The days were dark. Not
the sun in the sky, but the whole atmosphere... dark indeed. The
prisoners were escorted from their large Egyptian city of
Oxyrhynchus, away in chains to where the prefect Culcianus was
staying. They'd been ratted out by their neighbors for being
Christians. And so there, on the twenty-seventh of August, 303,
there stood Bishop Miletius, with his three priests Ammonius, Chiron,
Serapion; the tribune Marcellus, with his wife and sons; the soldier
Peter; and eight other members of their fellowship. Along the way,
the four pastors whispered words of encouragement to the thirteen
others, reciting stories from the scriptures and the heavenly
promises of the God they worship.
But now they stood before
Culcianus, these Christians. They did not quake as the prefect
called them enemies of culture itself, traitors to Caesar's law,
rebels against his authority and his gods. The incense was brought
out. He ordered them to offer up just a little tiny sacrifice to the
gods of Rome – just one quick pinch, that's all it takes – and
they'd be free to go their merry way. Not only free, but handsomely
rewarded. “Approach the altar,” he cried, “and make a
sacrifice to the immortal gods, so that you would be filled with the
highest honors and are able to appease the king and to be united in
the bond of our friendship!” He urged them to come to their
senses. Isn't it worth it, he pressed them, to go through these
little formalities in exchange for such a reward?
Marcellus steps forward.
He gives voice to what the rest are thinking. “We are Christians,”
he tells the prefect. “We have God as our Master, who made heaven
and earth and sea and all things which are in them. He is able to
liberate us from your madness and from the malice of your father the
devil. For it is not lawful that we accept your impious counsels and
sacrifice to demons at the detriment of the Creator, our Lord!”
Culcianus orders them
thrown in prison overnight – traitors to Roman authority, despisers
of her gods. The next day, they're retrieved, all seventeen of them,
and brought out to the stadium. Again Culcianus cajoles them,
threatens them with death. He tells them to repent of their foolish
intransigence, tells them they ought to be ashamed for worshipping a
crucified criminal as God – and why should they trust a God who
couldn't protect himself? Again, he tells them, just offer the
sacrifice and be done with it! But the bishop, full of the Spirit of
the Lord, shouts back, “Far be it from us! We will not deny the
name of the Lord and God Jesus Christ, who is the Word of the living
God before the foundation of the world, … who bore our weakness and
ruin that befell us on account of your father the devil. … We are
not terrified by your words.” And after praying to God for the
sake of the prefect and the mocking crowds, the seventeen were
martyred.
But it wasn't the first
time. A hundred years earlier, miles away in the city of Carthage in
north Africa, there lived – for a while – a 22-year-old woman
named Vibia Perpetua. She and one of their brothers had decided that
they wished to become Christians. They were undergoing the season of
teaching customary before being admitted to baptism, along with four
slaves in their class, including a pregnant slave-girl named
Felicitas. The six of them were captured – it wasn't legal to be a
Christian – and they were put in prison.
Perpetua was torn from
her husband and from the little baby she'd so recently brought into
the world. Her father visited her in jail, trying to talk her into
her senses. “Just give up this ridiculous little fad – can't you
see what it'll cost you, Perpetua?” But, she answered, she
couldn't call herself anything else than what she is – and what she
is, is a Christian. Over the next few days, she managed to get
baptized; the deacons arranged for her to see her mother, her other
brother, and her little son.
The trial date grew
closer. Her father visited again, begging her to reconsider, begging
her to go through the motions and give the authorities the little
gestures they wanted, a tiny pinch of incense and a few meaningless
words. He was old, he said, and couldn't bear the loss! He needed
her! And she was putting the whole family to embarrassment – her
mother, her brothers, her aunt, her baby. And how would this little
baby survive if his mother went through with this? But, she said,
“On that scaffold, whatever God wills shall happen. We aren't
placed in our own power, but in God's.”
The hearing came. Her
father was there, cradling the little baby in his arms, crying out,
“Have pity on this baby, Perpetua!” So, too, the judge
Hilarianus urged her with the same arguments: “Spare the gray hairs
of your father, spare the infancy of your boy, offer sacrifice for
the well-being of the emperors.” Isn't it worth this one quick
moment of worshipping the gods to spare your family from suffering?
But, she said, she couldn't do it. She persisted in saying, “I am
a Christian.” In front of her eyes, her father was thrown to the
ground and beaten with rods – all this could be stopped, they said,
if she changed her mind and sacrificed! But still she couldn't. And
so the verdict was delivered: “Guilty as charged!” And after
more attempts by her grieving, weeping dad to get her to give in, she
and her fellow Christians were led off to the arena to die.
But it's an almost
timeless trial, taking place in every age and every place. There was
a movie in the theaters the other month, based on this book – it's
called Silence. Show of
hands, did anybody see it? For those who didn't and might want to,
I'll try not to spoil it – the DVD's coming out Tuesday, I think.
