The temptaton of knowing good and evil

 Sermon for Lent I, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY

 Text: Matthew 4:1-11

The readings this morning deal with two sides of temptation, and two responses to it. It's not by accident that we start Lent with these readings, because Lent is as much about confronting temptation as it is about self-denial. If we didn’t deny ourselves of something during Lent, we wouldn't have to deal with the temptation to break our Lenten fast. But, temptation goes well beyond Lent, and is a daily challenge. In the garden of Eden, God pronounces a command to Adam and Eve: do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This is a commandment similar to the Ten Commandments in Leviticus: You shall not. In reality, though, Adam and Eve are given a choice: obey God, or make their own decision. Their decision to follow their own will leads to a complicated outcome of their decision. They have exercised free will, that is, the freedom to determine their fate and their future through their decisions. They have confronted temptation, and not denied themselves knowledge of good and evil.

That free will brings with it the burden of knowing what is right and what is wrong. It brings with it the all too familiar struggle of having to say no to the temptations of life that we know are bad for us, and the struggle of saying yes to the hard parts that we know are good for us. Knowledge always has a cost, and the cost of knowing good and evil is that we bear responsibility for what happens when we make a decision involving a known good or evil. This is a terrifying realization, especially when we so often pray to Our Father in Heaven, to God who we want to and who we believe is taking care of us, keeping us from harm. That realization and the terror it brings is very relevant today as we struggle with people who decide to perpetrate evil in the form of murder or unprovoked war. That realization also paints a very dark picture of an unavoidable sinful human nature, but only if we concentrate on just the evil, just the suffering, and just the loss that people experience almost every day. Our emotional reactions to decisions that permit or commit evil paint us into a corner concerning our nature, and the paint never dries.

Jesus would appear to be confronted with a frightening experience where the satan, the adversary, tempts him to use his power to save himself after 40 days of fasting. This is the same adversary who appeared to Job and afflicted him with loss of his family, fortune, and health. Instead of giving Jesus commandments, he provides suggestions. The satan doesn’t say, “You shall make these stones into bread” because it does not sound as plausible as “Prove to me that you are the Son of God.“ That is how most decisions that lead to evil sound to us. They are subtle and vague enough to not fit God’s commandments exactly and so are more easily justified. The adversary appeals to Jesus’ ego, saying in so many words, “Show me that you are who you say you are,” which would be not so different from Jesus saying, “I’ll show you how powerful I really am,” or “I’ll do this because I can.” Those phrases are subtitles to the violence and crime that we experience today, and they reinforce the impression that we are irredeemable. But Jesus doesn’t say those things, and instead says, “Away with you, satan!” presenting another possibility of human nature, where we can say no to temptation and do the right thing.

What Jesus has to contend with is not so much the specific temptations offered to him, but to remain true to his underlying principles, his reason for saying no. For him, this effort is easier because as the Son of God, he understands on a much deeper level why certain decisions bring him closer to God and why others disrupt that relationship. Our experience with temptation is different, because we struggle with the words of the commandments to do this or that. In order to approach Jesus’ level of understanding, we have to go beyond the words in scripture to find God’s voice that provides that deeper reasoning, that “why”. We have to understand, like Jesus does, that there is a connection between the words we read in scripture and the deeper reason. To just do what the words say to do is to just go through the motions of a shallow faith, while to understand the deeper reason without action is to commit a sin of omission. Jesus did not just go through the motions of avoiding temptation because he was acting on his deeper reasons. Adam and Eve understood the deeper reason for not eating the apple but didn’t obey God because they encountered a more attractive alternative: eating forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve are like us, with weaknesses that lead to sin, but the focus on disobeying the word of God does not make them forever sinful. They are like us, able to do good when they understand from God what good is. They are like us, where they are tempted to do the wrong thing, to sin, and it is Jesus who shows what it looks like to say no when that is a very hard thing to say.

Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the fruit and understand right from wrong, good from evil, are the same decisions that we are faced with, and because we eat that same fruit, we wrestle with that knowledge every day. It is during Lent that we become more aware of our struggle with walking away from temptation and doing the right thing, and how knowing right and wrong complicates our lives. The atmosphere of Lent makes it easier to look back to when we did the wrong thing, or didn’t do the right thing, but the real struggle comes after, in the glow of Easter and Jesus’ resurrection. We are used to confessing our sins every Sunday, but from this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus pushes us past that confession to the deeper reason for our sins, and we begin to see why we make decisions that lead to evil. It’s not because we will always make the wrong decision, or that we can never see the right decision, but because we don’t think about why a decision is right or wrong. We get hung up on the words, on the commandment, and we question it, and try to find a way around it. We think we fully understand right from wrong, good from evil, but we don’t realize how often we don’t get it.

This is not to say that there is no hope for us. Jesus, being as much a human being as he is divine, does make the right decision by saying no to temptation. He quotes scripture to explain why he rejects temptation, and from there we find a starting place for finding our own deeper reasons for saying no. In our baptismal vows we make a promise to fulfill our vows by saying, “I will with God’s help.” That is a sign for us that we can do the right thing when we choose to adopt Jesus’ deeper reasons and then follow his examples, to learn to see God and God’s commandments the way Jesus does. For me during Lent, I am going to examine what I say when I am faced with the temptation to make the wrong decision or the temptation to not do the right thing. I am going to find my deeper reason to help me live with my knowledge of good and evil.