Would Jesus Have Gone Splat?
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: Luke 4:1-13
So, uh, what would have happened if Jesus had jumped?
The devil, Luke tells us, brought Jesus to the top of the Temple — which while not that high by our standards of buildings, was plenty high enough to cause death upon impact with the ground — and suggests that Jesus should jump.
The devil seems quite confident about what would happen: the angels would catch him. After all, that’s what scripture says, “God will command his angels…on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” But the devil is a liar.
Would the angels have shown up? [Shrug] God didn’t send any angels to the cross; which was significantly more than a foot dashing.
Maybe Jesus would have just landed on the stones below with a thud. That would have made the devil’s day.
The devil suggests to Jesus he can’t die; in many ways, the whole point of the gospel is that he can.
Jesus would go splat.
This imaginative exercise forces us to consider whether the Jesus in our imaginations is really a superhero who just refuses to put on his suit. Is Jesus Superman who refuses to go in the telephone booth; Iron Man who won’t turn on his Arc Reactor; Thor who refuses to pick up his hammer?
Does the Jesus in your head have the ability to zap rocks into bread, take command of the world’s armies with a cry, and jump off tall buildings without going splat? If the answer seems to be, “Of course he could,” I’d remind you that those are the devil’s ideas in the story. And the devil is a liar. He’d like us to believe that about Jesus.
This idea that Jesus could, conceptually, do anything at anytime but just chooses not to is an old and ancient one. It’s virtually as old as Christianity itself — and it’s called Docetism, and it’s the idea that Jesus only appeared to be human, but was in fact in full possession of all the divine power at all time.
Docetism is the fancy name for Jesus being a superhero who just refuses to put on his suit. The devil would have us believe that about Jesus, because it is not true, and the devil is a liar.
The appeal of docetism is that it is easy to imagine how a superhero Jesus is the Son of God. It’s harder to imagine how a Jesus who would go splat it the Son of God. And yet, friends, we worship a Jesus, who, as Philippians says, “emptied himself” of divine equality, “taking the form of a slave and humbled himself” even unto death. The Jesus we worship would have gone splat if he’d jumped that day.
I know the devil says otherwise. But the devil doesn’t keep his promises.
Why does any of this matter? Because, as our Proper Preface for today says, Jesus Christ our Lord “was tempted in every way as we are, yet did not sin.”
We read these temptations of Jesus on the First Sunday of Lent to remind us of that, and yet, I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling tempted to jump off tall buildings. The older I get, I’m less and less tempted to jump off anything at all, frankly.
If Jesus temptations were to reveal himself as a comic book character, he wasn’t tempted as we are; he was tempted as only superhero could be.
But if Jesus isn’t a superhero in disguise, then the temptation offered by the devil can’t be to blow his cover and revel in his glory.
No, the final and great temptation was to believe that God’s love is proved by God saving us from suffering.
Jesus came to show us that we are saved by being loved; not that we are loved by being saved.
This may sound like I’m just playing linguistic games, but these are not the same thing. How often do we think to ourselves: “If God loves me, God should save me from the myriad of ways my life goes splat.” And the “better” we are, the more we think of ourselves as a good person, don’t we feel that God’s saving us from suffering is even more deserved?
Isn’t this the test we give God over and over again — despite Jesus reminding us not to put the Lord our God to the test. Sometimes it’s a long answer test — a struggle of circumstance, disability, or addiction; sometimes we give God a pop quiz — save me from this sudden crisis and we’ll believe.
You all certainly know people who have given up on God because God hasn’t saved them from hitting rock bottom and going splat. I think of my friend who went to a great school, raised a beautiful family, volunteered at her church, started a business and cared for her clients and employees, took care of her health — and still got diagnosed with breast cancer. How could that happen to her? And then the cancer came back. And then the cancer spread. And she decided God couldn’t love her because God didn’t save her. Or more likely, that God simply didn’t exist.
There are heartbreaking examples in our own congregation. I think of the hospital visit I made for a man’s cardiac issue, that turned out to be a cocaine overdose, that was the result of his despair with God after his mother’s death. Didn’t God know what a wonderful woman she was? Surely she deserved better.
Think of Jesus up there on pinnacle, the breeze whipping through his hair, looking down on the top of the birds riding the thermals coming up off the pavement below, his face warmed by the sun, and thinking — “I am God’s son, I am full of the Holy Spirit, God is pleased with me” — surely God will not let anything bad happen to me.
Jesus doesn’t even need to jump to fall prey to the temptation. He just needs to accept the premise in his heart. If the devil can get Jesus to believe that since he is so good he need fear no evil, the deed is done. The cross would have been impossible; the lashes across his back and the thorns pressed into his temples would have shattered his relationship with God.
God obviously did not save Jesus by keeping anything bad from happening. God saved Jesus, and through him all of us, by loving him right through the bad up to and including his death.
In facing the temptation to equate God’s protection from harm with God’s love right at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is living into the advice I received from the monks at Catholic school about making out with a girl.
Haha, I jest. Their advice there was pretty simple: don’t.
But their larger point was that a couple should make clear decisions about the boundaries of physical intimacy in their relationship up front, before they ended up in the back seat parked on a dark street. Deciding to just see how things played out was a recipe for bad decisions — once the waves of emotions and hormones roll in, to say nothing of alcohol…well, you all know. Those waves drown a lot of good intentions.
The spiritual life is not altogether different — there are moments of life when the passions overwhelm us and we are liable to be swamped. If we have not built our faith on the rock of God’s love, but have instead built our faith on the shaky supports of the success this world has offered us, we will be lost when the supports give way. Right at the beginning of his ministry Jesus had to face down the temptation to make his work dependent on God’s protecting him from harm.
In this season of Lent we’ll renounce our sins and make a peculiar effort to live holy lives. But we best not do so under the impression that doing so will ensure that God makes our lives more pleasing to us. We all want God to be our fair weather friend who makes sure the weather is always fair. In fact, God is a friend in weather fair or foul.
Got sent us a man who could go splat just as well as the rest of us, to show us that the end of our human nature is to be loved by God in that human nature, up to, including, and after our deaths. Superman, after all, isn’t truly human. Jesus is.
