“Even
the devil can quote scripture,” goes the saying. That line is actually not in
the in the Bible (it’s from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice), but the
truth of it is confirmed by the gospel we’ve just read. Actually, in
Shakespeare’s play, that line is used to ignore rather than engage what I find
actually a very interesting argument about the relevance of the book of Genesis
to debates about usury. The way the saying is used often seems to follow the
Shakespearean model, ignoring someone’s attempt to bring scripture to bear on a
situation rather than engaging it. So, I suggest, that even though it’s the
devil citing it, we pay attention to what he says when he cites scripture, pay
enough attention to see why that doesn’t lead Jesus to do what Satan wants.
Satan
quotes from the Psalms, from the 91st psalm, which we sang tonight.
It’s a perfectly good psalm. He cites two wonderful promise from it: “God will
command His angels to guard you;” “They will bear you up, lest you strike your
foot against a rock.” Satan’s suggestion is that Jesus take advantage of this
promise by throwing himself off the top of the Temple.
There
are various responses Jesus could make to this. He could actually have just recited
what comes just a few lines further on in the psalm: the psalm switches to God’s
voice, which says, “If you cling to me, I will deliver you.” Throwing yourself
off of a parapet doesn’t sound a lot like clinging to God!
I want
to come back to that line, because I think it’s important, but it’s not Jesus’
response. Jesus, for the third time, cites scripture to Satan, and he cites the
same book each time: Deuteronomy. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that
Deuteronomy isn’t the book of the bible I read the most often. We sing a psalm
every Sunday at Mass and recite one every weekday; on contrast on average we
hear from Deuteronomy 2-3 Sundays per year, and for about 1 week per year at
daily Mass. You can see a lot of embroideries with verses from psalms on; my
experience working with people planning funerals is that, often, their one
request is that we do “The Lord is my Shepherd” either as the psalm or as a
hymn. Deuteronomy, not so much. So, over the past week, I’ve been deliberately
praying with bits of it each day. It’s the last book of the Torah, the last of the
books of Moses, and presents Moses giving speeches right at the end of the
Exodus journey, before the Israelites enter the Promised Land. It’s mostly law.
It does contain the great love commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all
you heart, with all your mind and with all your strength.” But, that’s about
the only verse from it most of us would know by heart.
If we
were in a synagogue right now, though, there’d be another verse that might be just
as famous, if not more so, and it’s what we heard tonight as our first reading.
“My father was a wandering Aramean;” a line that appears in the Passover Haggadah.
It goes on to say “we were slaves in Egypt… God rescued us… so worship Him… let
us bow down and offer sacrifice.” We were slaves in Egypt. Moses is saying
this, and he never was. Most of the people who had actually left Egypt as
slaves had died by this point in Deuteronomy. It’s the next generation claiming
for themselves, we were slaves. God rescued us. So, let us worship. Let us bow
down and offer sacrifice.
Jesus
seems to be saying, you have to walk through Deuteronomy before you can get to
Psalms. Not that you have to pay your dues, not that we can earn God’s salvation
by being sacrificial enough. No, it’s this idea of clinging to God from the
psalm. Clinging to God because God delights in our embrace, and we so long for
that. How do we learn to cling to God? Jesus shows us the way. Walk through
Deuteronomy. Walk through your memories of your life, and name how God has
rescued you. We are invited to do what that wilderness generation did under
Moses’ direction and build up our sense of solidarity with those who have known
slavery in ways we haven’t.
This, I
think, is Jesus’ lesson in how to live Lent. We don’t engage in grandiose
sacrifices because we think we’ll earn God’s favor that way. No, we live Lent
because we want to cling to our God more, because we long for that embrace. And
we do that, in part, by living Deuteronomy. We do that make sacrifice, in part
as a way of saying thank you, building up our sense of wonder and awe at what
God has provided for us, building up our longing for Easter and our longing for
resurrection glory by putting some things aside for the duration of Lent. We
also make sacrifice to build up our sense of solidarity with those who know
forms of slavery we don’t. The rice bowls provide one way to do this. They’re
not just money boxes, but help educate us, our minds and our stomachs, about
the plight of those who know food insecurity.
God will
send a thousand angels if that’s what need, but not to stop us running from Him.
God will send a thousand angels to help us cling tighter, embrace more fully.
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