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Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.

Again we come across the Kyrie, the prayer, “Lord, have mercy on me.” The prayer comes up ten times in Psalms, and five times in the Gospels. Blind Bartimaeus and his companion (the two blind men), the man with the epileptic son, the two blind men that followed Jesus to the house, the ten lepers, and the Canaanite woman all cried out “have mercy on me.”

In a previous meditation, we covered how worship is formal because we have a formal Savior and ourselves are formal beings. This Gospel explains how. And again we get clarity by contrasting the basis of formal worship with its opposite, Gnosticism.

Gnostics hate formalism. In the Gnostic system, forms are impositions of an alien god on what should be one and undifferentiated. This is why they despise the flesh and materiality: flesh and materiality are that in which forms become manifest. There is no such thing as “cat” (either the word or the being) until this world’s inferior God forced there to be this furry, formed, material thing doing cat things that we all understand objectively to be “cat.”

Of course we reject all this. How then do we understand things in a faith that cherishes the creation and incarnation? Let’s continue our example of the cat.

Once “cat” arises, “cat” runs what it means to be “cat.” And we receive “cat” as it is. In a sense, we receive it as a gift. We – forms ourselves and defined by our own materiality – are passive receptors of whatever “cat” is, delighting in its uniqueness. A question might be asked, do we do “cat” or does “cat” do us?

What in God’s name does this mean? “Cat” is determined not by some “construct” we, or the powers that be, impose on some fluidly, randomly changing thing. That would be us doing “cat,” and don’t think this bizarre. There are many modern philosophers who would argue that in fact, we do “cat,” that all such things are constructs and products of our mind’s making.

By contrast “cat” arises and is governed by an actual cat doing cat things as God created it to do. By observation, we’re like Adam, receiving what “cat” is and thinking about it as a unique creature with an associated concept and name, something to discuss as part of human language.

OK, that’s a lot of setup for the day’s theme. Reminiscere’s Gospel demonstrates the same concept when applied to faith. Do we do faith or does faith do us? If the object of our faith is indeed a formed, external, material “thing” – as Christ is – then we’d say the faith does us.

The modern philosopher way would be to say that faith is a construct we subjectively define. This is the “I feel it in my heart” way of faith. But there’s danger here. How many people’s faith becomes shipwrecked because it’s as sure as their ability to construct what faith means “to them”; but how wobbly we truly are!

Unfortunately, so much of our Christian practice fosters this idea of “us doing the faith.” That brings us to informal worship, the idea that a “worship team” on Thursday night will construct a worship service based on who knows what. They’re constructing the faith; they’re doing the faith.

And this is why formal worship needs to be upheld. In formal worship, the object of faith, like “cat” remains distinct and unique from us, so that we receive it in its totality and uniqueness, without adding anything to it or “constructing” it as if it needed to be constructed. It is gift, because it is always something external to us, something formed, something where there are clear lines where it ends and I begin. It’s not my words, but God’s Word.  Like “cat” running what it means to be “cat,” faith runs what it means to be faith.

How does this work? And here, this week’s Gospel explains.

The Kyrie, the “Lord, have mercy,” is given to us by inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. King David sang it by the Holy Spirit; the Canaanite woman and others prayed it; the apostles recorded their prayers by the Holy Spirit, making it a “thing,” a thing external to us (like a cat) that “does its thing,” which is… well, let’s talk about that now.

Every time the Kyrie is prayed to God or Christ in the Bible, it is answered,  Very often Jesus answers it with “great is your faith.” The Kyrie is the prayer of those at the “zero point,” who have nothing to give the Lord but their broken spirits. Lepers, blind, demon-possessed sons and daughters, those characters fill the Kyrie with their freight. A cat purrs and a Kyrie testifies to ones broken-ness. Why would anyone want to remove it?

As part of the formal liturgy, it’s part of the Lord’s re-creation of the world. It serves as the foundation for the Lord to speak His “Let there be” (or Jesus’ “let it be” of this Gospel) into the broken down messes, the formlessness and void that we have become, to be formed by Him, by His Word.

Like the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t do the Kyrie, the Kyrie does us. Us doing a Kyrie will leave us in doubt. The Kyrie doing us imports the freight of the Gospel, every time, to those who pray it.

This may be difficult to conceptualize, but think of it this way. Everyone subjectively feels in their soul his spiritual needs. Everyone could easily pray a “Lord have mercy” and feel it as coming straight from his heart and soul. But it’s an empty prayer no different than “Ahhhh! I’m falling!” when it’s only basis is one’s self. Only when that prayer has the content given it by the Scriptures, by its place in the Psalms and Gospels, does that “Ahhhh! I’m falling!” feeling turn into faith founded in something real, Christ.

In the liturgy, we may or may not be “in” the prayer. It doesn’t matter. We put so much burden on ourselves to “feel” the words we’re saying, as if our “feeling it” makes it happen. No. Not at all. The Kyrie is doing its work of building faith. There will be many times we will “feel it.” There will be many times we won’t. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the objective reality, that we are all the Canaanite woman. We are all the blind men. We are all the ten lepers.

And when that is true, great is our faith, because great is our Savior.

Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying.

This Gospel begins with words that call for context. Jesus “went away” and “withdrew.” Went away from where? Withdrew from what?

