Via Dolorosa, From the Wilderness to Golgotha
by Scott Pineau
February 10, 2008
First Sunday in Lent
Matthew 4:1-11

About 28 years ago – give or take a year – a  young boy tried to seize an opportunity that would undermine the economic structure of the common enterprise between small children and the tooth fairy.
This child had been learning how the system worked: put the tooth under the pillow when you go to bed, but not by itself; put it in an envelope; don't place the envelope too close to the edge of the bed, and so on. Soon this practiced hand had accumulated several facts concerning the business of losing teeth: 1) that the so-called tooth fairy had always delivered, 2) that the tooth fairy must have been a billionaire, since the daily demands of thousands of teeth required that a lot of cash and coin be stuffed under pillows, 3) that the human head, including his own, had lots of teeth, and 4) that the envelope could hold a lot more money than he usually got. Having culled all of this information on the occasion of having lost yet another tooth, the boy set out to write a letter to the imaginary winged tooth taker and placed it into an envelope that night along with a tooth. With all of its undotted “i's” and backward “e's,” the letter read something like this:

Dear Tooth Fairy, I really lost 5 teeth, but I can't find four of them. Please give  me the amount of money for 5 teeth lost.

The astonishing thing is that the boy in this story happens to be today's speaker. Now, I never have been and never will be in the same league as that Old Serpent – and far be it from me to equate Christ with childhood fairies – but if a mere 5 or 6 year old child can be that calculating and that exacting, whose mind can imagine how cunning Satan's is? Let us turn our attention back to the gospel lesson for today, found in Matthew 4 and beginning in verse 1.

Now, Jesus had just been baptized. The heavens were opened, the Spirit descended and bore witness as the Father spoke concerning Christ's deity, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”. This morning's passage picks up by telling us that Jesus was then “led up, by the Spirit, into the wilderness, to be tempted, by the devil”.

Sadly, there are those who think that Jesus was a phantom or a divine spirit and not a real man, and therefore was not really tempted as we are. Additionally, some would ask whether God in sending Jesus into a desert without food in presence of the enemy is any way for a father to treat his son.  But the Bible is clear, from the prophesies concerning Christ in the Old Testament to the historical events recorded of him in the New, that he is fully God and fully man. Christ was and is a real man. His temptations were real and it was not without reason that they were visited upon him.

You might be familiar with the illustration of the process of smelting, or purifying gold. The gold is placed into a bowl fit to endure extremely high temperatures. Upon the application of intense heat the gold becomes liquid in form and the impurities, if any, can be driven out, or separated. And the point is that even gold that is pure, having absolutely no impurities to force out, is subject to the same amount of heat. So too Christ, as the analogy goes, though he never sinned – or even entertained the thought of sinning – yet felt the same flames from the temptations.

We should understand something about the significance of the 40 days here. Many are quick to point out the correlation to Moses, representing the law, and Elijah, representing the prophets. Both fasted forty days before receiving great revelations from God. In fact, the two then make a blinding appearance later in the gospel narrative, at the Transfiguration. And it is interesting that here they are seemingly hinted at by the 40 days of fasting in Christ’s humiliation, and there they appear as witnesses to his glorification. But further investigation shows us that there is still a much larger significance to these 40 days that more directly relates to Old Testament events.

After sinning, Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden of perfect felicity and intimate communion with God, and the chosen line of descendants that came from them eventually wound up wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, showcasing their continual failure to trust God. Jesus passed every test in his wilderness experience, demonstrating in 40 days that he was perfectly fit to be the Messiah and Lord of all the nations he would and ultimately will lead to comforts and joys far more supreme than the Garden of Eden; the New Heavens and New Earth. And after the tests had ended Jesus got right to work, ministering and healing, preaching and instructing, forgiving and loving, warning and sometimes condemning.

Many theologians believe – and I think that they are right – that Jesus was going out into the wilderness to pray; to spend about a month and ten days with his heavenly Father before engaging in full time ministry. But count the many dangers he faced in this experience: there were wild beasts, an unforgiving terrain with jagged cliffs, insufficient living quarters (the Son of Man literally had nowhere to rest his weary head), he was, humanly speaking, alone so that if he had gotten injured no one would have been there to come to his aid, or to encourage him. He endured all of these perilous conditions, and more, in a state of weakness due to hunger. But when he needed food for strength enough to engage in battle he fed on the blessed Word of God.

