2023

While we don’t face temptations exactly like Jesus faces here, we are tempted nonetheless. For some of us a few days into our Lenten fasts we’ve broken them. We may be tempted to fully count ourselves failures or tempted to just shrug it off as not having mattered anyway. While the lectionary fails spectacularly at showing Jesus being tempted in every way that we were, it nonetheless shows that Jesus faced temptations. The mundane, real-life, day-to-day temptations that we give in to or resist, Jesus faced too.

If our lives are not transformed by meeting Jesus the Christ by encountering the true and living God the encounter is for naught. In seeing Jesus’ transfigured body in holding him in our hands as Bread God admonishes us to listen to Jesus. Mountain top experiences going to thin places are for the good of the world not just the good of our feelings.

In these directions Jesus uses what would have been a familiar rabbinical rhetorical device where the second statement seeks to deepen, intensify and radicalize the first. Jesus has made clear that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. The Law has been a gift from God. What Jesus pulls those committed to following him toward is that keeping the mere letter of the law is not enough. Love itself must be the true guide.

From the smokiest Anglo-Catholic parish to the plainest puritan one with clear glass only it doesn’t matter how pretty, severe, or stark our worship is if we’re not sharing our bread with the hungry, bringing the homeless poor into our houses; and covering the naked it doesn’t matter. If we’re avoiding eye contact or staying in a bubble, choosing not to learn about systemic racism or housing policy or mass incarceration so that we can loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke we will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

The texts are great today.Micah summarizes the whole of the law and the prophets:“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;and what does the Lord require of youbut to do justice, and to love kindness,and to walk humbly with your God?”The psalmist lays out who will abide with God:He has sworn to do no

Matthew’s quotation is intended to remind his readers that the preaching ministry begun by Jesus in Galilee in fulfillment of Scripture would eventually issue in the mission to the Gentiles. That’s us. Epiphany season, extension with Magi knowing good news of the same God, us sharing that good news, Jesus’ direction in great commission.