The Grand Inquisitor

Prayer - God, may your Spirit guide us this morning as we explore your Word to us. As we engage our hearts and our minds. Open to us to hear what you want heard today whether in words, meaning, sound, thought. Even when we don’t understand. Let it move us. Amen.

Lent has begun. We started our Lenten journey last Wednesday night. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Those are the words we heard that night as we witnessed the imposing of ashes on foreheads. A reminder that we are made from the dust of the universe, and we will inevitably return there. To dust. These challenging words invite us to face a bewildering paradox: we are created by, beloved of God. And we will die. The first truth does not prevent the second and the second truth does not negate the first.

After two plus years of a global pandemic that has taken nearly six million lives worldwide, we’ve had opportunity to witness life — beautiful, singular, and robust life — crumbling to dust and ashes. This week, as our siblings in Ukraine and Russia have become some of the most recent to face the terrors and losses of war, we are once again asked to consider what it means that we — all of us, regardless of where we live, what we do, or view we support — we are mortal and vulnerable.

In many ways, this is the same reality Jesus wrestles with in our Gospel reading for today, this first week of Lent. At his baptism, just before this passage, Jesus hears the truth about his identity: he is God’s Son, precious and beloved. But when the Spirit leads him into the wilderness, Jesus must face some assaults on that truth, under the guise of earthly power. He must discern God's presence in a bleak and lonely barren land. Jesus must trust that he can be beloved and famished, valued and vulnerable at the same time. He must prove that God's care resides within his flesh-and-blood humanity — within a fragile vessel that can crack and shatter. To be beloved is not to transcend the other, grimmer truth, the truth of dust and ashes.

We find Jesus in the wilderness, not by his own choosing, but as he was being led by the Spirit. And while he is there, he finds himself confronted by evil, revealed through the face of the devil. And the devil offers Jesus three opportunities to take a place of power.

I wonder what we may discover today beyond the temptations themselves, but rather in Jesus’ response to the violent nature of the temptations of evil.
First, the devil tempts Jesus to forgo his hunger. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Considering the amount of times Jesus fed people and believed in the nourishment of our bodies as a holy act of communion, it is revealing that Jesus counters the devil saying, “It is written: One does not live by bread alone.”
Second, after showing Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world,” the devil promises him authority. “It will all be yours” the devil says. Fame. Visibility. Recognition. A kingdom to end all kingdoms, here and now. A match for the power that the rulers of the empire had already claimed for themselves. Now, offered to Jesus in an instant. But Jesus counters and says, “It is written, only serve the Lord your God.”
Then, thirdly, the devil takes him up to the top of the temple and says, If you are God, then throw yourself down from here. “[God] will command the angels concerning you, to protect you,” the devil promises Jesus. Implying that if Jesus is the beloved child of God, then God will keep him safe. Safe from physical and emotional harm, safe from frailty and disease, safe from accidents, safe from death. But Jesus counters and says, “‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
At each proposition/temptation for satisfaction and power, Jesus responds with a counter of holy word, with a sentence offering the heart of scripture, and refuses to accept the power and control offered to him. And this is where I see the beginning of Lent come to us. This is where the work of Jesus’ lays itself before us.
In author/poet Dostoevsky’s collections of writings gathered in the book The Brothers Karamazov, he writes about a character named Ivan telling a story about Jesus and the temptations in the wilderness. Ivan uses the name the Grand Inquisitor for a character questioning why Jesus would simply reply to these offers and deny the seats of earthly power that could potentially change the way seats of power operate.

The Grand Inquisitor says, "'... a great spirit talked with you in the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he "tempted" you. Is that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to you in three questions and what you did reject, and what in the books is called "the temptation"? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three temptations…”

A real stupendous miracle occurred, and the miracle is that Jesus resisted. Not only did Jesus resist the powerful offers of evil, but Jesus also resisted responding to evil in the way the devil expected him to, in the way we respond to moments of aggression and violence. Jesus chose another way to respond to the violent power of evil. Jesus chose nonviolence, a resistance to violence.

According to Walter Wink, a former professor at Auburn Seminary, there are three responses to violence: violent opposition, passivity, and what he calls Jesus’ third way: nonviolence. Human evolution has only trained us for two of those: violent opposition and passivity, these operate a lot like the two common conflict responses known as fight or flight. This is survival mode. A place we move to internally when we feel the presence of danger, conflict, or aggression.

Fight is a moment of anger and revenge. Fight is what the Galileans were crying for when they tried to rebel against the Romans two decades before Jesus arrived. Fight is what many people and communities had reacted with when they experienced harsh oppression, neglect, abuse. On both the larger scale and the individual scale: its war. It’s a common reflex when the brain or body sense danger. We move into protection mode and the way we choose to protect ourselves when we fight is through defense, physical, verbal, manipulative defense.

