Easy or hard? Wrong or right?
Earlier this week, Deacon Yvonne and I talked about this Sunday’s readings — and particularly about how to handle them in children’s chapel. Fasting, and temptation, and Satan, and a serpent in a garden. It’s all pretty grown-up stuff.
But then I thought back to my own childhood, and it occurred to me that kids might actually understand temptation more clearly than adults do. A child knows the temptation to lie to stay out of trouble. To cheat on a test. To be mean because everyone else is being mean and you don’t want to be left out.
And kids know they’re doing wrong when they do it. They haven’t learned to talk themselves out of that feeling yet.
Adults, on the other hand... Somewhere along the way, we convince ourselves that the wrong thing is the reasonable thing, the necessary thing, the only realistic option under the circumstances. We lose the moral clarity that children have.
So does that mean that ethics is actually easy? That we just need to unlearn our skills of rationalization and respond to every situation as a child would?
Well, maybe. Sometimes a childlike clarity is exactly what we need. But we did eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so even when the right answer isn’t quite so clear, the call is still ours to make.
Today, we hear about Jesus’s time in the wilderness. He’s been fasting for forty days. He’s hungry and alone. And the devil shows up, peddling temptation.
Notice something, though. The devil doesn’t tempt Jesus with anything obviously evil. He doesn’t say, “go do something terrible.” Instead, again and again, he makes a case for the easy way out.
“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” You’re hungry. You have power. Why wouldn’t you ease your hunger?
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the temple.” And then he quotes a psalm: the angels will bear you up, “so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” You’re protected by God’s promise. Why not take the easy path?
“All these kingdoms I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Isn’t that what the Messiah was supposed to do anyway? To take charge of the world and set things right? Why not do it now? Today?
Each temptation is a shortcut. A way to get to something real – food, certainty, power – without the long road Jesus sees ahead of him. Each temptation says: you don’t have to wait. You don’t have to do things the hard way.
But Jesus doesn’t take the bait. He doesn’t engage with the tempter’s argument. He just answers: “It is written.” “Again, it is written.” And finally, “Away with you, Satan.”
It’s almost the way a child might answer. Not because Jesus is naive. But because he sees clearly.
Our vision won’t always be as clear as Jesus’s vision is in this scripture. We might often be tempted by the seemingly easy, rational path. But I suspect that ease might actually be one of the warning signs we need to watch out for.
When you find yourself in a difficult situation, and you start discovering reasons why you don’t need to do the hard thing, when complexity starts to feel like sense, be suspicious. You might be listening to the sort of voice we’ve heard since the Garden. It’s a voice that sounds reasonable. It might even quote scripture. But it points to the easy way out.
But when the way forward is costly, when it asks something of you that scares you at least a little bit, when it’s right but hard, pay attention to that too. That’s often where the real thing is.
There’s a lot of injustice in the world right now. I don’t need to catalog it. You can see it. And it’s tempting to look away. Not because we don’t care. But because the problems feel enormous and we feel small. Because we don’t know exactly what to do.
But when fear becomes a reason for doing nothing – when not knowing the right move turns into permission to make no move at all – that’s a temptation too. Maybe the most dangerous temptation of all. Because it feels wise.
We’re going to get things wrong. We’re human. We’re finite. And we’re asked to act anyway. We’re asked to trust in God’s grace, to trust in the one who walked this road before us.
In the wilderness, the devil told Jesus to throw himself off the temple. To force God’s hand. Jesus said no. He didn’t test God. But he did trust in God. He lived his whole life trusting God. All the way to the cross. Jesus didn’t jump from a high place to prove his power. He walked. Into every hard thing. Into every uncertain thing. Into every costly thing.
Today’s the first Sunday in Lent. We’re still with Jesus in the wilderness. Still in the hard place. Still facing temptation. Whenever we find ourselves there, we can follow Jesus’s lead. We can say no to the easy way out. We can see clearly, the way children do and the way Jesus did, and we can do the hard thing anyway. And we can trust in God with the childlike trust that is actually wisdom.