Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry. The tempter came to Him and said, “If You are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.' Then the devil took Him to the holy city and had Him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If You are the Son of God,” he said, “throw Yourself down. For it is written: 'He will command His angels concerning yo, and they will lift You up in their hands, so that You will not strike Your foot against a stone.'” Jesus answered him, “It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'” Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. “All this I will give You,” he said, “if You will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from Me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.'” Then the devil left Him, and angels came and attended Him.

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I just want to say that I realize that it’s not generally considered very polite to tell someone to go to hell, but I thought that since we were talking about the devil after all it might be considered acceptable, since when we tell the devil to go to hell, we’re not really telling him to do anything more than to go home! Yes, we're talking about Satan. Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and the Scripture reading we just heard is the traditional Gospel passage for this day. Satan plays a significant role in this passage in which Jesus faces the temptation (right from the start of His ministry) to abandon the plan God has laid before Him and to accept an easier and more comfortable life. Satan may be a significant character in this passage, but it's fair to say – at least according to public opinion surveys I've seen that have been done on the subject - that the majority of Canadians don't believe in Satan. It's probably not unreasonable for me to suspect that many people here today don't believe in Satan. Well, I have a confession: I'm not part of the majority. I do believe in Satan! Having said that, before you get the wrong impression, let me explain first what I do not mean by Satan.

I do not believe that Satan is a red-skinned, quasi-human creature with pointy ears and a long tail who carries a pitchfork. That picture is nothing more than silly medieval mythology. But if Satan is not that, then what is Satan? The tendency is generally to try to explain Satan away and deny Satan's existence. A number of years ago the United Church Observer had a cover story about just this subject. Mike Milne, who wrote the article, said that “while United Church people readily recognize the spreading evil around them, many of them are squeamish about naming Satan as the source.” Marilyn Legge, a professor of Christian Ethics at Emmanuel College in Toronto described Satan in this article as simply “a religious construct that’s designed to express human experience of evil.” In other words, Satan is a concept we’ve invented to explain why bad things happen. With just a few exceptions, this article seemed to lead up to a dismissal of even the possibility of any type of evil spiritual force in the world around us, although one notable exception was Victor Shepherd – who teaches church history at the Tyndale Seminary in Toronto and who for many years was the minister of Streetsville United Church in Mississauga – who said that if we reject the idea of Satan’s existence, “we render almost un-understandable a great deal of the New Testament.” Shepherd's words seem relevant to today's passage. Matthew tells us that Jesus faced temptations beyond the normal temptations that comes to any of us at various times. This passage tells us that Satan – however you define him or it – was very much a part of Jesus’ experience in the wilderness.

For Christians, Satan is usually seen as the very epitome (indeed, as the very embodiment) of evil, and I think that's important, because it acknowledges the reality of a spiritual force behind evil. Evil is surely more than just the bad things we do. Evil is what motivates us to act in ways that defy normal conceptions of what is good and right and moral. Evil is that which takes possession of us and pushes us to act in ways that are destructive to both communities and individuals. This particular passage teaches us that evil – most of the time – is not what we think it is. We restrict evil to the obviously horrible and cruel things that happen in the world. The Holocaust was evil; apartheid was evil; slavery was evil; murder and violence of all kinds is evil. And, of course, they are. But what we learn here is that evil is just as often (and perhaps even more often) quite benign – at least seemingly so. Scripture suggests that evil starts with the small and seemingly unimportant things that serve to pull us away from God, and it’s these small things that can often serve to make God's presence seem very distant and perhaps even absent.

We learn a lot from Jesus in this passage about how to do battle with Satan. The evil we battle usually consists of little more than just the every day tests and temptations that we face in trying to be faithful to God: believing that God will provide; believing that God will keep us safe; believing that God is with us; sometimes just believing that there is a God. We’re constantly being tempted to give up on our faith in God. We so easily fall into the trap of wanting God to prove Himself: “do this or that for me; give me this or give me that” - and when things don’t work out the way we had hoped, we question, we wonder, sometimes we get angry with God and give up on God completely. That's not evil by human standards. I know many people who don’t believe in God, and the vast majority of them are very nice people – they're not at all evil! But the obvious evil that we see around us flows from that because, it’s when people give up on God that they start to give up on the moral bearings God lays down, and the result is simply moral chaos, with no obvious reason to believe one thing over another except that “it feels good to me.” That type of individualism is the greatest darkness and the greatest triumph of evil. We just talked about the growing problem of individualism and isolationism in our Tuesday discussion group last week. That's the work of Satan in my opinion – to isolate us, to make us individuals who have to get along on our own rather than members of a community that nurtures us and cares for us. In today's reading we see Jesus at His most vulnerable – weak and hungry – and yet we still see Him triumph because he trusted in God to sustain him, resisting temptation by repeatedly quoting God's Word in response to them.

By holding on to that relationship and refusing to be isolated from God, Jesus did battle with Satan in the wilderness and sent him packing, so to speak. He overcame evil, and the strength to do that – the strength to look evil in the face and sneer at it – belongs to us all, as people who belong to Christ we have God with us, and as people empowered by the Holy Spirit we have God within us..

Martin Luther was quite convinced of the reality of Satan’s existence. In his journal, he wrote that on one particular night he was awakened by sounds as he slept in his chamber in the monastery. But, he said with a seeming degree of both irritation and contempt, once he realized that it was only Satan, he rolled over and went back to sleep.” It must be marvelous to have such confidence in the power of God; to be able, as Luther apparently was, to look evil in the face and to simply sneer at it. And yet Jesus teaches us that we can have such confidence; that we can have authority over Satan and over all the evil that Satan represents. All we need to do is trust in God. So, as we mark today the beginning of Lent, I encourage you to follow the example of Martin Luther and let the Word of God strengthen you and sustain you. And when you find yourself faced with temptation to turn elsewhere, remember where that temptation comes from, and tell the devil to leave you alone and go to – well, you know where!