Christ confronts sin and evil.

While Mathew and Luke give us a much fuller account of Jesus’ temptation, with the details of three temptations Satan made, the way Mark briefly covers it places it in context with Jesus’ baptism and his ministry in a way that enables us to step back and connect it to our own struggles, to the realities of life we encounter. Mark quickly frames it between his baptism and ministry.

Note how Peter ties the story of Noah to baptism. The flood covered the earth as God’s means of washing away sin, starting over with the righteous Noah and his family. Those waters bring us back to the waters of chaos at creation, so the idea would be that what we really need when everything has gone wrong is to wipe away the errors of the past and start over. That will fix it, right?

That’s kind of like telling yourself that if you move and start over in a new location, the change of scenery will fix things. The problem with that idea is that we are consigned to carry our baggage wherever we go. We might indeed do better in some respects, but as we see with Noah, when we restart, we still have to deal with the same realities of life which include our capacity to sin. Soon after they exit the ark, sin afflicts Noah’s family in pronounced ways. Scripture goes on from there to tell the ongoing story of people trying harder to do better, and with a lot of reminders. And they fail, repeatedly. It is impossibly difficult.

Most often when we think about temptation we think about the internal struggles we have with our own nature – the appetites and desires that lead to thoughts and actions that we know are not according to God’s will.

Jesus doesn’t have those issues as his will is completely aligned with his Father’s will, but Mark testifies very briefly that he does contend with another aspect of temptation, Satan. The awful thing about Satan is he will take your strengths and turn them against you.

We can see this clearly in the realm of addictions. With an addiction, every strength a person has gets turned against them. A person can be financially secure, smart, nice looking, have a great personality, very intelligent and hard working – all of those are very positive attributes, attributes to which we all aspire and celebrate – but an addiction causes them to turn against you because each enables you to cover up your problem, to compensate and thereby hide the disease. And so you go deeper and deeper. Even your loving family can easily get sucked into      co-dependency and drive you deeper and deeper down, their desire to love mangled into enabling the disease.

We see it all the time in the news or on TMZ – how often the very fame and fortune we celebrate crushes incredibly talented people. If you’ve ever struggled through addiction issues or been through it with a friend or family member, you know the true pain of when it isn’t on TV but you’re living through it.

I’ve seen it up close a number of times. Once was with a friend in seminary who had all of those positive attributes. He was a great guy, extremely bright, great sense of humor, beautiful family with two kids, financially secure, handsome, an ex-gymnast and in great physical shape; he had it all. One Friday evening he called and asked me to take him to the emergency room. I did. The doctor examined him and told him he wasn’t sick, he was drunk. He said that his liver was terribly distended and that if he did not stop drinking he would die.

He didn’t stop. He lost everything to alcohol. And I do mean he lost everything: his marriage, his place in seminary, even his partners threw him out of the engineering company he had founded.

I lost track of him after he left seminary. I thought about him this week and searched for him online. He died five years ago from complications of alcoholism. Tragic. I trust him to God’s perfect mercy, but what a sad and hard and early end to a painful life.

That is the way evil works. It takes advantage of our natural weaknesses, our appetites and desires. (What sin do we no come by naturally?) And it will take advantage of our strengths, too, turn them against us if it can. The pain and human cost is beyond measure. God sees it and our suffering grieves his heart.

Christ is the opposite. Jesus will take every strength and gift you have and put it to its highest and best purpose – serving him, in whatever form he needs. He will also take your weaknesses, your mistakes, your grief and even the sin that has been done against you and weave those back into his plan so that they not only heal but they also become strengths. They may become the means by which you came to know him at all, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

When Jesus is in the wilderness Mark notes two key sets of company with him. He notes, “he was with the wild beasts.” This also hearkens back to Noah, the righteous man whom God gave care over all flesh, and it also reminds us that Jesus was, during his earthly walk, bound with us as fully human. He was subject to the same physical needs we all have. He got hungry and thirsty. He got physically tired. He felt pain. He was therefore subject to the appetites and desires we face but he did not sin.

“The angels attended to him” reminds us that he was also fully divine, continuously refreshed and restored by his Father. All of this is available to us through Christ.

The key to that life-giving grace that Jesus offers is repentance. He commands us to take careful note of the ways we are failing to be the people he is calling us to be, failing to live as he calls us to live, and failing to love as he calls us to love. We must recognize the sin that arises out of our natural needs and desires and that is lurking, always lurking, even in our strengths. We have choices, every day, all the time. We will make mistakes. We will sometimes willfully choose wrong. So we repent, amend our lives and move forward.

Knowing our weakness, Christ died for our sins – the things we do and fail to do – as well as our general state of sin, the general state of our humanity. As we repent, he will redeem it, heal us and help us move ever closer to him. His promise is that the orientation of our hearts, our attitude – attitude is a navigational term, he will forgive. The state of our hearts is key.

And remember that another gift for us moving forward is that God has given us the Holy Spirit to advocate for us, to comfort us and to guide us into all truth. Guide, again a navigational term, to help us find our way.

AMEN