The context is Matthew 15, and if a phrase might summarize the whole chapter, it would be “What may or may not go in the mouth; what may or may not come out the mouth.”

The chapter begins with Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for their traditions of man. He says, “These people draw near to Me with their mouth, And honor Me with their lips, But their heart is far from Me.” Teaching as doctrine the commandments of men is what should NOT come out of the mouth. Jesus calls these Pharisees plants which will be uprooted, for the Father has not planted them.

What may go IN the mouth? Here Jesus teaches, using mildly graphic language that refers to, um, number two: “Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man…whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated.” This lays down the “change in policy” that God’s people may now eat pork and shrimp.

Then Jesus ends the section describing the connection between the heart and the mouth: “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.”

(Quite interesting thinking about how from “out of the mouth” come murders and adulteries. But again, as we’ve been meditating on these past weeks, the mouth is the source of the word, which comes from the heart. This is a reflection of our divine image, even as Jesus the Word proceeds from the heart/mouth of God. But the parallel sets up the understanding. As God used His Word to bring about His heart’s intention, the good creation of the universe, man uses his word to bring about his own un-creation. Again we go to the proverb, “A wholesome tongue is a tree of life; perverseness breaks the spirit.”)

Now we get to the Gospel for Reminiscere with this preparatory set up: What comes out of the heart goes out of the mouth and has the power to create (when that word/doctrine is from God) or to un-create (when that word/doctrine is from man). Also, food is welcome into the mouth.

Jesus is leaving the area behind where words coming out of mouths is the “commandments of men,” that is, where from the heart words proceed that un-create. He withdraws from there and enters the land of Tyre and Sidon, where a Canaanite woman approaches.

What comes out of her mouth? “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David.” This is liturgy, the intersection of objective and subjective faith. That is what SHOULD come out of the mouth! Not the commandments of men by which men attempt to build their own Babels, their own creations, which only end up dissolving the creation with its inevitable murders and fornications. But these words, as we meditated on with the Gospel of blind Bartimaeus, put one at the point of being an object of the Lord’s grace and mercy, and re-creation.

It puts one at the point of being good soil, from which the Lord will plant new plants

But for the time being we get Christ’s silence. Nothing. God’s silence. (More on this in a later devotion.) Nothing comes out of God’s mouth. Wow.

Until it does, and Jesus says the words of creation, “Let it be.” Let it be as you desire. And what did she desire? Mercy from her Lord. Again, that places her among the chaos and void of the first day, ready to be re-created.

Or to jump back to another metaphor, she says words that cause a new plant to bud in the rich soil that was this woman’s faith, the words that came from her heart, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David.” (This incidentally lets us in on what is the “good soil” of the fourth seed in the Parable of the Sower. It’s the soil that cries out “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David.”)

The woman got all of Jesus – all His creative, planting, feeding Person – through faith in the final thing that now should go IN the mouth, the crumb. That bread crumb is the small seed that blossomed in her being granted the desires of her heart, the mercy from the Lord.

What shouldn’t come out of the mouth? False doctrine and words of un-creation. What should come out of the mouth? Prayers of mercy to the Lord, the Son of David (David’s Seed). What may go in the mouth? Food. What does the Lord do with the smallest crumb of that food? Fill it with Himself.

“Remember, O Lord!” This is the translation of this week’s Sunday, the second Sunday in Lent, Reminiscere, the first word of the Introit (in Latin). “Remember, O Lord!” appropriately fits the Gospel for this week, the account of the Canaanite woman begging Jesus for mercy on her daughter.

I sometimes like to set up an explanation of the Gnostic and Neoplatonic understandings of the cosmos though this image. Imagine being a head floating in deep, dark space. There is nothing around you. No stars, no planets, nothing that any human sense can take in. You can’t say there’s “blackness” because there’s no way to even say what blackness is, like the woman born blind who, when I asked if she just sees “black,” said, “What’s black?”

Now, let’s imagine your head has been floating around from the beginning, so you’ve never had anything other than nothingness entering into your various sensory organs. Here’s a question: could you speak anything? Could you talk about anything? Would you have an word to say?

The answer is “no,” because there’s nothing to speak of. There’s nothing to think about. Thoughts and the words which communicate those thoughts depend on external realities – beings – that craft our thoughts and have a one to one correspondence with the words defining them. This is the basis for communication. As the proverb says, “A whole some tongue is a tree of life.” In the same way two people in communion with an objective quanta of conceptual stuff bring it to life and make it “a thing.” Sort of like the expression out there, “You mean that’s a thing?” It is once it’s spoken of!

(Gnosticism is such a tricky doctrine to handle because it’s actually an articulated principle of “no-thing” against the inherent evilness of “things.” How do you grapple with no-thing-ness? How do you speak about that which claims to be beyond speech, which itself is seen as a conspirator in the evil. Naming Gnosticism is the significant way to battle it, like Jesus demanding the names of demons before casting them out. Same principle.)

For the Gnostics , their cosmic creation account begins when this head, what they call Monad, had a “first thought.”  Monad actually had his first thought once he contemplated the one “thing” in existence, himself.  This began the process that ultimately led to the fall.  The existence of beings, paralleling the rise of individual thoughts, led to the ultimate fall of the cosmos into material beings, for matter is that in which a thought can claim fully individual existence.

