Yesterday's gospel reading, Luke 4:1-14, The Temptation of Jesus, is pertinent for the world today in which Christians in some places are taking positions (supporting Trump, supporting Putin, calling for women to be removed from public life because Supreme Courth Justice Barrett voted with other, 5-4, to ... wait for it ... insist that the Trump government pay for work the US government had said it would pay for, writing about "the sin of empathy" and for forth) which come with a Scriptural backing but which seem very, very, very at odds with the main run of Christian thinking through 2000 years, or, more simply, are theologically unsound.
Famously, in this narrative, the devil attempts in the third temptation to draw Jesus away from God's will, by quoting Scripture at him and Jesus responds by quoting Scripture back to the devil. Dare we use the word? Jesus trumps the devil's knowledge of Scripture! In this case, Psalm 91:11-12 v Deuteronomy 6:16.
But the obvious question to then ask, not only of this narrative, but any such exchange between people quoting Scripture to (or, at) each other, is, on what basis is one Scripture "better" than another Scripture? It turns out that Why is Jesus right and the devil wrong?, has the same answer as Why am I right and the Jehovah's Witness knocking at my door wrong?
That is because what Jesus is doing in Luke 4:1-13 is not a kind of "Scripture chess" (To your Knight to D6, I counter with my Queen to B8) but an exercise in theology - in the right understanding of God's will for the world. That is, what God wants and what the devil wants are at odds with each other, and the resolution of the dispute does not come from mere knowledge of Scripture (noting Jesus quotes Scripture to the devil in the first two temptations (4:2-3 [Deuteronomy 8:3] and 4:5-8 [Deuteronomy 6:13]). Resolution comes through Jesus' knowledge of the will of God - the mainline, if you like, of theology: in this theology, Jesus is to be God's agent (God's Son, God's Servant, God's Anointed) in the redemption of the world; not the agent of the devil. Moreover, Jesus will be the suffering servant of God (see the passage following, when Jesus is rejected at Nazareth, 4:14-30) rather than the triumphant, magically powered, populist servant of Satan. Jesus knows and understands this, not only because he has read Scripture and studied it well, but also because of his experience of God at work within him and around him (so, Luke 1-3): his theological understanding is informed by Scripture but it does not solely consist of a treasury of memorised verses. Jesus' theological understanding flows out of a reckoning with the main message of Scripture: that God is God, God has created the world, and even when the world has rebelled against God, God's love for the world sets out to redeem the world back to God. Jesus is committed to that plan and not to the devil's alternative.
So, Jesus himself affirms, through this passage, the importance of theology: of rightly understanding God and God's will for the world.
In our crazy, upside-down world - and, also, in this weekend's horrible, terrifying news, that Christians and others are being massacred in Syria - we need theology as much as ever in the history of the Christian faith. We need a right understanding of God and God's will for the world.
Otherwise the charlatans calling for women to be removed from public office, finding no fault in the supine surrender to Putin or, conversely, willing to remove Russian Orthodox priests from office for proposing a [Russian] end to the war will win. And the massacres will spread unabated.
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