Luke 4
Wow, chapter four is packed with action!
Put yourself in the scene. Jesus is in the desert, having fasted for the past forty days. In case we didn’t get the clue, Luke reminds us that Jesus was hungry. So how does the temptation come to him? How about this: Jesus looks up from praying and sees a red demon with a pointy tail sitting next to him. In a scratchy voice, Satan says, “Hey, I know you’re hungry. Just tell these stones to become bread.”
I won’t say it’s impossible, but it seems unlikely. I suspect the temptation came far more subtly, as an insidious thought in Jesus’ mind. “If you’re the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread. Who do you really think you are, and why are you out here starving?” I don’t claim to know how it actually happened, but for me this makes the temptation far more powerful and dangerous. It’s generally easy for me to turn down temptation when it looks at me with a crooked toothy grin. It catches me off guard when it comes as a thought or a doubt.
Somehow I always missed something else important: “[Jesus] was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days…” Did you catch that? He wasn’t just tempted for a few hours at the end of forty days of fasting and prayer; he was tempted and tried and tested for the whole six weeks. It is here that the humanity and divinity of Christ meet.
Again I am struck by the presence of the Spirit in this passage. It starts in verse 1: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit… was led by the Spirit in the desert.” Then Jesus goes into Galilee “in the power of the Spirit”, and goes to his hometown synagogue. When he is given the chance to read a passage to the congregation, he picks Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” Thus begins his ministry as the rest of the chapter describes: healing the sick, casting out demons, and teaching with great authority - by the power of the Spirit.
