The Second Temptation
The Second Temptation
Luke 4:5-8
I think we all have certain songs that keep popping up in our lives. You may not have heard it for a while but as soon as you do, a cascade of memories from across decades are triggered.
One of those songs for me is “Satisfaction,” by the Rolling Stones. The actual title is, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Believe it or not, that song was released in 1965, almost sixty years ago. The twenty-two year old, Mick Jagger, snarled his way through the song which became the Rolling Stones’ first number one single in the United States. Since then, it has been featured in films, was covered in the most amazing way by the band, “Devo,” and continues to be one of the highlights of every Rolling Stones’ concert. Now days, Mick is 75 but, apparently, he still can’t get no satisfaction…but he “tries and he tries and tries.”
Of course, the song has a catchy hook and it has Jagger singing it but I think the song stays in our lives because we’ve sung it in heartfelt moments to ourselves. (I have anyway!) One of the things that we are programmed as human beings to seek is satisfaction. We try and we try and we try in so many different ways to find it. When we are hungry, we eat until we are full but we are not satisfied, not for long. We just get hungry again. When we are thirsty, we can drink until we feel like we are sloshing but more thirst is just around the corner. Perhaps this is why Jesus talked in such concrete terms about the "living water” and the “bread of life” with the promise of satisfaction—because we all know the constant need that is there for more food and more water. Maybe the promise is to liberate us from such endless striving.
Our striving carries us well beyond food and water and basic security. We strive for love and respect and admiration. We strive for wealth and fame. We strive mightily to achieve something that is entirely worthwhile. We can convince our family and friends to become our support team in our struggle to achieve whatever it is we are seeking, with them taking care of the rest of life while we focus singularly—maniacally—on fulfilling our dream. (I have seen a lot of families of high level executives or high achieving artists or athletes organize themselves this way. All eyes are on the dream!)
Here’s the problem, though. If you listen to people who have achieved their dreams, they will tell you that they almost immediately moved on to the next dream. Maybe, now that I’ve achieved what I set out to do, it is unimaginable to not be striving. Maybe as soon as I achieve the dream, I realize that it is hollow. (How long did it take you, when you finally dated that person you had watched from afar, to confess to yourself, “This is awful?”) How long did it take Michael Jordan in the midst of that championship winning locker room to announce his plans to win another? How restless do you get when you can’t yet see your next dream?
Arthur C. Brooks explains things this way: “Satisfaction is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it. We believe we can get it. We glimpse it. Maybe we even experience it for a brief moment. Then, it vanishes.” Satisfaction is fleeting. In an instant, we are on to the next struggle.
As an aside, I think Jagger has made a career out of playing bigger stages with more spectacular special effects all in the service of creating experiences for people that are exciting and compelling and only very fleetingly satisfying. This has certainly sold a lot of tickets to people seeking satisfaction. It also led to Jagger singing to those same crowds, “If I could stick my pen in my heart and spill it all over the stage, would it satisfy you, would it slide on by you, would you think the boy is strange.” He knows, as do all performers and entertainers, that no matter how good this moment is, it will be gone in a flash. What’s next better be bigger and better!
The classic formula is that satisfaction is getting what you want. The problem is that when we get what we want, it is not what we thought it was going to be or we want more or we get bored and want what’s next. Every addict knows that the first puff of that cigarette or the first buzz from that drink or drug is never recreated. We just chase it, on and on. Even if you’ve never been addicted to a substance, your body is programmed to lead you in a similar way. The internal reward system of chemicals like oxytocin and dopamine fire away in our brain’s pleasure centers when we do certain things, from eating when we are hungry to exercising to make ourselves stronger to falling in love. It turns out that there’s a pretty good case that striving is an essential, built-in part of being human and dissatisfaction is the perpetual state that fires our engines.
Early on, it makes sense that the striving and dissatisfaction cycle would be a part of how humans adapted and evolved. Before the social rules were constructed, intense internal rewards for eating and drinking and even hygiene would have been survival tools. (Have you ever had a shower after a few days of camping? You feel great! You’re also a lot less likely to get sick.) Eating and hydrating and good hygiene are the basic things a healthy person needs to survive so they get rewarded. In the same way, the powerful human drives and rewards around sexuality were the rewards for our genes surviving.
