to the dead and calls into existence those things which do not exist; which gives life to our mortal bodies. To believe with the heart seems to me to be more active than believing with the head. One can give intellectual assent to something without it actually changing the way we live; to believe with the heart, though, means that we probably can’t help our selves choosing to live in a way which is in accord with the spirit of God found in Jesus.

But we do live in a world of hard, cold facts; where if someone follows their heart they are somehow considered to be a bit weak; flakey; unreliable; impetuous. How many of us have found ourselves saying to our children if they wanted to follow their heart: now come on dear you need to be realistic. Face the facts. You can’t make a living following your heart. But a world without heart is dead and a culture of the letter of the law over spirit is sucking us dry. My observation is that many of the people who are often depressed or lead very fragile and tenuous lives or who suffer from substance abuse are the ones who are deeply sensitive individuals with tender hearts and have been crushed by a world of cold, hard facts. They can’t cope in our desiccated, fact driven existence.

We live in what is known as the information age – but fat lot of good it is doing creating a better world. We seem to being buried under an avalanche of words; not many of which seem to be making a scrap of difference. Michael Leaning wrote in the Age last weekend that Our culture’s unquestioning belief in the power of words may be turning into a blinding fundamentalism.: “Words will save us.” It sounds not unlike a fundamentalism about scripture and the power of the words on the page.

We need to hold a word like Paul’s to our hearts when we’re confused abut all this: ‘The word is near you,
 on your lips and in your heart’; because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. That’s all. It seems quite simple really. It sets us free from the letter of the law which is death-dealing. But if our response is heartfelt – then it will cost much; not that that matters because then with Paul we can say: I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Some are writing that the thriving and attractive church of the future will be a church with heart; not one concerned with right belief and right behaviours but one with heart for God as found in Jesus. I see this in young people. That the world they inhabit is not so divided up into two. It gives me hope; hope for the world; hope for the church. It is our heartfelt response to Jesus which gives life to our mortal bodies and life to the dead – so may be willing to allow the spirit of Christ inhabit us and our community and in so doing imagine and life God’s future for us.

Andrew Boyle