When do we fight? When we feel the heat in our body rise over shame and abuse. When we are hurt, when we see others hurt, when we experience pain so deep and it feels unfair, we want the other person to feel pain, too. Fight can feel like a cosmic balancing of right and wrong.

Flight is a moment of passivity, submission, passive-aggression, what maybe you have heard in the King James version of the Bible translation as “resist not”. Flight is one response that as Christians, I think we utilize quite a lot. This is common when we sense conflict.

When do we take flight? When our breath gets shallow, and our hearts start to beat very fast. We lose our words, get tunnel vision around the issue itself, and try to make ourselves smaller in a space. When we choose to protect ourselves using flight, we tend to remove ourselves from the moment completely. It’s easier to not respond at all, then to try and engage and risk our safety.

The devil used safety as a temptation, and it's such an enticing lie, because it targets our deepest fears about what it means to be human in a broken, dangerous world. We want so much to believe that we can leverage our beloved-ness into a shield that will protect us and keep us safe. Safe from physical and emotional harm, safe from frailty and disease, safe from accidents, safe from pain. That we can get God to guarantee us a perfect rescue if we just believe hard enough. But no. The ashes of dust remind us that God’s precious ones still bleed, still ache, still die. We are loved in our vulnerability. Not out of it.

And the third way is Jesus’ way. The way of nonviolence. Which even though the word and concept is familiar, is actually a really unusual response, not one we would expect in a moment like this. It truly is not inherent to us to actively resist violence. And I think what's so interesting about this passage is that it goes against what we think Jesus would do. Or what we would want to do. Jesus is confronted by evil, and we would likely expect him to fight or to disengage and leave. But he doesn’t do either of those things.

What did Jesus do by resisting the urge to fight or to flee? What did he show us by discoursing with the devil in the wilderness rather than accepting the three temptations? It was one of the first moments of his ministry on earth, in which he showed us, was not about holding the seat of power, which many rulers had portrayed as rightfully theirs as bestowed upon them by God. These questions didn’t come from nowhere, the rulers claimed to be sent by God, and therefore the highest seat of power and control was due to them.

Jesus shows that his ministry is not about holding the seat of power or trying to change the seats of systemic power and control into something good; it was not about ignoring the evil present in the world, his ministry was about holding to the truth of God’s word and walking on the road alongside the people. He refused the seat for the people. That’s active nonviolence. That’s the ministry of Christ, that’s the grace of God. We are the children of a God who has chosen to accompany us. That’s the love of God for you. This is where we begin our Lenten season.

How do we, as we move alongside Jesus’ story for these 40 days, follow Jesus in the wilderness? How can we embody the third way of Jesus, the nonviolent way?

Jesus’ way of nonviolence was the way of God. Turning the tables on the oppressor may seem vital now and then, but long-term change of power requires alternative visions. Jesus did not advocate for nonviolence as a technique for out-witting evil, but as a just means of opposing evil in such a way as to hold open the possibility of evil becoming just as well.

We start by knowing the ways we tend to protect ourselves when we feel the presence of danger, conflict, or aggression. And practice the alternatives, learning how to:
Seize the moral moment, find a creative alternative to violence, assert our humanity and dignity as people, expose the injustice of the system, stand our ground, force the powers to make decisions and cause the oppressor to see us in a new light, recognize our own power, be willing to suffer rather than retaliate, to die to fear of the old order and its rules. Let it go to dust, let something new come from the ashes.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus doesn't choose to enter the wilderness. The Spirit leads him there. But here's the miracle: Jesus chooses to stay until the work of the wilderness is over. We don’t always choose to enter wildernesses, either. We don’t volunteer for pain, loss, danger, or terror. But the wilderness happens. Whether it comes to us in a hospital waiting room, a difficult relationship, a troubled child, a sudden death, a credit card bill, a panic attack… the wilderness appears at our doorstep.

What Jesus offers us in his third way is a glance at God's presence in a bleak and lonely barren land. To know that we can be beloved and famished, valued and vulnerable at the same time. That God's care resides within our flesh-and-blood humanity — within a fragile vessel that can crack and shatter. To be beloved is not to transcend the other truth of dust and ashes. God can redeem even the most painful periods of our lives. Our wilderness can become holy even as it remains dangerous.

This Lent we can examine how this time in the wilderness is changing us. How it is shaping us into vessels that can handle what is next. We don’t know what’s next. But we do know that Jesus is here, with us in the wilderness. A God who refuses the power of evil and chooses to accompany us. Rooting us in our unquestionable identity as beloved children of God that is not moveable, even by the devil. We can look evil in the face, hear its voice, confess its appeal, and choose to hold to the truth of God’s word and walk on the road alongside the people. That is where Jesus began. Let us start this journey there together, too.

Amen.