“What about the Devil?” Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11 “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” By the Reverend. Joanna Adams Morningside Presbyterian Church Atlanta, Georgia February 13, 2005

 “What about the Devil?”
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
By the Reverend. Joanna Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
February 13, 2005

Today, I begin a series of sermons that will run throughout the five Sundays in Lent. For
Christians, Lent is the season of the year customarily used for deeper reflection and self discipline.
I want to suggest to you that coming to worship on a regular basis during the weeks
ahead and thinking with me about some of the most perplexing questions we can ask about faith
and life are spiritual disciplines might be important for you this year. Each sermon in the series
will be based on the assigned Biblical text for the day. The sermons in the weeks ahead will be
as follows:
"Is Jesus the Way to Salvation?"
"Where Is God When Terrible Things Happen?"
"Should I Believe in Miracles?"
"Is There Life After Death?"
I look forward to exploring these questions with you.
As serious as the season is, I can not resist sharing with you something that a Presbyterian friend
e-mailed to me recently. These are quotations church bulletins and newsletters.
"The sermon this morning," one bulletin read, "is ‘Jesus Walks on Water.'
The sermon for the evening service will be ‘Searching for Jesus'."
"The pastor will preach his farewell message next Sunday after which the
choir will sing ‘Break Forth into Joy.'"
"Susan remains in the hospital and needs blood donors for more transfusions.
She is also having trouble sleeping and requests tapes of Pastor Jack's sermons."
This morning the subject is Satan or the devil or whatever you want to call the one who tempted
Jesus in the wilderness at the very beginning of his ministry, just after the glorious occasion of
his baptism, when the Spirit of God had descended upon him like a dove, and a voice from
heaven had said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, the one with whom I am well pleased." The
proximity of the two scenes - the scene in the wilderness and the scene by the river Jordan- is no
coincidence. It is true, is it not, that just when things seem to be going most wonderfully and you
feel as if finally you have made it to the peak of human existence, you are the most vulnerable?
It is then that we, like our Lord, can be tempted to betray out core identity. We are tempted to
forget that we are created to be nothing less than but also nothing more than human, and to be
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human is to have limits. If Satan was after Jesus Christ in this regard, you can be certain that
Satan will be after you. There is no way to live a life in this world and not be subject to the
temptation to be less or more than God created you to be.
Whether you believe there was a literal wilderness, whether you believe in a literal devil, or
whether you believe that the whole struggle took place "within the mind and soul of Jesus," you
and I simply can not deny the reality of the struggle. (1) As Fred Craddock puts it, there is
another player on the field. If there were not another player on the field, there would have been
no need for the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. If there were no other player on the field,
there would have been no reason for him to make and live among us, as one of us, no reason for
him to suffer and to die.
I find it to be of enormous comfort to know that the one who was beloved of God, the very Son
of God, fully human, fully God- that he was, as the book of Hebrews puts it, "as tested as we
are." As vulnerable to temptation as we are. Therefore, he is able "to sympathize with us" in the
complexities of human existence. There is much talk about righteousness these days and
morality, much piety on parade in American religious culture. There are some that think that the
answer to everything that is wrong with human society and with us broken mortals individually
is to post the Ten Commandants on the walls of public school classrooms and courthouses.
Would that it were as simple as that! The encounter with Jesus and the devil reminds us that
temptation masquerades in all kinds of ways. Peter Gomes of Harvard's memorial Church
writes, that "Temptation masquerades most cleverly in areas of moral ambiguity where good
people can be tempted either to do good things for the wrong reasons, or bad things for a good
and high purpose." (2) Would that all we had to do was read the Bible and have everything be
made clear. That might be the case, were it not for our capacity for self deception, were it not for
the reality of human pride that blinds us to the most unspeakable of our sins. Almost always it
is in the name of virtue, "vice is given its greatest aid and comfort. Temptation appeals most
particularly to those who would see themselves as good and who would pursue the good as a
goal that they themselves are capable on their own of bringing to pass." (3)
Goodness is no shield against temptation. Jesus had plenty of goodness. He was utterly
committed to holding on to the good, and it was Jesus that Satan was most interested in.
What came to pass in Jesus' life was that the Spirit of God led him into the wilderness - You can
believe in a literal wilderness, or you can believe it as a place of testing. Whether you see it as
an actual geographical place or a state of the soul, it is clear that the Spirit of God led Jesus
there, Clearly, this moral testing, as difficult as it was, nevertheless was a part of the divine
plan. How could Jesus help us be human in the way God intended if he were able to avoid the
pain of being human? In the wilderness, he met the devil head on.
I once asked a group of friends at a Chinese restaurant if they believed in the devil. (You have to
do your sermon research wherever you can.) One said yes. Two said maybe. The rest looked at
me as if they wished I would just eat my egg roll and hush up.
In his great work, "Church Dogmatics," theologian Karl Barth warns against giving the devil
more than his due. It is all right to look at the devil, to glance in that direction, but we must not
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linger or become engrossed with the subject. "This matter may be real, but it must not be
contemplated too long." Many fundamentalist Christians give the devil more than his due.