Don't let it trip you up that in each instance Satan uses the word “if”, saying “if you are the Son of God”. It can just as easily and accurately be translated “since you are the Son of God command that these stones become bread”. He was perfectly aware of who Jesus was. It is precisely out of that knowledge that the Serpent had slithered onto the scene, trying to provoke the Lord to spoil the plan established within the Trinity for Christ's humiliation during his earthly ministry.

The first attempt by Satan to ambush the King of Kings was to try to get Jesus to change a non-edible substance into a most welcome meal. However, like Job centuries before, our Savior desired the Words of the Father's mouth more than necessary food, hereby giving the greatest literal expression to that ancient wisdom. Notice that Jesus counters the Adversary at each point with scripture. To be sure each portion he quotes is from the book of Deuteronomy; specifically within the narrative of the 40-year wilderness wandering. Listen to the context of the passage our Lord quotes from in Deuteronomy 8:2-3.

And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.

That is why they were sent into the wilderness; to be tested that it might be made known what was in their hearts. That is why Jesus was maneuvered into such a barbaric landscape as well.

Now the object of desire, in this case physical food, was not the enemy. Rather Satan and his thugs, and –  more personally for us – sin are the enemies we face. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,” the apostle Paul instructs us, “but against the rulers, authorities, and against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). Sin is the cosmic curse at work in this present age. From all over the prayerbook in our catechisms and confessions, and in the baptismal and confirmation vows, the words planted in us to “renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world,” should blossom.  There is a kind of pomp we should seek; not a kind of cheap and showy display, but of ceremonial splendor and elegance. And there is a meal that neither we nor Christ will abstain from, when we dine at that very large table with God and His Son, the bridegroom. The complete company of holy angels and the redeemed humanity will feast with the triune God. This is a helpful thought for us to meditate upon when the deceiver and his goons hurl deceptions our way.

Stealthily, but not enough so, the Tempter places his second lure, now using Scripture himself. With extreme subtlety he uses it in a way that turns the original meaning completely on its head. Many think that the place where Satan brought Jesus to was the South East corner of the temple complex. Josephus informs us that it was about a 450 ft. drop from the peek of this retaining wall to the ground.

From a Psalm that is all about the faithful blessings that flow from God to the one who trusts him, the devil deceitfully mangles the recipe, by nabbing one sweet morsel – as though a person could claim to have eaten a chocolate chip cookie by eating a single ingredient, say a chocolate chip. Listen to what the full cookie tastes like. Reading Psalm 91:9-15.

Because you have made the LORD your dwelling place-- the Most High, who is my refuge--no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot. "Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name. When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him."

Does that sound like an invitation to test God? Absolutely not! It is so far from that way of thinking that the great reformer Martin Luther incorporated bits and pieces of this Psalm into the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God!” If Jesus had fallen for the devil's trick and presumptively tested the Word of God, it would have been a faithless act, which he is incapable of doing.

Instead Jesus counters, not with a brassy lecture, but with the Sword of the Spirit that led him to where he presently was.  Jesus quotes a portion of Deuteronomy (6:16) in which Moses warns the covenant people not to repeat the way they had tested the Lord in the wilderness, when they had belligerently asked Moses, “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Ex. 17:7)

The third assault is the most attractive enticement of all: “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.” Was this really the devil's to give? Well, three times in the gospel of John Jesus refers to the Adversary as the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11). Paul calls him the “god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). Inasmuch as this is still a sin-cursed world, Satan has some authority over it. But ultimately everything he had offered was already in our Lord's hands, because he was, is and ever will be God over all, blessed forever. Here the Lord paraphrases Deuteronomy 6:13-14 which explicitly forbids idolatry. Then, we the readers are given quite a serving of irony as our savior is fed, ministered to by holy angels, while the devil is sent away still hungering and thirsting for that which he had tried to get, does not have, and never shall have.

Far from it being the case that Satan was frustrated to the point of withdrawing, Jesus commanded him to leave. It is important to note here that demons can only always obey the direct commands of God. Everywhere in Scripture this is proven to be the case. This should be a comforting reminder to all of us, as we engage in our own daily battles, not to be paralyzed with fear from powers and principalities. Christ our Lord has overpowered and bound the strong man and his minions, once and for all. Yet this does not get us off the hook in cases where we do fail. We must accept the consequences of our cowering to temptations of various kinds, and repent of our sins. But the beauty that this passage displays is that we are not in the wilderness alone. Earlier I said that humanly speaking Jesus was alone, but the Spirit was leading him, and he was not without the Father. Likewise, we have Trinitarian protection in the wilderness, no matter how alone we might feel.

