Matthew 4:1-11
There’s a story from the life of
St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish nun and mystic. She was a very
prayerful woman, prone to visions and ecstatic encounters with God, who had to
spend much of her time traveling and doing administrative work as a leader and
reformer of her religious order―which she did reluctantly because she really
preferred living a simple life devoted to prayer. One night she was caught in a
terrible storm, and her carriage was blown over and she was thrown into the mud
by the side of the road. She stood up, drenched and filthy, and yelled, “God,
I’m trying to do what you want me to do. I’m working hard, I’m exhausted, and I
keep asking for your help. Now this happens! Why?” And then she heard God speak
within her heart, saying, “Teresa, this is the way I treat all my friends.” And
she replied, “Ah, Lord, it’s no wonder that you have so few.”
I first told that story in a
sermon many years ago at the beginning of my ordained ministry. I had a very
clever point I was going to make with it; that story was going to beautifully
illustrate what my sermon was all about. And then, standing up in front of the
congregation without notes, I told the story―and then forgot what I was going
to say. I mean, my mind went completely blank. If you’ve never stood in front
of 150 people and completely lost your train of thought, let me just say that I
don’t recommend it. I must have stood there for about 20 seconds, though it
felt like eternity. Nothing came. I finally stammered out a few sentences about
God meeting us in terrible circumstances, apologized, and then sat down. It was
bad! I was mortified: I don’t think I have ever been more embarrassed. And I
spent days beating myself up about it. I told a priest friend about it later
that week, just to share my shame, and he looked at me and said, “That was
probably the best thing that could have happened to you.” In that moment, I
could not believe him. But good things did come of it. Lots of people expressed
love and support for me, and several people actually said that they got a lot
out of it. One woman told me she was so moved by my demonstrating how God uses
human weakness—and it became clear in our conversation that she thought I had staged
the whole thing! As much as I wanted to find something to feel good about, I
did not let her go on believing that! (Oh, yeah, yeah, I did that on purpose!)
But most importantly, it made me
confront in a deep way my own shadow side. Since there was no hiding from it, I
asked God into it: my egotistical need to impress people, my vanity, my craving
to feel perfect, my fear of failure, my mixed motives at the heart of
everything I did as a priest. At some level, I thought I needed to ignore, deny,
or repress all of that, but the Spirit said otherwise: what I really needed to
do was acknowledge it and accept that God loved me in the midst of it. I have
had many humiliating moments like that over the years, more than I care to
admit, and the cumulative effect has been to convince me of how crucial it is that
we bring our whole self to God, leaving nothing out. That is the only way to forgiveness,
healing, and wholeness.
And I believe that Jesus models this very thing for us. It’s easy to
hear this familiar Gospel passage and treat it like a cartoon: the devil with a
pointy tail and pitchfork urging Jesus to do bad things, and Jesus standing
firm and piously resisting such blandishments. I mean, who can really identify with
such a scene? Far better, I believe, to see Jesus being human and confronting
his own shadow side. He does not sin, but the Bible assures us that he
undergoes real temptation. Think about that: part of him wants to do these
things—wants to abuse his power to satisfy his own needs. Part of him wants to sell out for the sake of
personal glory. In this story, Jesus does not deny any of that: he recognizes
it for what it is. He owns it. And I think that accounts for this wonderful
detail at the end, about the angels coming to minister to him. Only by seeing
the whole truth about himself can that happen. There would be no angels in the
story if there were no devil. The only way for God to make us whole is to bring
our whole self to God.
Every week we confess our sins in worship. That is not meant to be an
act of self-flagellation—man, I’m such a terrible person!—but rather an act of
probing spiritual honesty. It’s an honesty that we are called to always, and
the season of Lent just drives the point home: we need to see ourselves as we truly
are, dark aside and all. We can do this with safety and hope because through
Jesus God assures us that the bottom line for us is always love, not judgment;
mercy, not condemnation. We all have our own issues, of course, and the
possibilities are endless: resentment, jealousy, dishonesty, pride, fear,
greed, whatever. Rather than living in denial or shame, Christ calls us to
bring ourselves, our full selves, to the light of God’s love and healing power.
If you do this, I don’t know what God will do in your life. I know what
God has done in mine. Among many things, she has shown me that not only am I
not perfect, I don’t have to try to pretend to be perfect; that the Holy Spirit
will move through my weakness as much as, if not more than, through my
strength; that God does not love the fantasy I once had of myself but loves me
as I really am; that I can count on that love so much that I can take risks and
be vulnerable. And I have learned that, I have experienced it in my heart and
my gut, mostly by confronting my shortcomings, my failures, my shadow side.
That is the promise of Jesus Christ: God will forgive, accept, and love us for
who we are and will even use our worst qualities to transform us in ways that
we cannot imagine. God is amazing: even our sin can be the means of
life-changing grace. But for that to happen, we first need to own it. All of
it. God will do the rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment