“He Will Give His Angels Charge Over Me”
Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On March 1, 1998
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”
Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Luke 4: 1-13
He will give his angels charge over me. That is a real personalization of that text. It actually reads, “He will give his angels charge over thee.” Maybe you read it as I do, and find the hope in it that somehow all night and all day, the angels are watching over me. And you. And those we love. The temptation for Jesus is the traditional text for the first Sunday in Lent, on at least two of the years in the lectionary cycle we have this story. I believe this is a sign that the Church, the historic Church, judges Lent to be a time when the congregation can benefit by focusing on Jesus’ struggle with temptation.
Note what Luke says: “It was the Spirit (meaning the Holy Spirit) that drove him out into the wilderness.” Not the devil, who we met there as the one who tempted him. I think that means that it was the Spirit that drove him out there. That even though we may pray, “Lead us not into temptation,“ we know the truth is that God can be at work in the midst of temptation. God can be at work in the midst of it strengthening us to resist it, and teaching us to rely on God’s spirit.
So Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by the devil. “He ate nothing at all during those days,” says the text. “And when it was over, he was famished.” The first temptation that comes to him is one that is based around physical need. The devil tempts him to turn stone into bread, and Jesus quotes scripture to refute him. The second temptation occurs when the devil leads Jesus up to a very high point. The Gospel of Matthew describes it as a mountain, a mountain from whose tops the kingdoms this world and all of their splendor can be seen. In other words, the whole world and all of the wonderful things in it. The old lie that the devil puts to him there is this: “If you will fall down and worship me, then all of this will be your. The whole world, I will give to you.” And that is a significant temptation, the things in this world. It still is. All of the glorious things of this world.
St. Luke puts it a little differently here, in his account. The devil lies to Jesus. “If you will worship me, I will give to you all the glories of the world, because I have the authority to give this. It has been given over to me and I will give it to whomever I please.”
Who does the world belong to? Again and again, we have to struggle with that temptation, not only here as Jesus encounters it in the Gospel of Luke, but again and again in the stories of our own lives and the relationships of our lives, in the vocations of our lives, in the material things of our lives. Again and again, we have to struggle with the question, “To whom does the world belong?” In the midst of the tornadoes of the last week, many of us had to struggle with the question, “Who does the world belong to?” It is the tempting question in our hearts that we have to struggle with again and again. The devil suggests here that the world belongs to him. Jesus, like us, has to struggle to hold on to the spiritual truth in the face of that temptation, the truth that the world belongs to God. The world belongs to God.
For my part, I think that here in this second temptation, the devil is angry. The text doesn’t say this, but I infer it. I expect the devil doesn’t like to be resisted. In the first temptation, he tried ta clever ploy cloaked in the guise of seeking a physical need with this bread temptation, the guise of seeking a religious end with physical need. After all, the Shepherd of the flock has physical needs. “Do this, Jesus,” says the devil. “Do it as a sign of your divinity. After all, you are the Son of God. Do this to confirm your real presence with the Lord.” There is a spiritual reason for this. But now, here in the second temptation, he throws all pretense to the side, and it is just a raw appeal to greed. “Look here, Jesus. Let’s cut out the games. I want you to worship me and I am willing to trade the whole world for it. If you will fall down and worship me here, this world is yours.”
I point out the existence of another temptation here. It is one that I think is very prevalent for us, at least it is for me; maybe you are a little something like me. It is a temptation we often fall victim to. The devil is angry here, but it is not the same thing as being righteous. Again and again in my own life I am tempted to believe that my being angry is equivalent to my being right. But it’s not necessarily so. Just because you are angry doesn’t mean that you’re right.
The same thing is true about being hurt. Being hurt, while it is a very real and authentic experience, is not necessarily the same thing as being right. Being personally grieved or being slighted is not necessarily synonymous with being on the side of the angels. And lastly, being powerful is not the same thing as being right. It is a temptation to believe it, but being a worldly success is not the equivalent of being righteous. Of course, it also follows that neither is being a failure the equivalent of being righteous.
What is righteousness? What does it mean to be right? From the story, using Jesus as the model (that is the model in the story, isn’t it?), it seems to me that being right is being faithful. Jesus is faithful to the purposes and intentions of God as he understands them here. That is what faithfulness looks like to us: being faithful to the purposes and intentions of God as best we can discern them. Temptation is the enticement away from living out God’s purposes for our lives and the enticement towards living out some other purposes for our lives.
What troubles me a lot about this story from Luke is that people are always more interested in the devil in the story than they are in Jesus. And Jesus is the model in the story. The questions we ask about the temptation text are so often questions about the tempter. We are fascinated with that figure. Perhaps we are even enamored with him. Herb Mays once referred to that as being “enamored with hell.”