But it's about how, in seventeenth-century Japan, the authorities
decided that Christianity had no place in the country. And so they
hounded the believers to near extermination; many were forced to
become what they called Kakure Kirishitan,
“Hidden Christians,” disguising their icons and prayers to escape
suspicion. Those captured were told that they could go free,
perhaps, if only they'd trample on an image of Jesus as a sign of
renouncing Christ.
And
there's a scene where a pastor has been captured, and he's given a
novel twist on the offer. Outside, there are Christians, members of
the flock he came to serve, being tortured. And they will continue
to be tortured – unless he tramples on the image, unless he
renounces Christ and the Church. Not to save his own skin, but to
save theirs, as an act of mercy and love. The argument is put to
him: Wouldn't Jesus himself do it – reject, for a moment, his God
for the sake of others? Wouldn't he lay down, not just his life, but
his sinlessness, for his friends? Couldn't apostasy, couldn't false
worship, be an act of mercy to save others?
I
won't tell you how the story ends; I won't tell you what choice that
pastor makes. But as for that argument, as for that question, we
don't have to speculate. A century and a half before Vibia Perpetua
was even born, and long before the sufferings of the seventeen
martyrs from Oxyrhynchus or of the Kakure Kirishitan in Japan, the
Lord Jesus Christ spent forty days fasting in the desert. And there,
at the close of his time, the devil approached him to tempt him –
to try to persuade Jesus to listen to his ideas of what it means to
be a child of God.
If
you were here the last couple of weeks, maybe you remember. The
devil tells Jesus that being a child of God means having it your way,
it means getting what you want, when you want it, it means having
bread on demand (Matthew 4:3). But Jesus looks back to the time when
Israel wandered the desert, to be tested to see what kind of child of
God they wanted to be; and Jesus sees there that being a child of God
means trusting the Father's word to sustain you in his time (Matthew
4:4).
And
then, in a second temptation, the devil took Jesus to the top of the
temple and urged him to show off, use God's protection and love to
impress the crowds – surely a child of God has that privilege
(Matthew 4:5-6). But Jesus again looks back to the story of Israel,
and how they tried to manipulate and test God into serving their
agenda at Massah – and he sees that being a child of God means
living by humble faith, and not using God as an excuse to do dumb or
sinful things (Matthew 4:7).
And
so now for the third and final temptation in the desert. “Again,
the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him”
– probably in a vision – “all the kingdoms of the
world and their glory”
(Matthew 4:8). The riches of soaring Roman temples, and legions
marching in ranks. The exotic splendors of the Parthian Empire in
Persia, the divided and embattled Han Dynasty in China under Emperor
Guangwu, the miscellaneous tribes of so-called barbarians in northern
Europe, the far-flung settlements of native peoples across the sea
where we live now – all of it, the devil showed to Jesus as an
enticement, as if to say, “Do you want it? I'll step out of the
way, you can have it all, you can be king of the world... I just
need one little thing from you first.”
The
devil said to Jesus, “All these I will give you, if...
you will fall down and worship me”
(Matthew 4:9). “Just submit one time – you don't even have to
mean it – but take a three-second break from serving that God you
call a Father, bow to the real boss, and we can go our separate ways,
conflict-free.”
That's
what the devil is selling here, a trade: the riches and beauty and
allegiance of all the kingdoms of the whole entire world for one
quick moment of worship. The devil will give up his involvement, his
meddling rule, his clutches whereby he clings to all these things, to
Jesus. Jesus can rule all the kingdoms, he can guide it, he can
reshape it. He can write every law, he can decide every court case.
He can have “dominion
from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth”
(Psalm 72:8) – all his, for the low, low price of one measly bow
with a few muttered words of praise and gratitude to the benevolent
tempter who sponsored this utopia.
And
think of all the possibilities! Can you hear the devil plead his
case? If you're silent for a moment, can you catch a snippet of the
sermon pouring off the lips of this angel of light?
Don't
you see, Jesus? Don't you get it? I'll give it up, I'll give it all
up! You can take every crown; your name can be shouted in every
temple; you can roam the streets bedecked in jewels and gold; you can
trade your rugged linens for the finest silks. And you can do it
however you please. Do you want to rule with an iron fist? Be my
guest! Or do you want to be a kindly shepherd, making everyone happy
and – oh, what's that word... – 'virtuous'? Go for it, Jesus!
Just think of all the good you could do!
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and you can be free from pain and poverty.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and thorns never have to pierce your brow.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and Roman soldiers will adore your face, not
spit in it.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and your buddy Simon, the one you'll find back
in Galilee and nickname Peter – he'll never be led off to hang on
an upside-down cross.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and your little pet John will never be dipped in
boiling oil.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and your future devotee Perpetua can live to a
ripe old age. She'll watch her baby grow. She'll see grandchildren
and great-grandchildren, and her family will be happy, never knowing
the torments and heartache that will otherwise be.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and Marcellus and the rest of your Oxyrhynchite
crew can live freely and unashamedly and sit at Culcianus' table all
the days of their lives.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and there need never be any invading Huns,
marauding Mongols, pillaging Vikings.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and no one need ever be kidnapped, whipped,
treated like property, merely for the color of their skin.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and Japanese troops will never rape their way
through Nanking, and no one will ever remember Pearl Harbor as
anything but a lovely beach.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and the precious citizens of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki need never learn the deadly secrets at the heart of the
atom.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and your people will never scream their dying
words in a gas chamber.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and the Tutsis and Hutus will never brutalize
each other in Burundi and Rwanda.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and those towers in New York can stand tall and
proud forever; for never need there be an al-Qaeda, nor a Taliban, a
Boko Haram, an ISIS.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and no one will ever have a reason to invent the
word 'genocide.' Phrases like 'ethnic cleansing' or 'crimes against
humanity' will never be uttered.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and you can stop every pogrom, every lynching,
that would ever be.
Think
of it, Jesus. No Soviet gulags. No Cambodian killing fields. No
dissidents imprisoned in Cuba. No Agent Orange. No sarin gas. No
children starving in the streets. No battered wives. No veterans
with PTSD. No such thing as human trafficking.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and I'll forever stand aside while you “crush
the oppressor”
(Psalm 72:4).
As
much as I love the chaos and the carnage, I'll trade all the kingdoms
of the earth, with all their glory, if you'll give me this one measly
moment of your time – one act of submission to me, one word to wipe
away all the blood and sweat and tears of history yet to unfold, all
the heartbreak and sorrow of generations yet unborn.
Worship
me this once, Jesus, and I'll never entice them to mistrust you.
I'll never trick them, never hurt them, never hinder them. You can
write the laws. You can preside over the courts. You can execute
the edicts. You can pump your little Sermon on the Mount into every
home over the airwaves for a thousand years, Son of Man. Teach them
your ways, govern them with whatever you call justice – all I ask
is this one little thing.
Worship
me just this once, Jesus, and you can give them paradise.
You
call yourself kind; you call yourself merciful.
Isn't
it most merciful to say yes to all that, at the cost of one moment,
one word, one bow?
Oh
yes, all this and more I will give you, if only, just this once,
you'll fall down and worship me.
Hearing that, who among
us doesn't feel the strength of the temptation? Who among us doesn't
see the appeal? Who among us doesn't have days where we might wish
he'd said yes? But there's the question again – the very question
posed in Silence, the
question given to St. Perpetua by her father, the question given by
Culcianus to the martyrs of Oxyrhynchus: Is that sort of trade worth
it, or isn't it?
For
his part, Jesus turns back to the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, the
most important lesson of all. It's a piece of scripture that answers
the question of where real life comes from, where we get real joy and
real abundance. Jesus, like Joseph and Mary and all their neighbors,
would have grown up reciting these words daily: “Hear, O
Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD
is one! You shall love the LORD
your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
might” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
These are the words they're meant to carry in their hearts, teach to
their children, write on their doors and gates, bind to their hands
and foreheads as a sign and a seal – the mark of their God
(Deuteronomy 6:6-9). These are the words they mustn't forget when
they get the blessings they haven't deserved – when they live in
“great and good cities that you didn't build, and houses
full of good things that you didn't fill, and wells you didn't dig,
and vineyards and olive trees you didn't plant” – then
they can't forget that they once were slaves, but the LORD
saved them from Egypt (Deuteronomy 6:10-11).
In
that day, when they enjoy the beauty and bounty of grace, grace,
marvelous grace, they need to remember that they have only one God,
whose glory outweighs the heavens and the earth. Other so-called
'gods' will try to entice them with all sorts of offered blessings.
But they aren't to follow those gods. They aren't to serve or
worship those gods. Those gods make pretty-sounding promises, but
they poison everything they touch, and their lips are full of lies
and invite the wrath of the only God who matters (Deuteronomy
6:14-15). No, no, no: none of the glories, none of the riches, none
of the mercies or kindnesses those poison-gods preach can compare to
the richness and mercy of worshipping the one and only LORD
God – “It is the LORD
your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name you
shall swear” (Deuteronomy
6:13).
That's
the key message, right there. He says to worship him, and him alone.
It's phrased as an absolute, and it just is
an absolute. He says to never, ever take what's his, like rightful
worship, and render it to someone else – that's very much a 'thou
shalt not.' He says to never, ever withhold our worship from him –
it's very much a 'thou shalt,' with no ifs, ands, or buts. Because
as much as the poison-gods may dress up their proffered benefits as
pleasant and helpful, they're poisoned, and they lead only to death.
