March 10, 2019 “Shortcuts” – Luke 4:1-13

Luke 4:1-13
“Shortcuts”
March 10, 2019 – First Sunday in Lent

“You don’t have to be crazy to drive this road, but it helps.” That sign was once actually posted on the Black Bear Road in southwestern Colorado. It’s a one-way, east to west shortcut between Ouray and Telluride. By “shortcut” you should understand “a shorter distance than driving on the paved highway,” not “a faster way to get there.”

Back in my youth in 1975, C. W. McCall immortalized the Black Bear Road in a blazingly quick spoken ballad with guitar accompaniment. As he might say, there’s no good way for me to “’splain it to ya.” You’ll just have to listen to this little gem of a story about a family driving an impossibly steep and curvy route up a pass, getting stuck in the mud, and finally having their jeep roll off a cliff (without them in it). Those were the consequences of seeking a shortcut.

We’re often tempted with shortcuts. Jesus was. The devil offered Him three shortcuts in our text this morning. Each of our Lord’s temptations was an offer to take a different road, a shorter, easier road than the one on which Jesus was being led.

It was the Holy Spirit leading Jesus there in the wilderness. Luke is the only Gospel to tell us that. Matthew and Mark tells us that the Spirit led or drove Jesus into the wilderness. But Luke is the only one to indicate that the Spirit’s leading continued, as he says in verse 1, there in the wilderness.

We get the impression from the account in Matthew 4 that the devil only came to tempt Him at the end of forty days, when Jesus was hungry and tired. But Luke makes it clear in verse 2 that the temptations were all along the way. Every day there in that rocky, barren landscape, as Jesus went where the Spirit guided Him, He was tempted. What are highlighted here for us are His three last and greatest temptations. They are all shortcuts to places Jesus did want to go, but they were bad ways to get there.

As we embark together on our annual metaphorical “journey” of Lent, walking with Jesus to the Cross, we may also expect to be tempted every day. Thinking about that during Lent is a reminder that it’s our normal human condition at all times of the year. Each and every day we wake up, and before we’ve gone very far at all, an evil spirit is whispering in our ear, suggesting a shortcut, an easier path. For some of us this morning, it included the temptation to stay in bed rather than get up for church after losing an hour to Daylight Saving Time.

The first of Jesus’ three great temptations is one we deliberately remember during Lent by the spiritual discipline of fasting. If you’ve thought you would give up sweets or red meat or soda pop during Lent because you really could stand to lose a few pounds or want to improve your health, please don’t do it for those reasons. We fast in Lent to deliberately recall in our own bodies what Jesus did in the wilderness, going without food in order to focus His attention on God’s leading by the Spirit.

Of course, the temptation of food doesn’t happen to us just in Lent, or just when we deliberately fast. We joke all the time about being tempted by chocolate or cheeseburgers or beer. It’s not really a joke. Food and drink really does tempt us at the very same time we really do need it. And we’re often tempted toward eating and drinking just as Jesus was, via a shortcut.

For Jesus the temptation was to satisfy His very real and honest bodily hunger by an exercise of His divine power. If He wanted, He could command the stones to become bread. This was the end of the forty days. He probably knew His time in the wilderness was nearly over. But He still had to walk to the nearest village and find some food. He was weak and tired. Why not just make Himself some fast food then and there?

You may not be tempted by fast food, but many of us are. Whether it’s a swing by a drive-up window or a little plastic tray heated up in the microwave or just a candy bar for lunch, getting the food our bodies need in some quick way is a common temptation. In Lent, that temptation could be an opportunity to reflect on Jesus’ response in verse 4 to His own temptation for fast food, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

When we constantly allow our desires to be instantly satisfied, especially one as simple and innocent as hunger, the temptation is to forget the deeper needs we have, the spiritual life that is only satisfied by God. Matthew’s account adds to “One does not live by bread alone,” the rest of Jesus’ quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” It’s not true life if we are only fed by food. There’s a deeper, more desperate hunger in our hearts to hear and know God.

