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A GREETING
My soul aches with thirst for God, for a god that lives!
When can I go and see God face to face?
(Psalm 42:2)
A READING
Jesus returned from the Jordan filled with the Holy Spirit, and she led him into the desert for forty days, where he was tempted by the Devil. Jesus ate nothing during that time, at the end of which he was famished. The Devil said to Jesus, “If you are God’s Own, command this stone to turn into bread.” Jesus answered, “Scripture has it, ‘We don’t live on bread alone.’
(Luke 4:1-4)
MUSIC
A MEDITATIVE VERSE
Oh, how often have I yearned to gather you together,
like a hen gathering her chicks under her wings!
(Matthew 23:37)
A REFLECTION
What I heard and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new... And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.
from Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion, by Sara Miles
VERSE OF THE DAY
For God has satisfied the thirsty
and filled the hungry with good things.
(Psalm 107:9)
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| "Christ in the Wilderness - The Hen," by Stanley Spencer (1954) In Matthew 23, Jesus grieves over Jerusalem and expresses (in the midst of rebuke) a deep longing for its restoration. His compassion takes the image of a mother hen and her brood. In Spencer's painting, his body encloses the hen and her chicks in a protective circle. Although he is conflating scriptural events to put the hen in the desert, the image gains in meaning when we consder that Jesus is "famished" in the wilderness. Rather than consider the hen as food, his desire is to hold it close to his body. |
How does the Tempter invoke the needs of the body to taunt Jesus? The longer version of the story of Jesus' time in the wilderness in both Matthew and Luke unfolds as a conversation about power, and what it means. In both versions, we hear that Jesus was hungry at the end of his fast. The Tempter starts here with that basic body need: food. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8:3 in a verse that summarizes the exile: God did indeed feed people in the wilderness with manna, to show that faith in God's promise is food for the soul. In Holy Week, the two will become entwined when Jesus says, "this is my body" as he breaks bread with his friends.
In our own world, we know only too well how much food can become a pawn in the welfare of those who are hungry. The blockade of aid to Gaza and the cancellation of food programs in many parts of Africa (just in this past year alone) pit human hunger against the need to express or retain geopolitical power. It is possible for Jesus to resist the needs of his body, but it is not possible for the rest of us to survive without basic nutrition. This is why Jesus calls us often in the gospels to feed the hungry.
Jesus refuses the temptation to turn stones into bread, because the kind of power that the Tempter envisions is not real or desirable to Jesus and he has no need to prove who he is. In time it will become clear through a different encounter with food: when Jesus transforms a single loaf of bread into enough to feed the many gathered at the wedding in Cana. And after the Resurrection, Jesus will be known to his friends in Emmaus through the breaking of bread.
When we work to feed people, we are helping to restore the wellness anyone requires in order to thrive. Many church communities provide regular meals and food distribution as part of living out their faith. How are you and/or your faith community working to combat hunger in your neighbourhood? How can you see such work as a resistance to empire, and a way of meeting the "famished" Jesus in the wilderness?
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| Image by Jonathan Cook-Fisher |
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Scripture passages are taken from The Inclusive Bible. Note: the Inclusive Bible retains the textually correct translation of the pronoun for the Holy Spirit into the feminine. In both Greek and Hebrew the pronoun is indeed feminine. Its presence in this translation is a faithfulness to the text as much as a symbolic gesture of inclusion.
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LC† From Dust, Still Holy is a devotional series of Lutherans Connect, supported by the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Centre for Spirituality and Media at Martin Luther University College. To receive the devotions by email, write to lutheransconnect@gmail.com. The devotional pages are written and curated by Deacon Sherry Coman, with support and input from Pastor Steve Hoffard, Catherine Evenden and Henriette Thompson. Join us on Facebook. Lutherans Connect invites you to make a donation to the Ministry by going to this link on the website of the ELCIC Eastern Synod and selecting "Lutherans Connect Devotionals" under "Fund". Devotions are always freely offered, however your donations help support the ongoing work.
Thank you and peace be with you!