You can see why the Gnostics hated God’s creation.

Because think of what God’s creation means for us in terms of God’s thoughts. We are God’s thoughts “spoken” into existence, and this is not evil but good. This is how God had us in mind from the foundation of the world, as St. Paul says. We were on His mind. At our creation He spoke us into being. And what does that mean? It means having a defined, delineated existence – “a thing,” something to be spoken of, something to be “brought to mind.”

So long as God keeps us in His mind, we will maintain that existence. To be out of God’s memory is the terrifying status of “not being.” Of course, the curse of man is that he’s slowly returning to a place of non-being, the dust, a place forgotten by all. As Ecclesiastes says, “For the living know that they will die; But the dead know nothing, And they have no more reward, For the memory of them is forgotten.”

The Canannite woman was experiencing all the forces of “non-being.” She was in danger of being forgotten. Her life – her daughter – was experiencing the spiritual forces of the demonic, a force of nothingness. She was a Canaanite, the refuse of Palestine.

And then we get to the brutal part of her story. Her hope and Savior greeted her cries with silence – God was silent! His silence was backed up by His earthly representatives, the Twelve, the Church. And finally, when God does speak, He speaks an insult to her, calling her a little dog.

Ah! But what did we say before? For God to have you in mind and speak of you is for you to have an existence. A little dog is still a little dog, a thing, something in existence. And a crumb is a something. Anything’s better than a nothing. Jesus speaks the woman into existence! He speaks her hope into existence!

The woman hangs onto whatever the Lord throws at her, because it’s a something. She hangs on to that crumb against the demonic, Gnostic forces of nothingness which would say, “Scorn your life in this world, for your goal is to leave existence in this world behind.”

And little does she know, but she’s finding herself right in the Lord’s wheelhouse. The Lord does great things with formless dust, as He had from the beginning. He has a hard time working with willful dust fleeing from Him as if they want non-existence. But those who present themselves before Him and cry, “Put me on your mind! Speak me into existence!” He makes anew.

Remember, O Lord. Make me to continue to exist. And this means, sustain my body, for it is in my body that I have existence. My body is the manifestation of God’s thinking of me. In the collect for this Sunday, we pray, “O God, who sees that of ourselves we have no strength, keep us both outwardly and inwardly that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”

Notice the focus on the body. The body matters (pun intended). To be remembered is to have a body that’s “defended from all adversities.” And notice the “evil thoughts” that assault and hurt the soul. Evil thoughts – knowledge of evil – came into “being” with Adam’s choice. Evil wasn’t “a thing” in the creation – everything was very good. When Adam first heard the word “evil” he must have thought, “What’s that?” The answer was, everything the creation was not. By Adam choosing knowledge of that evil, he introduced the negation of the created order. He made evil something to pursue, and thereby flee God’s goodness.

In the collect, we pray God would protect us from “negating thoughts,” thoughts that would remove us as “things” created in God’s good creation, things worthy of redemption, things God keeps at the forefront of His mind. How often these thoughts attack us! How often we contemplate non-existence as a solution!

But not the woman of great faith. Though all the evidence would convince her she was a nothing, she had none of it. She was a creation of God, and therefore worthy to be on His mind, worthy to be spoken back into existence.

And Jesus did just that. Jesus came to restore us to being, to being in existence, to being on God’s mind. “Great is your faith!” May we all have such faith.

Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.

On Judgment Day, Jesus will return. The sheep will be at his right hand, the goats on His left. The judgment will be based on how they received Christ in His weakness. Hungry, thirsty, a stranger, in prison, weak, naked, these are the words describing Jesus in His humiliation, culminating, of course, on the cross.

The sheep will be judged as having received Him through “His brethren,” that is, the apostles He sent out. Matthew 10 provides a good backdrop. Jesus sends out the apostles on a mini-mission and promises them that they’ll be without clothing, without food or clothing, imprisoned, and estranged. Yet, “whoever receives you receives Me.” It’s the same theme as what happens on Judgment Day.

The goats, by contrast, do not receive Christ in His weakness or His apostles who bear His cross. Listen to what they say on Judgment Day: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”

Ministering to Jesus is what the saved do. And that simply means receiving Him in His weakness, or in our case today, receiving them whom Jesus sends, the pastors and missionaries who often bear great burdens in their administration of the Gospel.

In the wilderness, Jesus was at an incredibly low point. He was the scapegoat thrust out into the wilderness, having just been baptized and bearing the sins of His people. The devil had just attacked Him with challenging trials, leading Him to doubt Himself: “If you’re the Son of God…”

In the end, the devil left Him. The devil had no compassion, no room for ministering to Jesus. He abandoned Him in the wilderness to die.

Not so the angels. The angels came and ministered to Him. What did this mean? It probably at least meant they gave Him food and drink. A few verses back in the Gospel we learned the angels had hands with which to bear up them that fall, so it shouldn’t be too strange to imagine angels bringing food for Jesus. They also provided companionship, visiting Him and speaking with Him. Bringing up a theme we’ve been returning to regularly, speech has the power to strenghthen the soul. “A wholesome tongue is a tree of life,” says the Proverb. What holy conversation they had!

