Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 20, 2011

Scripture:
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Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last Sunday I gave a sermon on Matthew’s story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. The theme of that sermon was that the story of the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness is about what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. The temptation story comes immediately after the story of Jesus’ baptism in which the voice of God says of Jesus “This is my Son.” Then in the first and second of the three temptations the devil’s first words are “If you are the Son of God,” which scholars tell us can also be translated “Since you are the Son of God.” So Matthew seems pretty clearly to be talking about what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God, or so I believe and so I asserted in my sermon last week. As I wrote and gave that sermon last week I kept thinking that because I tried to say something about all three of temptations in Matthew’s story I couldn’t say very much about any one of them, yet they all have multiple layers of meaning. There’s a lot of depth in the story of Jesus’ temptation by the devil, so I decided to return to the temptations. Today I want to talk more about the first temptation, the temptation to turn stone to bread. In my sermons for the next two Sundays I will delve more deeply into the second and third temptations. In our Lent supper and discussion series that started last Tuesday we are exploring the question of what it means for us to live as Christians today. In these sermons I want to explore what the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness has to say to us as we examine that question.

We start with the first temptation. Jesus is famished after forty days in the wilderness. The devil, whom Matthew first calls “the Tempter,” appears to him and says “If (or since) you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Jesus of course refuses, quoting Deuteronomy to say “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Last week I said that this temptation introduces the question of bread into the question of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. I said that Jesus’ refusal to use his divine power to feed himself means that Jesus being the Son of God is about bread, but it isn’t about bread for Jesus. It is about bread for us. Now I want to take a closer look at that assertion and what it might mean for us.

Bread is a big deal in the Bible. Sometimes it is used as a metaphor for food generally, sometimes as a metaphor for the necessities of daily life, and sometimes bread means bread. There are several important stories in the Bible about bread, and the first temptation of Jesus in the wilderness being about bread reminds the reader, or at least it reminds me, of some of those stories.. In his book The Greatest Prayer John Dominic Crossan uses some of those stories to interpret what the line in the Lord’s Prayer “Give us this day our daily bread” means. I want to follow Crossan’s lead and use a couple of those stories to help us understand what the bread temptation in the wilderness has to say to us.

The first big story about bread in the Bible is the story of the manna, the bread from heaven, in Exodus, Chapter 16, that we just heard. This one has in common with the story of Jesus’ temptation that hungry people are, or a person is hungry, in the desert with nothing to eat. In the story of the manna Moses has led the people out of Egypt into the desert, and the people complain against Moses because they do not have enough to eat. So God tells Moses that God is going to “rain bread from heaven for you.” God has a set of instructions about how the people are to collect the bread. Each day the people were to gather enough of the bread from heaven for that day. On the sixth day they were to gather enough for two days (so that they wouldn’t have to work on the Sabbath by gathering bread for that day). They were not to gather more than they needed or to leave any until the next morning. When some people did leave some of the manna to the next morning it had spoiled, and when some people went out to gather manna on the Sabbath they found none. Crossan concludes from this story: “When God directly distributes food there is enough for each and every day.” I would say that when people collect and distribute food according to the rules laid down for the manna in Exodus, that is, when each takes only enough, does not take food to excess, and does not hoard food, there is enough for everyone. In these stories God makes miraculous bread for the people in the wilderness, but Jesus won’t make miraculous bread for himself in the wilderness. We shall return to that difference in the stories anon.

The other big story about bread in the Bible that the bread temptation in the wilderness reminds me, and Crossan, of is the story of Jesus feeding variously four thousand or five thousand people in the wilderness, depending on which version of the story you read, with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. The Gospel writers thought this story was really important, for Matthew and Mark included it twice, once saying four thousand and once saying five thousand, and Luke and John included it once, using five thousand. There aren’t very many stories that appear in all four Gospels, but this one does; and in two of them it appears twice. The Gospel writers must have thought it had something pretty important to say. These stories are familiar, but Crossan points out an element of these stories that I think we overlook. In Mark’s version of it that we heard this morning the disciples suggest that they send the people who have gathered to hear Jesus away so that they may procure food for themselves. When they make that suggestion Jesus says to them “you” give them something to eat. They object, and he has them bring him whatever bread they can find, five loaves of it—and some fish, but I’m not concerned with fish here. The disciples bring the bread, then Jesus has the disciples organize the people into small groups, and it is the disciples who distribute the miraculously increased food, not Jesus himself.

So what do we learn from these bread stories? We learn that Jesus being the Son of God has something to say to us about bread. The temptation story says that Jesus is about bread, but he isn’t about bread for himself. He is about bread for us and for everyone. The bread temptation points us to the Bible’s other great stories about bread. I know that when I first read that bread temptation last week I immediately thought of the feeding of the five thousand story, they seem so obviously related. The connection to the manna in the wilderness story seems pretty obvious too. And so do the obvious differences between those stories. In the manna story and in the feeding of the five thousand story people are fed in the wilderness. In the temptation of Jesus he is not fed in the wilderness, but by his own choice. But note this similarity between the story of the manna and the story of the feeding of the five thousand: In both of those stories humans are involved in the distribution of the food. In Exodus they go out and gather enough for themselves and those in their household. In the feeding of the five thousand Jesus’ disciples bring at least the beginnings of the food, organize the people, and distribute the food.

The point I think is this: God provides food. In both the manna story and the feeding story the provision of the food is miraculous, but it says God provides food. God provides our food too, for our food comes out of God’s good creation and neither we nor the food would exist apart from God’s good creation. But the point is also that we humans have an indispensible role to play in distributing the food God provides in a way that assures that everyone has enough, enough and not too much, just as everyone had enough when the people collected manna in the wilderness but lost the excess they tried to collect and just as everyone had enough when the disciples distributed the loaves and the fish. These stories say that we have an indispensible role to play in making sure very one has enough. God didn’t do it without the people in the story of the manna in the wilderness. God didn’t do it without the people, his disciples, in the story of the feeding of the five thousand, and God doesn’t do it without us today.

What does all that mean for us in this season of Lent as we struggle with the question of what it means for us to live a Christians today? I think it has at least this to do with that question: These bread stories call us to ask: Are we living in a way that contributes to everyone having enough bread? Or are we living in a way that means that some, ourselves included, have too much while others do not have enough? And of course, bread here doesn’t mean just bread. It doesn’t even mean just food. The question these bread stories ask us is: Are we living in a way that contributes to everyone having enough of all of the basic necessities of life? And not just life at a subsistence level but at a level that enables decent life, that enables wholeness of life, that enables the abundant life that Christ came to give us and everyone?

Jesus says that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. True, but Jesus also gave people literal food as well, just as God provided literal food to the people in the wilderness. One of the words that God speaks to us through these stories is: How is this giving everyone enough food working out there on earth? It sure doesn’t look to me like it’s working out very well. Got any plans for changing that? Amen.