Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 27, 2011

Scripture:

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.

This morning we continue our sermon series on the temptations of Christ. We’ve come to the second of the three temptations. In that part of the story the devil takes Jesus to “the pinnacle of the temple” in Jerusalem and dares him to throw himself off. The devil cites the text of Psalm 91:10-12 about God’s angels lifting us up “so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” We heard the choir just sing more of the text of Psalm 91 in the beautiful anthem “Eagle’s Wings.” It makes a beautiful anthem, but did you ever “dash your foot against a stone,” or stub your toe on the leg of the dining room table? Kind of makes you wonder about that text, doesn’t it? But I digress. In our story Jesus throws scripture right back at the devil: It is also written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Notice: Even the devil can quote scripture, so beware of devils quoting scripture for demonic purposes. But I digress again. The important point for our purposes this morning is only that Jesus resists this temptation. In my introductory sermon on the temptations two weeks ago I said that this temptation introduces the question of salvation into the question of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. I said that this temptation story tells us that Jesus being the Son of God has something to do with salvation, since it is a temptation to do something from which only divine power could save you; but it isn’t about Jesus’ salvation, it is about our salvation. That is the assertion that I want to pursue further this morning.

Jesus being the Son of God is about our salvation. I do think that much of a message is contained in the story of Jesus’ second temptation. What we don’t find in the story of the second temptation is anything about what the salvation that Jesus is about actually is. But this temptation, like the others, brings to mind other Bible passages that we know that help to fill in just what the temptation story is about. One passage that the second temptation brought to my mind is John 3:16-17, which we heard just now. I’m going to talk about these lines in some detail here, so I included them in your bulletin. I thought maybe having them in front of you might help you follow me through them. They are familiar lines. It is the line “but that the world might be saved through him” in verse 17 that specifically connects these verses to the story of the second temptation of Jesus, or at least I think it does. What, if anything, do these lines from the third chapter of John tell us about the kind of salvation that Jesus is about?

They tell us first of all that the salvation that Jesus is about comes from God. Maybe it’s obvious that salvation comes from God, but I’m always surprised by how many people think salvation comes from us, from something we do or don’t do or from something we believe. John says “For God so loved the world….” That’s where our salvation comes from, from God’s love of the world, including us. Then the passage confirms what we concluded from the story of the second temptation, that the salvation that comes from God has something to do with Jesus, “that God gave his only Son….” John 3:16 also tells us that salvation has to do with belief in Jesus, which I take to mean only that we make our salvation active in our lives through believing in Jesus, not that we have to believe in Jesus for that salvation to exist. Then John 3:16 says that what we receive through this salvation is “eternal life.” More about that eternal life bit in a moment.

We learn all of that from John 3:16, but then we move to John 3:17. That verse begins by saying that God did not send God’s Son into the world to condemn the world. That line is, I think, really important, but why do you think it’s there? Why does the author of the Gospel of John think it necessary to say that Jesus is not about condemning the world? The only reason I can think of for John saying that is that some people in John’s time at the end of the first Christian century thought that the salvation that came through Jesus actually did have something to do with condemning the world. Consider this: By the time the Gospel of John was written the book of Revelation had almost certainly already been written. In that book, as you probably know, Jesus really does condemn the world in order, in the end, to save it. All the mayhem and destruction that gets unleashed in that book is unleashed by “the Lamb,” Revelation’s primary image for Jesus. In Revelation Jesus condemns the world but good. In that book the world eventually gets saved through the ushering in of a new creation of peace, but as John Dominic Crossan says, Revelation gets to that salvation by wading through an ocean of blood.

The Gospel of John has a different vision. John sees that the salvation that God brings through Jesus does not come through a condemnation of the world. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world.” OK, but if Jesus’ salvation isn’t about condemnation, what is it about? To get at an answer to that question, let’s look at how verses 16 and 17 of John are structured. They pretty clearly belong together. They are joined by the “Indeed,” the first word of verse 17. Notice the parallelism between the way the two verses end. Verse 17 ends “that the world might be saved through him.” Verse 16 ends “may have eternal life.” John is telling us with this parallelism that the salvation Jesus brings consists of our having “eternal life.”

OK, the salvation that Jesus brings consists of our having something called eternal life, but what’s eternal life? Perhaps when you hear “eternal life” you hear “living forever with Jesus in heaven after we die.” A lot of people do hear John’s phrase “eternal life” that way. You’re even more likely to hear the phrase that way if you know these verses in the King James translation that Sue, Heidi, and I are going to sing here in a few minutes. There “eternal life” is rendered as “everlasting life.” The thing is, however, that that isn’t what John means by eternal life. There is a place in John’s Gospel where he tells us what that phrase means. It’s John 17:3, that we also heard this morning. There John has Jesus say in a prayer “And this is eternal life, that they [i.e., we] may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Notice that John’s Jesus doesn’t say “And this is how they get eternal life, by knowing you, the only true God” etc. He says “this is eternal life.” For John salvation is obtaining eternal life, and eternal life is something that happens here and now, in this life. It is knowing God and Jesus. It is knowing God in and through Jesus. That knowledge doesn’t bring eternal life, it is eternal life. That knowledge doesn’t bring salvation, it is salvation.

OK, but that just raises more questions, doesn’t it? One question that occurs to me is: Just what is it that we know when we know God in and through Jesus Christ. Up to now this sermon has pretty much been a lesson in Biblical study. Sorry about that, but sometimes I can’t help myself. This is the Good News part that maybe you weren’t sure was coming. For starters we know that Jesus, and through Jesus we know that God, isn’t about doing things for himself. Jesus and God are about doing things for us. That is the primary lesson of the temptation story. And we know that, set as it is at the very beginning of the Gospel as a prologue to the Gospel the temptation story point us to the rest of the Gospel for more information about what it means that God and Jesus are about us not themselves. There we find the really good stuff. There we find, as we heard, that Jesus and God are about saving the world not condemning it. In other places we learn that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. We find that the God we know in Jesus is a God of forgiveness, mercy, compassion, love, and unconditional grace. We find God in the person of Jesus entering fully into human life and even, and more importantly, into human suffering and death and demonstrating God’s unshakable solidarity with us in whatever befalls us in this life. That’s what we know when we know God in and through Jesus Christ. We know that that knowledge is eternal life, is our salvation that Jesus is all about.

And that, my friends, is very, very good news indeed. It is the good news to which the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness points. That story doesn’t give us the full message, it starts us on our journey of discovery through the Gospel. It points us toward Emmanuel, God with us. It points toward God’s unfailing presence and solidarity with us, a divine presence and solidarity that offers us all of the fruits of the Spirit—peace, hope, comfort, strength for the journey, the bread of life. The temptation story says Jesus isn’t about saving Jesus, he is about saving us; and it invites us to discover what that salvation is all about. It is the beginning of the Good News, the Good News of salvation in Christ Jesus. To that Good News all the people say: Amen!