Did Jesus need clothing? Did He need a way out of a vast desert? Who knows, but whatever He needed, the angels provided.  The painting above suggests they played music for Him!  Why did they do this? Because they are “spirits sent to serve” yes, but also because they love their Lord.

And this is among the many reasons why, when Jesus returns, He’ll be with His angels.

Many Christians and pastors are in the wilderness right now, and not just because its Lent and they might be in a “wilderness training program.” They are suffering for the Gospel, for the Word of God, for their advocacy of God’s Law in an antinomian world. They often struggle financially. How many Christians or pastors find themselves isolated because of what we believe? How many have to endure dangerous temptations of body, mind, and soul because Satan targets God’s children?

Those who minister to them are like the angels, and they will be with Jesus on Judgment Day, not wondering where Jesus was when He was among them as hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, weak, and in prison.

Consider St. Paul’s words to Timothy: “May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me – may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day!—and you well know how many ways he ministered to me at Ephesus.”

May we all be Onesiphorus, ministering to the saints, ministering to each other, ministering to Christ, as the angels did.

Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”

To what extent were all the kingdoms Satan’s to give? In Luke’s account of Christ’s temptation, Satan says, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.”

Here we see whatever Satan has to give out, it’s because something was delivered to him.   He was delivered something by Adam.  Adam had dominion over the world, and he handed it to Satan. Now Satan manages the nations, the rulers of our age.

Let’s probe deeper. Adam executed his dominion by naming the animals. Human language is how man masters his world.  Whether it’s a political community handling finance, trade, and land management, or a scientific community sharing knowledge about the latest way to increase production of corn, the human capacity of  speech is what gives us our dominion. From the Word, by the word, through the word, man lives out what it means to be in the image of God.

At Babel, speech became corrupted as a judgment for our humanistic attempts to name ourselves. To “make a name for” yourselves, as they did at Babel, corrupts speech. God makes the things that get named, not us. On one hand, Babel was man’s attempt to be like God and make things to be named. God had given His name to Seth to invoke; at Babel man was setting up a name for mankind to invoke. It was self worship.

On other hand, because to name is to have dominion over, man was setting up self-dominion, or self-rule, or government.

Kingdoms are fascinating phenomenon in the Bible.  On one hand, nations are little principalities of demons. The nations, the prophet Daniel suggests, had prince-demons overseeing them. Or again, Satan claims ownership of the kingdoms in his temptation to Jesus.  On the other hand, the Lord sets up government; the Lord sees to the rising and falling of nations; and the Lord sets up the boundaries and borders of the nations. So are nations, government, and self rule good or bad?

Like everything in this fallen world, governments and nations accommodate our fallen existence.  They are a blessing and a curse. They keep order, but so often do so in a perverse way. Without the governments which have arisen from Babel, the world would have fallen into a vicious anarchy-tyranny cycle: each man doing what he wants followed by a world orderer imposing order.

At least with the advent of diverse languages, we’ll always have feuding nations keeping each other in check. Such is the benefit of Babel’s curse. Also, within the confines of a given nation – where all speak the same language generally – you have echoes of language’s original glory, the ability to work together to execute dominion over one’s little world.

Man is always trying to reverse Babel’s curse. The desire to “make a name for ourselves” and build a humanistic idol is always in us. It’s the desire of nations to be empires. It’s the quest for one world government. It’s the presumption of science to conquer all that ails humanity. It all begins with the same offer given in the beginning and given to Jesus: worship Satan; yield to him.

Now, let’s look at things from another perspective in order to hone in on the issue. St. Paul calls Satan the “prince of the power of the air.” (Ephesians 2: 2) This is appropriate, because it is a Gnostic error to say Satan’s power in our world is over anything God created. Everything God created is good and to be received with thanksgiving. What, then, does Satan have authority over?

The things that aren’t. The vacant spaces between stuff. The “stuff” that when activated negates what is. And that is the human will. Think about it. If a man shoots another man and kills him, was his finger evil? the arm? the nerves leading from the brain to the trigger finger? the neurons in the brain? No. Was the gun evil? the bullet? No, in fact they were quite good, good at what they were created to do.

Where then was the evil? Was it not in “the air,” the vacant spaces where Satan reigns, and what does he reign over? Human will. God is the author of all that is good. Satan tempts us to gain knowledge of evil, which is really nothing more than will-against-God, the ability to choose against Him.

Jesus said, of the “ruler of this world,” “he has nothing in Me.” No, Jesus was a body, and bodies are not vacant places; and Jesus was in complete submission to His Father’s will, so Satan had no perverse will working in Jesus.

Satan tempted Jesus to choose against His Father and finish the Babel project. But because it would only be a reign over the vacant spaces, it would only be a negating project, something like what fascist German or communist Russia inflicted on the world, but on a worldwide scale. It would fulfill Satan’s quest to reverse the created order. That was his lie and deceit to Jesus.

Jesus submitted to His Father’s will and had no room for Satan’s will working in Him. He didn’t want to inherit Babel’s curse. He wanted to restore Eden, and this wouldn’t happen through one world government, but through the Kingdom of Heaven, where He is king.