Early Church Father John Chrysostom has some insightful comments on this passage concerning the Prince of Darkness: “He is an implacable enemy, and hath taken up against us such war as excludes all treaty. And we are not so earnest for our salvation, as he is for our ruin. Let us then shun him, not with words only, but also with works; not in mind only, but also in deed.”

We can snub each of the temptations that face us in this life – even Satan's worst intentions for us – by believing 1 John 4:4: “greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world”. To the multiple pain-giving episodes in the Apostle Paul's life that might have tempted him to despair – beatings, robberies, imprisonments, betrayals just to name a few (all in the plural mind you) – he used the spiritual discipline of donning the armor of God and the physical training of keeping his bodily appetites in subjection, rather than the other way around.  To the tempting comforts of the decorated status Paul had as a Hebrew of Hebrews, a zealous Pharisee, and a master of the scriptures, yet in opposition to Christ, he said with mile high confidence, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith--that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:8-11).

So temptations come in various forms. Again, from the inkwell of the same apostle: “In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:12b-13). This is how to deal with temptation in general.

So then, what is the point of Lent? For starters, it is a vivid seasonal awareness of the complete victory of Christ over all temptations, availed to us, through him, by prayer and meditation on the scriptures.  Christ, better than the best Bible software available, knew his Word. The Lord was also the mightiest prayer warrior, and his mind, the greatest reservoir of godly meditation imaginable. In a word, no pun intended, he was perfectly equipped to detect and avoid the deadliest traps Satan had ever laid for before mankind. The witty novelist and quasi-theologian Frederick Buechner calls meditation opening “the mind to a single thought until it fills the mind so completely that there is no room left for anything else”. Take that into the wilderness over the next few weeks, meditate on scripture and watch Him guard your heart with it.

Lent is a time of sparing ourselves of some routine comforts in order to spur us onto more prayer and meditation. As for those who practice Lent in a superstitious way, hoping thereby to gain brownie points with God, it is repugnant to scripture. As for the giving up of a few daily comforts in order to remind and direct a person to meditate on God in His Word, and to pray and repent unto sanctification; I can't see how that is a bad thing. It is in fact a very good thing. We live in a cultural habitat that fosters the principle of wolfing down pleasures as fast as we can get them onto our plates. Even a slight break in the normal way of conducting our physical lives can be used to remind us to focus on Christ's suffering on our behalf; to repent of sin in our hearts and lives.

To those for whom food fasting would be ill-advised, or even dangerous, consider instead a media fast. Turn the television off and refrain from surfing the web. Because the enemy is so wily, Lent is a good opportunity for us to be freed of various footholds he might have in our lives.

Some liturgies include the Latin subtitles for each Lord's Day during this season. The first Sunday in Lent is called Invocavit which is Latin for “He shall call”, taken from a latter portion of the Psalm that Satan dubiously quoted. It is where we get the word “invoke”: to ask earnestly for aid or protection. This is really at the heart of the Lent season. The Lenten pattern has to do with purification as an appropriate way to prepare for the resurrection celebration. Our Lord, on the occasion of this text, proved his purity through his fiery trial. The wilderness was his crucible, Satan the fire, the Father the goldsmith and Jesus the perfectly pure and priceless gold. When the frequency of temptations increase and the heat rises remember that we are in the crucible, being smelted like gold, and God wants to drive out all of our impurities. But we are not alone.

Invocavit: we will call for help to the One who can rescue us. In a certain sense we should live Lent-like lives. Consider Christ's first advent, and ours. He came into the world the first time to be a suffering servant, and will we not be the same? Jesus was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. We should be men and women of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Now take into account Christ's second advent, and ours. He will come again as the King in power in his glory, and will we not come with him in our glory to reign with him? It should make us quiver with delight.

Over this 40 day season we as a church will make a broad sweep of the earthly ministry of Christ. The specific road that Jesus struggled along when he carried his actual wooden cross has been named the via dolorosa, which is Latin for “the way of suffering”. People go to Israel and walk this path and reflect. In much broader sense we can look at the entire earthly ministry of our Lord from the wilderness to Golgotha as the via dolorosa; a ministry of sufferings.

Here is one final comfort; this one from the end of Philippians 1 (v. 30).

It has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.

As Christ's people let us face up to the fact that as much as joy cannot be contrived, suffering cannot be avoided.

So let us find ways to make this Lenten season profitable by curtailing our penchant for pleasure over the next few weeks, and devoting more time to prayer and meditation. And after having a seasonal fast, most certainly, as the Father did for His Son, shall he not send holy angels to wait on our table as we feast with the Resurrected Christ? Amen!

Let us pray.