Jesus bets the ranch in the Wilderness

Tough Conditioning (Luke 4:1-13) | TMBH Luke #15

COMMENTARY:

You really need to put on your MAGA hat, Matt. There’s a lot of truth in advertising at at stake.

As I say, I am a Christian heretic with a long running working relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Now, the tempations of Christ is a continuation of the transaction between The Satan and God set out in the Book of Job. Job is the oldest book in the Bible and the only one literally written by The One and it is a cosmic shaggy dog story. A shaggy dog story is usually a long, involved joke that ends with a very lame punch line, like “That dog’s not so shaggy” and God is the butt of the Joke.

Make that connection, campers: God wrote a farce and God is the fool on the hill. The story is, of course, that God is having a party and The Satan comes and tricks God into afflicting Job, twice, by playing on God’s ego and, when Job becomes indignant about the injustice of his situation, God smacks him down again, at which point, Job is so chagrin that God realizes that He has been tricked by Satan and makes it all good with Job and spanks Job’s friends, who counsel Job turn his back and deny God.

Which is the real point of the story: once you come to know The One, you cannot NOT know The One, thereafter, which is exactly my experience, but it'a something God learns about mankind that informs the appearance of Jesus and puts some real weight into John 3:16. Remember, this is God’s story and this is something God reveals about Himself. As Solzhenitsyn observed, someone who is warm cannot understand someone who is cold. God learns that cold is the human condition and sends Jesus to assure us He remembers the lesson.

Which brings us back to The Satan and Jesus in the Wilderness. Jesus is on a mission from God and The Satan makes a bet that Jesus cannot complete this mission intellectually, by merely teaching, but that He must feed the multitude, create a vast political organization and do some death defying stunt. Jesus, being a good Jewish boy, proud of his intellectual powers, takes the bet, because He plans to deliver the Sermon on the Mount and then the Sermon on the Plains and He will turn the political system of the world on its head (not unlike Marx with Hegel) and complete His mission.

Of course, the thing is, He feeds the multitudes at least twice, He establishes the steering committee that will create a vast political organization and then He raises Lazarus and the Holy Spirit reminds Him of His wager with The Satan in John 11 (where the narratives of Mark and John converge on Palm Sunday) before the fact with the doubling of the lament of Martha and Mary

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”. 

This doubling is a sign that the tidings are from The One for those of you interested in a working relationship with the Holy Spirit and Jesus realizes He has been given his marching orders straight to the Cross, do not pass “Go”, do not collect $200.

Jesus wept.

Is it not written that those around Him that His weeping showed how much He loved Lazarus? But the reality is that all the tension building in Jesus’ circumstances is suddenly released and the entire narrative of the entire Bible comes down to this moment. 

Jesus weeps because He loves life but he has a duty to perform and a mission to accomplish. For Jesus, everything that follows is anticlimax. By raising Lazarus, The Satan wins the wager, once again making a fool of The One. The next thing that happens, after Lazarus, is the withering of the fig tree on the way to scourge the Temple, which John does not witness.

A flame thrower has two triggers, set in tandem. The one closest to the operator operates like a Super Soaker squirt gun, and releases the napalm under pressure unto the target. The one other trigger sets of phosperous caps set in the nozzel that lights the napalm as it flows out. When Jesus curses the fig tree, He is popping a cap of a spiritual flame thrower that will destroy the Temple 37 years later. If you truly desire to experience the humanity and vulnerability of Jesus, it’s important to make the connection between John 11:35 and Mark 11:14.

Like the sacrifice of Isaac, the ministry of Jesus is a study in the nature of duty and the Beatitudes are a discussion of the aspects of servant leadership. This is why the centurion in Matthew 8 and Luke 7 recognize his similarity to Jesus and why Jesus justifies the faith of the centurion in Matthew 8:10.

Finally, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” is a two cushion carom to the Book of Job by way of Psalm 22:1

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How do I know? The Bible told me so.