At the end of Matthew, we learn how Jesus would truly gain authority over heaven and earth. It happens after He dies and rises again. He meets His disciples and says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Jesus’ authority is executed through baptism in the Triune name and by teaching the Gospel. And it’s executed through the Twelve whom He sent, and after their deaths – because Jesus would be with “them” to the end of the age – to men set up (ordained) in the apostles’ names.

Another word for all this is the Church. The Church is Christ’s kingdom. The Church is the reversal of Babel. The Church is where men and women of all races and nations come together in one speech, even as Christians all over on Sunday morning partake of one creed, one liturgy, one song. And the Church will be fully manifest at Christ’s return, being revealed as the glorious restoration of Eden it is.

“If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down.”

How many people recognize in Satan’s second temptation the popular piety, “Let go and let God”? “Throw Yourself down,” said Satan to Jesus, because God’s angels would surely bear Him up and save Him from all harm.

According to this temptation’s modern incarnation – Let go and let God – the piety assumes a cosmic context that’s not exactly the biblically accurate way. Say someone “feels in his heart” he should – or, God says he should (because if he’s feeling it, must be God, right?) – give up his job and go on a mission in a faraway place. But how could he make this happen? All sorts of questions and anxieties attack his soul. How will I pay for the trip? Where will I live? How will I begin my mission? What about my family I’m leaving behind? What about my job?

In the face of this – because, after all, it’s God telling him to go – he finds comfort in the words, “Let go and let God. Just stop worrying and thinking you’re driving this plan. Sit back and let God take over. He will get you to where you want to be. Because, if God’s the one telling you to do something, surely He’ll make it happen, right?”

Hand in hand with this piety is the “surrender” piety you occasionally see referenced. “Just surrender to the forces at play and you’ll find inner peace.”

The idea actually finds its roots in Medieval mysticism, but has an element of stoicism in it as well. The assumed cosmic context is that God is what we name this universal divine force out there steering everything toward its ends. We find inner peace insofar as we work with this divine force instead of treading upstream against it. It communicates with us internally, in that “still small voice” sense. So, if you just turn down the noise and chaos of everyday life and listen to your heart, you’ll sense what the divine force is leading you to do, and once you surrender to it, you’ll be destined to where you should be and have that peace.

Medieval mystics like Meister Eckart used the term gelassenheit (“releasement” or “let it be”) to describe the piety. The Anabaptist traditions as well embraced the concept, relating it to Jesus’ words, “thy will be done.” The philosopher Heidegger resurrected Eckart’s gelassenheit as a component of his ultimately gnostic philosophy, which believed man has a role in bringing about “being,” by “being willing to not will” and be open to the mysteries of being, which in turn is related to God’s emergence.

The problem is not with the idea of setting aside one’s own corrupted will and “letting” God’s will prevail. The problem is where and how we interact with knowledge of God’s will. For the Anabaptist, mystical, and Heideggerian traditions, “letting go” means some sort of disengagement with external truths, most particularly as revealed in the Scriptures, but also as they are revealed in nature.

A wife and mother who “feels in her heart” that God wants her to get a job in ministry or missions, but is worried how she will take care of her family and other such details, is not being directed by the external truths revealed in Scripture and in nature. Scripture provides her calling, and nature backs it up: she’s a mom! She has her ministry and mission staring her in the face.

The “let go and let God” way of the devil would be to surrender to the heart’s feelings and pursue whatever mission she feels God’s sending her on. The “thy will be done” way of Christ would be to become obedient to what Scripture and nature are saying, not arguing with nature and calling motherhood a “construct” but seeing it as a reflection of God’s own will.

We could say the same about the callings men feel they are called to, or the gender changes others feel called to, or so many of the callings our hearts tell us to do. In many ways we’re testing God when we do this.  “Sure, God made me a male, but I feel God has made me a female trapped in a male body; and I feel He wants me free, and I’m going to go with that feeling.”  That’s testing God, and it’s a test that usually fails miserably.

God never told Jesus to jump off temples. And for us, God outlines clearly in His Word what His will is for us.

Most people remember that silly exercise at retreats where we have to close our eyes and fall backwards, trusting someone will catch us. That’s supposed to be analogous to God, how we should just fall backwards – whatever this means on a personal level for each of us – and trust God will “bear us up.”

We need to be careful with this, because it’s the second temptation of the devil. “Thy will be done,” yes. And His will is clearly outlined in written, external words, not in “still small voices” heard in your heart.

This again is an act of projection-idolatry masquerading as “Christ” or “God.” And its antichristian. Christ is not you. He’s not whispering in your heart. He teaches clearly from the outside. Why? Because He’s flesh and blood. There’s a clear point where His body ends and yours begins. The only way He communicates with you is the normal way any human body communicates, from lips to ears. And the only way He enters your body through flesh and blood is when these elements are accompanied by the words, “Given and shed for the forgiveness of your sins.”

“If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”  But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'”

If you notice, Satan’s first temptation to Jesus is exactly his temptation to Eve. Read his words backwards: Have food to satisfy a desire, and thereby fulfill your God-like potential. Eat the fruit, and you shall be like God. Both temptations, at root, are Satan’s attempt to get man to follow his example and make a claim to divinity outside of the way God intended.