That’s why our reading from Romans 10:8 talked about God’s Word being near us, being on our lips and in our hearts. We may satisfy physical hunger, but without taking in that Word, we won’t be satisfied. That’s why fasting just to lose weight is not good Lenten discipline. If you fast, take the moments you would spend eating to read Scripture and to pray, to nourish your heart and soul and draw nearer to Jesus in His own hunger for the Word of God.

That first of the three temptations was a pretty straightforward shortcut. Take a quick, easy route to a meal, instead of listening to God and feeding on His Word. The second and third tests are more subtle shortcuts. Matthew and Luke put them in different order. In Matthew, Satan first encourages Jesus to throw Himself off the Temple in a great display of God’s protection. Then He invites Jesus to worship him in exchange for ruling the world. But Luke puts that unholy, really great deal with the devil before the other temptation.

So in verse 5, the devil takes Jesus up a very high mountain and shows Him everything He’s got to gain, “all the kingdoms of the world.” They all flash before Him there in an instant, all “their glory and all this authority,” as the devil tells Him in verse 6. As we all know, that’s exactly for what Jesus came. He came to be King of this world. We want Him to rule over our planet and make it just and beautiful and happy. He could do it. And here was the perfect shortcut to get there.

You might wonder why Satan thought the kingdoms of the world were His to give. Isn’t God the Creator, the Sustainer, the almighty Ruler of this world? Where does the devil get off pretending to have that kind of power? Wasn’t he just lying to Jesus?

Yes and no. God made the world and ultimately controls it, but He deliberately made, in this world, creatures with free will, creatures who can accept or reject God’s rule, God’s kingdom. Those creatures include both human beings and spiritual powers like Satan. Because Satan and human beings had already succumbed to the temptation to reject God’s authority, Satan did and, to some extent, still does have some real authority over this world. As our men’s group read in John 12 verse 31 Friday morning, Jesus called Satan the “prince” or “ruler” of this world. Like so much human authority, it may not be legitimate, but Satan’s power is real.

Yet a shortcut to power is one of the worst temptations to which we can succumb. That’s why the Holy Spirit inspired Matthew and Luke to write about Jesus’ own temptation toward that shortcut. It’s the insidious, devilish enticement to accomplish something good by evil means.

If you’ve read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or seen the movies, you know that a temptation like the second here in Luke is the great lure of the Ring. It’s a ring of power. Wielding it, a powerful good person could make the world a better place, for awhile. Overcome by the burden of carrying the Ring, the hobbit Frodo offered or made it available more than once to a great good person in the story, to Gandalf, to Galadriel, to Tom Bombadil, to Aragorn. All of them, as Galadriel said of herself, “passed the test.” They refused a shortcut to power which they knew would only corrupt them in the end.

Tolkien was a devout Christian and he knew the temptations of Jesus as well as you or I. He knew that he was writing about the great need of God’s people to forego this terrible temptation to get and use power by wrong means, by evil deals with the devil. He saw the consequences of taking that shortcut in his time, the time of the German church cooperating with the Nazis, the time of American development of the nuclear bomb. We see that same chasm of unholy deal-making looming before God’s people today. Power in exchange for worshipping what is evil is a deadly shortcut, no matter how much good is accomplished by it in the short run.

Jesus responded to Satan’s offer of a shortcut by quoting from Scripture again, the book of Deuteronomy once more, chapter 6 verse 13, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” Jesus was doing what Paul wrote about in our Romans text. He had the Word of God in Scripture in His heart and on His lips. When the turn toward those shortcuts appeared in the path, Jesus saw the warning signs God had already posted against going that way.

“Serve only Him.” That’s a word we need in our hearts and on our lips as we hear the calls all around us for service and loyalty to leaders and causes and nations. They are not all bad, but they are all superseded and surpassed by our primary loyalty, our primary service and worship of God. Jesus taught us that by refusing to serve anyone but God, even if it might have helped Him make the world better faster.

Faster is not always better. That’s a truth which is difficult for us to hear and believe, especially now. We are more than willing to pay for speed—faster food, faster phones, faster transportation. In that need for speed, we get tempted by shortcuts. One good discipline for Lent might just be to do something slowly, to do your Bible reading aloud, to walk to church, to sit down and write a card with a pen instead of a text with your phone.

Faster is not always better, especially in the arena on which Jesus’ third temptation is focused. It’s maybe the most difficult one to understand there in verse 9. The devil takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem, its highest point. “If you are the Son of God,” he says to Jesus, “throw yourself down…” And here the devil shows just how clever he can be. Jesus has been quoting Scripture, so Satan himself quotes Scripture. We as Christians might want to remember that in today’s world. Satan can quote Scripture too, twisting it out of all recognition, turning it to his own devilish purposes.

In any case, in verses 10 and 11 the devil quoted our psalm for today, Psalm 91 verses 11 and 12, about God sending His angels to protect the one He loves, about how they will lift you up and keep you from even dashing your foot against a stone. Satan is quite happy to use the Bible to tempt Jesus, to tempt us.

But what’s the temptation here, for Jesus or for us? I’ve often heard and may have said myself in previous sermons that the temptation was for a great publicity stunt. The shortcut would be a spectacular miracle that would have everyone believing in Jesus in short order. This is the Temple, in the middle of Jerusalem. If Jesus jumped off in front of a crowd and landed softly, they would all have to believe in Him. He would accomplish His mission of having everyone follow Him in hardly any time at all.

Maybe Satan was just trying to get Jesus to do a stunt for the crowd, but now that I look at this all again, that interpretation doesn’t seem very different from the second temptation. They would both be about offering Jesus power and authority. But I think I see now that this third temptation, this shortcut, was toward something else, toward the sort of thing with which one should never take shortcuts.

In this third temptation the devil invited Jesus to presume on God’s promise of love and protection toward His people. The devil wanted Jesus to put His Father in the situation of proving that He could be trusted. In other words, what the devil wanted was for Jesus to take a shortcut in His relationship with His Father. And taking shortcuts in any sort of relationship is always a disaster.

The devil was, in effect, asking Jesus to leap from the Temple in a dramatic statement that said to God the Father, “If you really love me, you will send those angels to save me.” Then Jesus wouldn’t have to struggle with His own doubts as we again read Friday morning in John 12: 27 when He said, “Now my soul is troubled.” With absolute proof of God’s loving protection, Jesus would not have to agonize in the Garden of Gethsemane and summon the courage and faith to simply trust His Father’s will. No, it would all be easy-peasy and Jesus could coast on home through the Cross and resurrection absolutely assured His Father’s safety net was waiting to catch Him. But that’s not how real relationships work. We learn to trust each other, to trust God, in just those hard times when we’re not quite sure.

You and I often fail each other. You probably know better than to trust someone who puts you to the test by asking you to do something hurtful or wrong by saying, “If you only loved me, you would… (fill in the blank)” That kind of shortcut to meaningful, deep relationship almost always goes bad. Jesus knew we must not use that sort of relationship shortcut with God. As He quoted one last time from Deuteronomy 6:16, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

We don’t get to truly know and love God by constantly putting that spiritual relationship to the test. We don’t make progress toward the kingdom of God by saying things like, “Just do this for me, Lord, then I will really believe, I will really follow you.” No, we learn to love God the same way we learn to love anyone, by slow, awkward steps often taken when we’re totally unsure just where we’re going. That again is why we slow down in Lent. We take odd and awkward steps like fasting or hiding that word we won’t say or sing for six weeks. We’re reminding ourselves what kind of path really leads to relationship with Jesus, with our God.

Dangerous shortcuts need warning signs. That one on the Black Bear Road about it being crazy to drive that road was maybe too cute. Others have given us warnings about shortcuts. One of the most quoted lines from The Lord of the Rings is the hobbit Pippin saying, “Short cuts make long delays,” just before they head off the road into delay, danger, and even disaster.

Opera singer Beverly Sills said, “There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going.” As an artist who spent a lifetime working hard to offer the world beautiful music, she would know. There are no real, honest shortcuts to the things that matter most. Christian hope is not to be beamed up out of this world when things get bad. It’s that our Lord walked with us through it all and is still with us, leading us by His Spirt as He Himself was led.

This Lent, I invite you to read the temptations of Jesus as huge warning signs posted by the Word of God over dangerous shortcuts. Don’t be crazy. Don’t go that way. Take the long road. Jesus did. The long road leads home. It did for Jesus. It will for you.

Amen.