It was great just recently spending time as a community considering the account in Luke’s gospel of when Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness and was tempted by the devil (Luke 4:1-13). We wondered what God might be saying to us today through these words, as we reflected on the parts of the passage that resonated with us most strongly. We study the Bible this way because we believe that all of Scripture is given to us by God to show us who he is and what he is like. We also hope that through God’s written words we will hear him speak to us today.
One of our group noticed that Jesus was able to resist the devil’s words by using only words quoted from scripture itself (Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 6:13, 16; 8:3) and this gave us hope that we could do the same. We were encouraged by what our friend had shared, and glad of the opportunity to ask difficult questions and look for answers together from the Bible. Someone else then asked the question of why Jesus needed to go into the wilderness for this time and why had he needed to be baptised by John the baptiser in the Jordan river not long before.
As a young person, I remember making the mistake of thinking that the Bible accounts of Jesus’ life, recorded by the four gospel writers, were just simple stories, because at first reading that is what they appear to be. I am a little older now and can assert that the more I have read them, the more I am overcome by both their immediate accessibility to anyone and yet their profound depth and complexity. Within these four short books are to be found truths that everyone with an open heart can see and insights that can take more than a lifetime of study to comprehend.
Separated by almost two millennia, it can be difficult for us to picture the situation that the gospel writer, Luke, was faced with. As far as we know, Luke never met the man Jesus yet, nevertheless, he set out to write an ‘orderly’, what we would call ‘historical’, account of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection. Luke used all the techniques of the great historians of his day. The details he included suggest that he must have listened for many hours to the testimony of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life and the people who had known him personally. Luke certainly took great pains to record their words, and recollections of what Jesus had said and done, drawing together the puzzle pieces to form a picture of who this personable yet mysterious man was.
We do not know, when or how it happened, but we do know from his account that Luke too came to believe that the Jesus he wanted to write about, was not only a human being who lived, and walked and talked with the people who Luke had listened to, but that he was also, in some divinely mysterious way, both the human being they had known and the God who the Jewish people worshipped. And if this isn’t mind-blowing, then I don’t know what is. It is also something that is exceptionally difficult to describe in writing.
Luke, however, also happened to be an extremely good writer. He could write in the best Greek of his day and was able to employ a number of important ancient history-writing techniques to convey his understanding of what the witnesses had told him about Jesus. He used a method called parallelism, to set two stories beside each other, so that one could shed light on the other. He used ‘programmatic’ statements, to lay out the bigger picture of what was to happen later on. He used quotes of direct speech, to summarise what was important, and because this demonstrated the authenticity of his work to the audience of his day. And, yet, all the time he strove to pose and answer the question, “Who was this man, Jesus, and why should we take him seriously?”
Set side-by-side, as they are, the stories of Jesus’ baptism and temptation in the wilderness are intended to illuminate each other, as the parallels in both help to answer Luke’s questions. To the faithful first-century Jew waiting hopefully for the coming of their promised Messiah (the one anointed by God who would be both prophet, priest, and king), the symbolism of Jesus’ insistence on passing through the waters of baptism in the Jordan river alongside his people would have been unmissable. As the greatest prophet before him, Moses, had passed through the Red Sea, leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to a new life in the land promised to them. Luke saw Jesus leading the people as they turned from their past sins and walked into the promise of a new life with him. Jesus’ role as the messianic prophet, the new Moses, becoming clearer still as Luke described how Jesus went on to spend forty days away from everyone, alone on a desert mountain eating nothing. They would have known that Moses had done the same after he had received God’s covenant word and God’s promise to reveal his power through many miraculous signs because this was recorded in their scriptures (Exodus 34:28).
For us, if we like Luke, want to know who Jesus is, then we learn much from the lines of speech that Luke recorded. At the moment of Baptism, Luke described an audible voice from heaven, which we can only assume is God’s, confirming Jesus’ divinity as the Father declares his sonship, love, and pleasure. Then filled with God’s Spirit and led into the desert, Jesus’ identity is again established as God’s son with authority over all the kingdoms of the world, and the one whose life would be laid down and raised again by God himself, through the tempting words of the devil’s questions. This scene, setting the program of what was to follow, with Jesus’ ministry of the word of God, his death, crucifixion, and ascension into heaven. Later on in his gospel, Luke reminds us of this desert scene again and the Devil’s temptations when Jesus in the Gethsemane garden faced and overcame them once more.
Yet for our group, something else in Luke’s text was resonating with us. We read the Bible because we want to know how the Jesus Luke described, might lead us in life. However, we have little in common with Luke or his first-century audience. That Luke’s account is historically accurate, does not make its relevance to twentyfirst-century England immediately apparent. However, we were struck by the humanity of the man Jesus, who Luke describes. The man who allowed John to baptise him in the river, and who then withdrew into the desert to prepare himself for what was to come. Luke tells us that this person, who was prepared to face life’s temptations to take shortcuts and do deals, and found the strength to overcome them, is actually someone we can be like. We can be immersed in water as we turn to follow Jesus in baptism. We can turn to scripture and find strength and guidance in its words to defeat the temptations of evil. We can follow Jesus’ example. We can be like Jesus because there was nothing he did in life, that we as humans cannot do. And this is true, because as a man, Jesus chose to set aside his divine power, so that he could walk and talk, and feel and breathe and hurt, just like we do. He lived as one of us, he was in nature like us, and this is so encouraging.
It is encouraging, we concluded, because it shows us that living like Jesus lived, is not impossible. It is certainly hard and painful at times, but because we know that Jesus did these things, as a human just like us, it must be possible for us too. And not only possible, it becomes doable, because Jesus is with us when we try. And, this, we concluded, is awesomely good news.
Be encouraged.