Traditional Judaism has an interesting view on Satan. They believe the world wasn’t “very good” until Satan was created. And by this they don’t mean Lucifer before he fell. They mean Satan just as he was, as he appeared on the scene in Genesis 3. Why was he created? And why was the world only good until he was created, thereby becoming “very good”?

Because, they believe, Satan was needed so man could reach his full potential. Simply coming on the scene living in the glory and goodness of his creation was good, but having to use his free will to choose the good and reject the evil is even better. It’s very good. So Satan was needed as a challenger to the creation made in God’s image.

Just about all of this would be rejected on several grounds. However, one aspect of their view is intriguing. They believe Satan’s temptation – “You shall be like God” – is in fact a proper goal for mankind. The problem was not the end result, but the pathway there. Satan tempted them to become Godlike by rejecting His Law, which for Jews is obviously the central path toward becoming like God.

Is becoming Godlike a noble quest of mankind?

Supporting a negative answer are several passages. We think of the Babel project, when mankind attempted to make a name for themselves, an event which serves as the foundation for all humanistic attempts to “be like God.” Or there’s the name of the angel Michael, which means, “Who can be like God?” It’s as if God established among his angelic testifiers the eternal statement that no one can be like God.

Supporting a positive answer is our creation in the image of God. What does that mean in terms of being Godlike? What does it mean that the one who restores us to God’s image is not just Godlike, but God Himself? What does St. Peter mean when he talks about participating in the divine nature?

It boils down to what one means by being Godlike. Satan’s temptation is for us to assume God’s creative power, to usurp what God alone has done, which is creating all things in heaven and on earth. He is the maker, the only maker. God created a world and it was good. Evil is the manifestation of what is not.  Put another way, if “is not” were a thing, that would be evil.  To know good and evil is to muster the mind toward “things” outside the creative order, and these will always have a negating effect (hence putting “things” in quotes, because whatever it is will always be a force of “no-thing-ness”).

Satan tempted Adam and Eve with the ability to create beyond the good creation – evil – and therefore to have something they might “know” in addition to the good, for you can only truly “know” things. Man’s first creation, as noted in a previous meditation, was clothing, the covering up of their physical, good bodies. What a sad moment. (Also what a sign of the Gnosticizing tendencies of many to come, to look down on the body in shame and cover it up.   God at least covered it up with flesh, foreshadowing Christ’s fleshly covering of our sin.)

Satan wanted Jesus also to be a creator according to rules he set up. The Father sent Jesus into the wilderness to fast. That was His will for Him. Satan tempted Jesus with making “no-thing” bread, bread that won’t last, bread man can’t live by. Interestingly, Jesus would one day make bread, but from other bread, not from stones. Jesus redeems the creation; He doesn’t start anew.

Jesus teaches the right way of restoring the image of God, of being Godlike in the proper way, and that is through faithfulness and obedience to God. As far as this goes, the Jews are correct. Obedience to God’s will as expressed in His Law is the proper way to be Godlike.

Where Jews go wrong is not recognizing God’s goodness is something “lived in,” not chosen. Adam gained nothing by “not choosing” the evil of eating the fruit. He had it all, and the “very good” of the sixth day seals that truth.

Jesus doesn’t restore our ability to choose good and reject evil, by Himself showing how it’s done and giving us grace to do the same, so He can step out of the way as we save ourselves by His grace.  Someone would have to prove the Gospels teach this at some point. What the Gospels do teach is that Jesus recreates all things, that He saves us from our sins, that we are born again to a new state of existence, that the kingdom of God is at hand, that Eden is restored. In other words, the Gospels teach that there is a new goodness to “live in” that has nothing to do with human choosing or rejecting.  The goal of Christian faith is living in fellowship with Christ, that we “live in” Him, our restored Eden.

This gets to a bigger point about why Jesus entered the wilderness alone. Did He go to show us how it’s done? So we could be like Him, Godlike? Or did He go to undo Adam’s original sin, defeat the one who defeated him, and become the source of a new, redeemed race of children born of God, not of Adam, of children who live in the joys of the new life.

We would say the latter, not the former.

“It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ ”

Of all the subtle aspects of Gnosticism that intrigue me and have helped highlight beauties of orthodox faith, the role of the Word in our creation is probably the most intriguing.

What is the Gnostic understanding of the word, or of human language. Remember, the Gnostics despised the creation and all things physical, or with material properties. Physicality and matter cause there to be divvied up “things.” This results in a word of multiple beings all divided one from the other, and this is a “fall” of what should be one and unified, the Pleroma, into multiplicity. This is the basis of wars. This is the basis of “walls.” This is the basis for all the so-called “constructs” of this world: male, female, family, church, state, law, order, etc. Only in a material world do such things matter. True liberation means becoming woke to the arbitrariness and illusiveness of this world order, and ascending up and out, by the spirit, back into the pre-existent oneness.

In such a world with multiple beings you have a world of multiple words. Words arise from beings. You wouldn’t have the word “cat” unless there was a being called a “cat.” And likewise with all the varied species of God’s creation. By contrast, what role would a word have if everything is one and undifferentiated?

In fact, this was what the Romantic poets hoped to attain. The Romantic poets fed off the popular Transcendentalism of the day (i.e. Gnosticism) and believed they had a role in collapsing language in order to yield a wordless flight into the great nothingness beyond.

