The Gift of Weakness

A sermon on Luke 4:1-13

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Art: Kramskoĭ, Ivan Nikolaevich, 1837-1887. Christ in the Wilderness.]

As many of you know, I am a big fan of qualified mental health therapy, especially as treatment for diagnosed mental illnesses, but also just as a resource psychological health.

Our minds need intentional care as much as our bodies do.

In fact, mental and physical health are often connected.

One of the core self-awareness skills taught in dialectical behavior therapy is called the PLEASE inventory, which is basically an acronym for assessing and safeguarding your emotional vulnerability based on what is happening with your body.

It reminds you to attend to physical illness, eating, altered states from substances, sleep, and exercise.

That’s because research shows that all of these factors in our physical well-being are essential to giving us the emotional balance to be able to cope with emotional stressors and challenging life circumstances.

Stressors and circumstances like, say, having the father-of-lies ambush you in the wilderness, trying to tempt you and twist the biblical witness so that you will betray your identity and mission.

Obviously, we know how today’s gospel story goes, so we don’t feel any angst about whether Jesus is going to fall prey to temptation, but from a psychological perspective we REALLY should.

Because his situation is practically custom-designed to make him as vulnerable as he can possibly be.

He has been socially isolated for over a month, other than harassment of his tempter.

His physical resources have been depleted to the very limits of human capacity by 40 days of fasting.

In that condition, and in the shelter-less wilderness he cannot have been sleeping well, and he’s probably getting MORE physical exertion that is healthy for him in his state.

That’s almost all of the PLEASE categories at high-vulnerability level.

And yet, at the end of today’s narrative we are told that the devil departs from him “until an opportune time.”

I have to ask: what more opportune time is the devil anticipating?

Jesus is physically weak; he’s alone; he’s in a stark and unforgiving location with no external source of support.

This is exactly the kind of scenario in which the research specifically tells us that we are most vulnerable to being manipulated and lied to by our emotions…. I have to assume that vulnerability applies to the Devil’s manipulation and lies also.

But the Tempter decides to wait for a better time…

Is the devil just delusional? Is constructing convincing lies such an occupational hazard that the Great Liar convinces themself?

Or is there something I am missing here? Something that makes Jesus uniquely invulnerable to factors of deprivation that bring the rest of us to our knees?

My first instinct in response to that second possibility is an automatic: Nope! Not going there. That’s heresy!

My Christology units at seminary drilled into my brain that it is not OK to question the reality of Jesus’ humanity.

Jesus did not just take on the appearance of human flesh.

Jesus was fully human.

He experienced physical weakness and weariness.

He knew frustration at miscommunication and anger at unjust treatment.

When he cut himself (as he must have done in his carpentry shop at times) he shed real blood.

When he felt God’s abandonment he cried real tears.

The gospels are full of stories that illustrate his humanity, to the point that it gets a little uncomfortable at times…

Like the time that he’s so exhausted and need of a break that he uses a racial slur to try to get rid of a woman begging him to heal her daughter, and she has to school him about the expansiveness of God’s grace, in response to which he admits she is right and demonstrates another human capacity: to learn and change.

And then there’s Hebrews 4:15, which assures us: “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

So, no Jesus was not possessed of some inhuman capacity for deprivation that made him immune to the debilitating conditions of spending 40 days starving in the wilderness.

Rather that being inhuman, I think Jesus was perfectly human.

I think Jesus was human in the way that we were all designed to be human, before the Fall broke our relationship of perfect trust and reliance on God.

I don’t think Jesus was invulnerable to the physical factors that degrade our emotional and mental functioning; I think Jesus was uniquely able to embrace his vulnerability.

Because he was not scared of being totally and utterly dependent on God.

Which means that the more vulnerable he felt, the more his body betrayed its frailty, the more easily he could reject the lie of self-sufficiency.

Think about the ways that the Tempter tried to pull Jesus in:

First, it was a temptation to exert power to meet his own needs:

challenging Jesus to give up his fast and use his word to turn a stone into bread.

But Jesus’s response shows the temptation for what it is, a siren call to self-sufficiency, a refusal to rely on God.

So Jesus says, “One does not live by bread alone,” implying the rest of the quotation, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” (Deut. 8:30)

The next temptation is for glory and authority.

And really, this is just a doubling down on the allure of independence.

Authority means being in charge. Glory means the illusion that one’s own greatness is what matters.

The devil’s condition is one of worship, but even without that condition the temptation itself puts worship in the wrong place… what else is a desire for glory than a desire for worship.

So, Jesus’s response rejects again the misplaced urge for autonomy: “Worship the Lord your God and serve God only.”

With the final temptation, the devil gets crafty.

Jesus won’t be conned into self-reliance, fine! Make him demonstrate God’s trustworthiness.

Jesus keeps referencing scripture, no problem! Scripture is easy to twist into a test of faith that undermines our trust in God.

But Jesus can’t be fooled because his weakened body just makes his trust in God stronger.

Jesus has spent 40 days being reminded that he’s not self-sufficient, that he can’t go it alone; and in that weakness and vulnerability he has leaned into total trust in God.

That’s why it’s an inopportune time to try to deceive and manipulated Jesus… because in his weakness he just leans into God’s strength.

I wonder if there is a lesson here for us… imperfectly human as we all are…

A lesson about the strength we can find in weakness… about the power of putting our trust in God when circumstances remind us just how powerless we are on our own.

Because I know a lot of us are feeling pretty powerless these days.

And that reality could push us to desperately reject our own vulnerability.

To try to grasp on to sources of control or to put our trust in lies that promise us safety or special status.

OR, we could follow the example of Jesus.

We could lean into the truth that we were never in control in the first place.

We could use each pang of fear as a reminder to find our security in God.

We could own our weakness and our dependence and thank God that do not ever have to pretend to be able to do it all ourselves.

I know none of us are perfectly human, so we still need to pay attention to the PLEASE inventory, and other mental health skills:

doing our best to prevent the kind of physical (and other) vulnerabilities that make us more likely to believe the lies of our own emotions and the ones that come at us from our environment.

And I know that no matter how intentional we are about healthy habits we cannot ensure a full night’s uninterrupted sleep when our bladders, or existential dread, wake us up at 3:00am, so we will probably have plenty of reminders of our weakness.

But those reminders can be opportunities for prayer. (I know my middle-of-the-night talks with God are always the most honest.)

Our need for God can be a precious gift, because once we admit our need, we let go of the central lie of sin: the lie that we are safest and happiest when we rely always and only on ourselves.

And once we lean into trust in God, it is not an “opportune time” for the devil to feed us lies.

Thanks be to God.