As I suggested last week, there are people who are still stuck focused on finding food and clean water and shelter and some way to clean up. They are homeless and living on our streets. They are the incredibly impoverished people around our world. It’s not that there’s not enough of what they need. We haven’t found an effective way to share those things with them. That is one of our most compelling, ongoing, worthwhile struggles.
However, what most of us have learned is that even when the basic needs, the bottom level of what Abraham Maslow called, “The hierarchy of needs,” are accounted for, our struggles continue, just concerning other things. We are going to eat and drink. Now, though, we will become “foodies” and we will debate which bottled water is best. Or, we will have so much food available to us that we will seek out what tastes good and those who strive to sell us food will figure out that the answer is, “Sugar, sugar and more sugar!”
We are prone to allowing lesser things to be treated as what matters most. A great meal is a nice thing but when that’s what matters most, you feel empty, not full. Doing good things with the money you make—caring for your family, helping those in need—is fine but if all your doing is trying to buy love or admiration, you will not be fulfilled. All the pretty good things in this life end up tainted when we ask them to mean more than they can possibly mean.
I think this is the hard work that Jesus does in the wilderness: adjusting and recalibrating his wants and needs and desires. Yes…after forty days of fasting, some bread would be nice. The hunger is incredibly intense. However, that intensity will pass as soon as he eats something. It is here and then it is gone. His days will need to include bread and some other things to eat but he’s not on a culinary tour. So, we pray that God will “give us this day our daily bread,” knowing that what we will be given will not be beyond our wildest dreams but will simply be enough…and that’s fine.
Today’s temptation is another of life’s fleeting things: power. A lot of people devote their whole lives to accumulating power. Here’s the truth, the more power you acquire, the more time you will spend simply trying to hold onto that power. What do people who win an election often do? They immediately start gathering donations and setting their sights on the next election, seemingly, somehow forgetting that that are currently in office. What do the people with the most worldly power do? They often become suspicious and paranoid. “How could people not be conspiring to take what I have?” It is a rare person who can wield power with grace and without it costing them their soul.
So, the “tempter” comes to Jesus with quite an offer. He takes Jesus to a place where he can see “the big picture,” a view of all the kingdoms of the world. (This is, after all, often how temptations arise in our lives—by wowing us with something we’ve never seen or experienced or even imagined before: “Let me show you how things really are!”) The tempter says, “See these kingdoms? I’m in charge of them all.” (This, of course, would have been a revolutionary notion in a world in which kings had done a nice job of convincing every day people that they were kings because God made them that way.) It turns out it is not God but the tempter who controls them. Because these kingdoms are his, therefore the tempter can offer them to Jesus. All Jesus has to do is worship the tempter! If Jesus is just willing to sell his soul…
That, of course, is the great lie of worldly power. If you are willing to do whatever it takes, to crush whoever needs to be crushed, to lie when it is to your advantage and say nothing when that’s what works, then, you can rule the world! And again, this is a lie that we are sold about all sorts of things, not just ruling all the world’s kingdoms. If you want to have this career, if you want to get this degree or this amount of adulation from the masses, all you need to do is be willing to say anything or do what it takes to get what you want. Just treat some lesser thing as if it is the only thing that matters. Put your heart and soul into getting what you want until, one day, you discover that you no longer have a heart or a soul.
Now, it’s worth pausing here for a moment. The people’s hopes for a Messiah were for a powerful ruler—a warrior king. Even those people, though, didn’t imagine that the Messiah would rule the whole world. All they wanted was their own little country back, delivered from Roman occupation. Man, this tempter is going big!
And what of Jesus’ sense of power? People who worry about accumulating power spend time with the powerful. Jesus would seek out the most powerless people around. Not one person he spent time with was going to help him “get ahead.” When he taught about welding power, it was always reminding his disciples to be servants, first, to think about others, first, to be humble in all their choices. What kind of respect is that going to get you in a world that craves power? When he was confronted by those in power, he seemed have no interest whatsoever in currying their favor which any power craving person knows is an essential practice. Come to think of it, after this day with the tempter and this brief overview of the world, Jesus next view from high above would be as he died on a cross, having humbled himself and refused to save himself because there was something worth dying for.
Think about it…having come off as completely powerless, it is Jesus who is remembered 2000 years later. It is Jesus who still transforms the world, one person at a time. What did he know that we didn’t know? He knew that the only thing worth worshiping in this life is God. He knew that our only hope is to discover what “enough” is, to learn how to share, and to practice, on a daily basis, what it means to pray with all our hearts, “Thy will be done…