The Scriptures set up something completely different. On each day of creation, God created something by separating one thing from another (light from darkness, for instance, or land from water), named it, and then declared it good. The naming is hugely important, for it grants man access to it.

For what is human consciousness and human reason, but the ability to communicate, to reflect our divine image and create complex community among our fellow man through the instrumentality of words. As it was for God Himself – who through the Word brought in all creation and established a cosmic community of Himself in fellowship with man – so it is for mankind. By begetting the word from our lips – like the Son begotten of the Father – we foster human life.

A beautiful proverb says, “A wholesome tongue is a tree of life.” Think of that. And think how foundationally this is rooted in the Trinity, the creation, and eventually Christ’s coming. God’s wholesome tongue begot the Word made flesh, the source of eternal life for us, our Tree of Life at the cross.

So also for us, even if our tongue has become a rudder (St. James tells us) that can steer our ship afoul.

But not God. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God are the words that built our world. With man’s disruption of that order and its return to chaos, God didn’t give up on His creation, but came to “seek and save” it. Now, the words laid down in the Scriptures are the words of a new creation.

How many words in Leviticus set up the tabernacle in the Old Testament. That tabernacle and the temple which followed were types of the new creation!

And today, Christ is our Leviticus, so to speak, Who Himself is the Word made flesh and “tabernacling among us,” the temple which was destroyed and rebuilt in three days, the New Creation itself. But for us His Word is a Leviticus building us into temples of the Holy Spirit, each word doing its work of creating in us the new creation.

These words are truth and they are life. And those who live by them live by far more than mere bread.

Man lives by every word coming from the mouth of God. Each Word of Christ is just that, a precious jewel and treasure we meditate on, ponder, and claim as our own. By these words we live.  And in the Church, the new cosmic community built from God’s Word, we receive this life.

If the flesh is important – and it is if God created it and became it – it matters how you build the flesh and sustain it. And the thing that builds and sustains the flesh is food. In so many ways food is a glorious intersection between God and man. Man cannot make food on his own, even as he can’t make life on his own. He must be a steward of some product that eventually came from the seed (or sperm), that is, from the instrument of God’s Spirit.

Not only that immediate stewardship, but think of the sort of communication needed to cause seeds to feed some 6 billion people. Think of all the naming – the investigating and categorizing of plant and animal properties – needed so as to apply agricultural principles. Think of all the work of community-building needed, to establish trade routes and methods of delivery, to defend from foreign enemies who ransack the land. Communication is a reflection of our divine image, and in the production of food to feed us, it’s staggering to consider how many forces conspire together to put a loaf of bread on my table.

For God to give me this day my daily bread, this bread that builds the flesh.

From the beginning to the end of the Scriiptures, food plays a huge role. Just a few of the highlights: the forbidden fruit, the manna, the Last Supper, the everlasting banquet of the life to come.

Adam and Eve turned food into something other than what it could be. They turned it into a their ticket to godhood, to self-salvation. If this is the original sin, it remains as the foundation of all sin, the idea that some earthly thing will be our ticket to self-salvation. This is why St. Paul said covetousness is idolatry. It’s when created things become the basis of phantasms representing the possibility of self-exaltation. Phantasms are projections of human covetousness. An apple is no longer an apple, but something we covet, to make us wise and be like God. That’s not a problem with the apple, but a problem with the human mind and will, for nothing is ever wrong with God’s creation.  It’s human will that makes the creation to be something other than what it is, a phantasm of the original crafted from human will and imputed with human meaning.

God had to train His people in the proper use of food, as a builder of flesh and not a builder of humanistic fantasies. Consider, in the wilderness Israel was dreaming of the foods they had back in Egypt, all the cucumbers and leeks and melons and whatnot. But that dream hid the fact they were dying in slavery in Egypt. By contrast, the manna God gave them from above was building them for a life in the Promised Land, their place of rest and peace. He was teaching them man doesn’t live by bread alone – He does live by bread, but not bread alone – but rather by the Word of God.

Jesus, our second Adam as well as our second Israel (in the wilderness for a period of 40, like Israel), lives by the Word proceeding from the mouth of God, that is, by Himself. That’s why He can fast for 40 days. As God, He’s self-sustaining and doesn’t need food. He lives “by Himself.”

But as man Jesus had a human body which necessarily needed food, and so He was hungry. He needed to eat. And eat He would, but not in Satan’s or humanity’s way.

By Jesus going hungry, He was changing the rules, so to speak, of how the process of life-sustainment in the creation will go. The original plan was – eat food, live forever. Adam and Eve turned that into – eat what you imagine food to give you, die forever. Jesus rejects this food, but sets up the foundation for a new eating – eat the Word become flesh, live forever. Just as He said in John 6, He who eats this bread will live forever.

A new conspiracy of activities brings about this bread for us to eat, and again the human element is mustered. Mary bears the Seed. Disciples hand him over to the Jewish authorities and eventually Pontius Pilate, so the women can bury Him. The apostles harvest the fruits of His resurrection, the fruits of thanksgiving and confession, and ministers distribute the eucharistic bread which brings life.  The Church as a divine community is set up to make it all happen.

So that we might be given this day our daily bread.

If in Epiphany Jesus “established His credentials” as the Son of God, as one able to do the heavy lifting of saving us, in Lent now, Jesus begins that work. What exactly was His work? This is an important question. What, after all, does it mean that Christ “saves” us.

“The Son of man came to seek and save that which was lost.” What was lost, and how is it sought and saved? Answering these questions helps understand Jesus’ actions in today’s Gospel, that is, entering into the wilderness.

Let’s first set aside what Jesus seeking and saving us doesn’t mean, that is, according to the Gnostic salvation plan. The Gnostics, as with everything, have historically had a problem with extremes. Ultimate puritanism or ultimate libertinism. Any sort of moderate view of existence, or healthy view of life in this world would give legitimacy to existence in this world. The only proper posture toward this world must be to scorn it puritanically or to take a cynical or ironical view toward it, for example to indulge it in an “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will die” sense.

On these terms, Christ came to make us “woke” to the prison house we are in. For them, Christ coming to us only appeared to be “in the flesh” because, why would God take on such an evil thing as human flesh? He appeared in flesh so He could teach us the way to escape our flesh and our world. He came to save us from our very existence.

But let us review the orthodox theology according to that phrase “seek and save that which was lost.” He “seeks” us, meaning He comes to us where we are at and in what we are in, that is, human flesh. It’s difficult to emphasize enough what the simple act of the incarnation means in terms of our salvation. Aside from all the subtle theology involved in the incarnation, or how it’s related to the crucifixion and resurrection, simply consider the basics: to save us God became flesh. Do you think the flesh is important and means something? Of course! It means everything.

And what does it mean to save that which was lost? Well, what was lost? The creation. God’s creation was “good” because He made it and give existence to all the innumerable creatures. What the Gnostics see as the fall – the “fall” of what should be one and unified (the Pleroma) into the individual beings made possible on account of matter and physicality – we see as glorious and good. Individual existence – i.e. life – is wonderful, and people will endure untold sufferings and tortures without a thought of suicide, because they know living is a good thing.

It was lost because man handed stewardship of the creation – which God had given him – over to Satan. As things stood, Adam and Eve knew only good. They lived in God’s goodness. Satan introduced knowledge of good and evil, and the possibility of choosing the evil. They wanted to be like God, and be able to, like God, make things to be “good.” The problem is, we’re not God, so how can we make things to be “good.” We can’t “make things” in the first place! Therefore any attempt to make things to be “good” (in our image) will tainted by evil. And what is that evil? It’s the inability to create life in all its beauty. Man only makes dead things, or rather, lifeless things. But we can steward God’s living things.

Adam’s work went from naming animals – being a steward of God’s creation – to making clothes – to hide his nakedness. His first creation as “god.”

All this is to say that death entered the world, because as god man cannot make life. We’re like scuba divers thinking they can live on their own without the oxygen tank. Can’t work, and we’ll die. So also with Adam.

Jesus came as a second Adam, to do things right. In a strange way, Jesus fulfilled what Adam and Eve were tempted to be, “like God.” If that’s the case, it simply demonstrates how God works all our evils towards His good, like when Israel wanted a king against God’s wishes, and He worked their misguided idea into the Messiah, the anointed King.

Adam and Eve want to be like God, so God shows them what “like God”means, and sends Jesus. Jesus is not just like God, but God Himself. He shows what “like God” means, and also shows us what “man” means as well.

So on one hand, He is obedient to God. If Adam was supposed to live in God’s goodness, Jesus too lived in the creation, but as it had become, a wilderness devoid of life. He submitted to God’s will for him to enter the wilderness and live there in communication with God, what Adam should have done, continuing his “naming” project of divine communication.

On the other hand, Jesus is God and has the power of life in His hands. Adam’s lack of ability to create life results in our world becoming a wilderness. This is what we do. We turn green into brown. We turn the fertile crescent into Iraq. We turn the North African bread basket into the Sahara. We turn cities into desolate post-apocalyptic dystopias. It’s what we do.

And we all know what we do to human life as well, in our efforts to enhance life we end up taking it away. We invent the internet thinking ourselves brilliant and masters of the universe. We end up with a population of out of shape zombies with back problems.  Man’s attempts at god always end up in death.

Jesus has life in Him, and gives it out. And one of His first acts as our Savior is to enter the wilderness, the place where life is rare. It’s like He goes to the nadir of our fall, in order to rebuild things from the bottom up. He will cause the deserts to blossom to life.

Before He entered the wilderness, He was baptized in the Jordan. There, He met the sinners He so desperately loves and wants to save. No, specifically, He met the repenting sinners – the sinners that wanted to be saved – at the Jordan. After all, if your project is to save sinners, where do you find them? You find them where sinners respond to the message, “Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins.”

Baptism isn’t only a sign for us that this is where we are forgiven. It’s also a sign for Jesus that, this is where the sinners are at. At the font.

At the Jordan it’s as if Jesus made a pledge to sinners, that He would make things right. So the next day He goes out into the desert to rebuild the world. Like a contractor after a flood promising a family he’ll fix everything, he first gets to work on the foundation.

Jesus finds the devil there in the wilderness. As if it’s his kingdom there, ruling among the lifelessness and demon-animals. If Jesus is to be a new Adam, He must first defeat the one that defeated Adam. He must start at the beginning.