Many liberal Christians never give Satan a thought. I will tell you where I stand on this matter. I
do not believe in a literal devil. I do not believe in an actual being called Satan, but I am well
aware of the reality that the figure of Satan represents, which is that are forces at work in the
world against the purposes of God. We can not defeat them on our own. Only God can defeat
them. I believe in what the figure of Satan symbolizes.
The poet Wallace Stevens wrote that the death of Satan in the modern consciousness was a
tragedy for the human imagination. I would say that the denial of the existence of the forces of
negativism, nihilism, as represented by the literary theological construct called "Satan" has tragic
consequences for all human existence. You can not defeat that which you pretend is not there.
Call the devil what you will. The Bible calls him "Satan," "The Tempter," "The Prince of
Demons," "Beelzebub," "The Prince of Darkness." Satan appears more often in the New
Testament than the Old. In the Book of Job, he walks around the earth spying on people and
reporting back to God as to their conduct. Someone has suggested, in fact, that in the Book of
Job, Satan is more like a secret intelligence agent than anything else. (4) By the Book of
Chronicles, however, Satan has become identified as God's enemy, but, in general, he is
infrequently mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is in the Gospels that we begin to see Satan
show up regularly. Particularly in Matthew, there is a war going on between the forces of evil
and the forces of God, as represented by Jesus Christ. Sometimes, stalking in the shadows,
sometimes boldly confrontational, Satan is a force to be reckoned with. Jesus has his first
encounter with Satan immediately after his baptism.
It is interesting to me that in our Presbyterian baptismal liturgy we now have the option of
including what is called "The renunciation of evil." Have we ever included the renunciation at
Morningside Presbyterian Church? If someone presents him or herself for baptism or even
brings a little bitty baby, the parents are asked this question, "Trusting in God do you turn away
from sin and on your child's behalf or your own behalf, do you renounce evil and its powers in
the world?" The idea is that if Jesus needed time to get clear about whose side he was on, surely
those of us who would follow his way are in similar need. .
It has been years since I watched The Godfather movies, but I remember a scene in one of them
in which a Corleone baby is being baptized. The camera shifts back and forth from the sanctuary
and the font and the baby to scenes of violence and mayhem caused by the Mafia. The realm of
God and the realm of the world. There is absolute conflict between the two.
Sometimes I think the first task of those of us who would follow the way of Christ is to
acknowledge the massiveness of our denial about the forces that work against the purposes of
God. I do not believe that there is a separate, distinct entity whose name is "Satan," but I do
believe that what Satan represents out there and in here in my own heart must be reckoned with
and acknowledged. If not, I become intellectually naïve and practically useless to the purposes
of God.
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Let me say a few things about Satan. First, God and Satan are never equal adversaries. "We
trust in one God, the Holy One of Israel, who alone we worship and serve." (5) The scriptural
motif of Satan's being a fallen angel is our way of helping us understand that everything exists
through the grace of God. Even that which is evil has no independent existence on its own but is
the result of the fallenness of creation.
God made the world good and saw that it was good and declared it to be good but then came the
scene that was read from the book of Genesis this morning. Adam, Eve, the serpent. Adam and
Eve are not content to be human as God made them. They want to be more than human, to be
without limits, to be as God. And then the snake, the serpent comes. The serpent makes a lot of
sense, doesn't he? "Don't worry about eating the apple! It's not going to hurt you!"
This leads me to the second thing I would say about temper. He almost always appears in a
winsome, appealing and reasonable form. Satan offers you something. It makes no sense to
refuse. Mesostophiles made a lot of sense to Dr. Faustus. Certainly, Satan, as he tempted Jesus,
made a lot of sense. What's the matter with turning a few stones into bread if you're hungry?
What is wrong with being a little spectacular now and then and diving off the pinnacle of the
temple especially if you have been promised you will not hurt yourself? And what's wrong with
ruling the world, if you think you will be good at it? Satan says, "Stop being so preoccupied
with God. Please yourself. Satisfaction, fame, power, it can all be yours." It all makes a lot of
sense until you stop to count the cost. The cost is your soul. The cost is your very identity.
And where did Satan come from? What is the source of the power of darkness? There has been
much debate across the centuries and little consensus, but I am helped in this bewildering matter
by an excellent Biblical scholar named, Walter Wink, who suggests that we not focus on the idea
of the fallen angel or that we see evil as the mysterious force that appears from another realmeither
up in heaven or from below in hell. He maintains that the spirit of negativity which Satan
represents does not come from outside of human existence but is a part of who we are. It is a
part of the systems and structures that compose human society. This spirit is here all the time,
and it emerges when we betray our vocation of obedience to God. Wink uses the excellent of a
soccer match. When a riot breaks out at a soccer match, and people trample one another to
death, where does that come from? Has the riot demon leaped down from heaven or up from
hell? Or is there something intrinsic in the situation that suddenly becomes crystallized? (6)
Think of those things that rip at the fabric of human dignity and human society. Think of
homophobia. Where does that come from? Another realm? Think of anti-Semitism. Does that
not rise up from the inherently negative forces that threaten to overtake us at all times? These
negative