But the blessings of the LORD
are life, and life abundantly, even if they rest on the other side of
an old rugged cross.
So
Jesus remembers this passage, and he sees that, no matter how
persuasive the devil's argument, and no matter how enticing the
devil's offer, “it
is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only
shall you serve”
(Matthew 4:10). It can never be an act of love to repudiate the God
who is
Love (1 John 4:1). It can never be merciful to abandon the God who
whom “belongs
mercy and forgiveness”
(Daniel 9:9) – the God who lets human history take the course it
does with the aim that he might “have
mercy on all”
(Romans 11:32).
The
world the devil depicts is an appealing world, that's true. The
fabric of its counterfactual history is missing an immense deal of
pain, heartache, sorrow, and ugliness. But it's also missing the
cross. And because it's missing the cross, it's missing redemption.
It's missing salvation. It's missing the beauty that is brighter
than death's shadow is dark. It's a world where our evil is managed,
not abolished; where, in the end of a delightful and utopian life, we
die in our sins and reap the everlasting fruits thereof.
And
so, just as Perpetua and the rest of the martyrs and confessors and
faithful believers refused the trades offered by their earthly
judges, Jesus refuses the immensely bold trade offered by the devil.
Because, in the end, what the devil might couch in terms of 'mercy'
turns out not to be so merciful after all. What the devil talks up
as a great profit turns out to be, in the end, a net loss. “What
does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”
(Matthew 16:26). That, in the final analysis, is the trade the devil
offered – to no avail. How much less the more pitiful offerings
the devil makes us for the same price?
In
each of the temptations, of course, Jesus eventually receives
something like what the devil offers – but he gets it on his
Father's terms, receiving it through patient, humble, loving faith.
Jesus was fed – but not by transmuting stones to loaves. Jesus
received the ministrations of angels and is honored as the Messiah –
but not by recklessly hurling himself from the pinnacle of the temple
to test his Father. And Jesus has received authority over all the
kingdoms of the earth – “All
authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,”
he said after the cross and after the empty tomb (Matthew 28:18).
What's
more, his active rule is being implemented even now, as he bears and
redeems all the sufferings of history whereby the devil may well have
sought to taunt him. And one day, his rule will be made complete,
and there will be a world with both
redemption and
paradise – where, once purified from our sinful pride, we humbly
receive from the tree of life, “and
eat, and live forever”
(Genesis 3:22). And Jesus' Father “will
wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for
the former things [will have] passed away”
(Revelation 21:4).
So
everything the devil tried to induce Jesus to barter away his sinless
soul for, he's trusting the Father to give him. He's trusting the
Father to answer the age-old prayer of the psalmist: “Give
the King your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the Royal
Son! … May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to
the ends of the earth! May desert tribes bow down before him … May
the kings of Tarshish and the coastlands render him tribute; may the
kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts! May all kings bow down before
him, all nations serve him!”
(Psalm 72:1, 8-11).
The
devil offers to answer that prayer in a cheap way, a quick fix, a
Band-Aid on the real problem. But Jesus is a faithful child of God.
And a faithful child of God doesn't go for the quick fix. A faithful
child of God trusts the Father to ultimately provide a real solution,
a deep healing – because Jesus' Father is “the
LORD,
the God of Israel, who alone
does wondrous things”
(Psalm 72:18) – none of the devil's poisoned counterfeits come
close.
But
have we learned the lesson Jesus is teaching us? Because the devil
so often comes to us, and though he doesn't promise all the kingdoms
of the earth with all their glory, still, for so much less, he tempts
us to barter away the health of our souls. He'll trade us
respectability in today's culture if we'll just tone down our
devotion and not be vocal in public about our God. To keep our
demeanor 'mercifully' inoffensive, we'll ignore or disdain the
life-giving words of scripture. To keep our bodies safe, we'll
reject Christ behind the faces of “the least of these” (Matthew
25:40). To keep our bank accounts afloat or our houses tidy, we'll
burn the midnight oil and stay away from the house of God and the
fellowship of his family on earth.
In
all these things, the devil offers us plenty of trinkets and tokens
if we'll just withhold our worship from our Father, one way or
another. We seldom think that's what we're doing, but these verses
this morning lay bare the crafty stratagem whereby the devil's snare
is laid (cf. 2 Timothy 2:26).
So
what do we want? Do we want the devil's quick fix, or the Father's
deep solution? Which will we choose when the choice is offered us,
under whatever trickery the devil sees fit to veil it? May we follow
the example of Christ our Lord, and learn how better to say with him,
“Get thee
behind me, Satan”
(Matthew 4:10). Amen.