This is a story, though, about Jesus. Jesus doesn’t spend much time with the tempter. He responds to him directly. It’s not a long conversation. In the third temptation, the devil, having had Jesus quote scripture to him twice now, starts by quoting scripture to Jesus. The scripture he quotes is Psalm 91, which is the Old Testament text we read this morning. It is the Psalm that the choir sang their beautiful anthem around. It’s not Jesus that quotes this Psalm, but it is the devil. I think that demonstrates some of the potential temptation of this text, because the text has that great line it, the one the devil quotes: “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against the stone.” I know this verse. We have it printed on a lovely plaque and hung next to the front door of our home as you come into the foyer. It is an important verse for our family. It’s also a temptation. The temptation in the verse is the one that the devil lifts up. It’s the temptation to believe that nothing bad will happen to us.
But of course, that is not the Christian witness. Nor is it even the Christian experience. Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.” And no one knew this better than Jesus. This is not to say that I don’t believe in angels. I do. In fact, I’m a convert to my belief in angels. I haven’t always felt this way, but I am a believer in angels now. I base my conversion on three things: The first foundation for my conversion is the Bible. My own research indicates that angels are very Biblical. They are not just Biblical in a little way, they are biblical in a big way. The Bible is full of angels. They are hovering around in almost every book in the Bible. The second foundation I base my conversion on is human experience. It looks to me like human history is full of the individual narratives of faith, the families and people, who talk about their own experience with God’s messengers. Angelic experiences. And the third foundation that I have found, which was a surprise to me, is how all of the major theologians in the life of the Church, and I include the modern ones as well, all of them take seriously the existence of angels and the Biblical witness to it.
Why is it, then, that science cannot demonstrate the existence of angels to us? Science is important to me. I live much of my life by it. Well, there is much about the faith that science cannot sustain. There is much about the faith that science is silent on. There is much about the faith that science confirms. But the faith is not completely dependent on science, nor is human knowledge. Before this week, science was silent on the principle of anti-gravity, or at least we weren’t building our physics on it. But now, after the end of this week, it’s not just gravity that is a principle in the universe, but anti-gravity, if you follow the accounts in the news. And now the current model is not that the universe is de-accelerating, but that it is expanding and accelerating in a way we thought had past. It changes very quickly, the things that we are sure about out of science.
I believe that the angels often protect me. Again and again, I think I have been the beneficiary of things I can only attribute to angels. They certainly have treated me better than I deserve. But bad things still happen to good people. Many good people. My second cousin, Irene, is a 78-year-old woman who lives most of her year in Michigan. But for three months every winter (January, February, and March), for the last twenty years, she has been coming down and enjoying the Florida weather by staying in a trailer park outside of Kissimmee called the Ponderosa Trailer Park. It is a sensational story because she is someone I know personally. But unfortunately, it is the story of lots of people this week. What I want to tell you about Cousin Irene is that she is a good Christian woman. It was, I think, Cousin Irene who gave us the plaque that we have hung on the wall by the front door of our home, which says, “He will give his angels charge over you.” And it was Cousin Irene this week who had a big tree uprooted from the ground and thrown into her trailer, crushing it badly, cutting and injuring her. She is going to be all right. “Where were the angels,” my children asked me, “when Cousin Irene needed them in the face of the tornadoes?” I don’t know. I can’t explain the workings of angels. I will tell you that maybe it was the angels who picked up the tree and threw it on her trailer, to keep it from becoming airborne like so many of the trailers where people were killed. They think that’s why her trailer didn’t fly around.
I can’t explain the workings of angels. Beware of those who say that they can. Consider the audacity of being able to explain the workings of angels. I’ll have to an angel-ology another time. But I observe it is true about all of the strong relationships of care and trust and help in my life. What’s true about them is also true of the angels: That they are of enormous benefit to me, and yet, they still are not always able to keep me from coming to some harm. Friendships, relationships of care and trust in my life, are of help and of great guidance to me. They still didn’t keep me from falling and breaking my arm in the sixth grade. Family relationships, of deep care and love, of enormous support and help to me. They still haven’t kept me from making some of my worst mistakes.
On the eternal plane, the psalm believes this to be very true when he says, “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.” I believe that this was true more for Christ than for anyone else. Jesus, right here in the middle of the wilderness, knew that it was a temptation to believe that these words from the devil meant that he wouldn’t suffer any physical pain. But he resisted that temptation. In some places the epistles teach us that when you suffer indeed, your suffering can be for the cause of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the most profound verses in this psalm are the ones that follow those most frequently quoted about the angels. Those verses that begin with 14: “Those who love me,” says the Lord, “I will deliver. I will protect those who know my name. When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble, (not that we will not have trouble), I will rescue them and honor them.” Let us read those verses together again and again.
It helps me to know that Jesus resisted the temptation ever present before us, to believe that the world belongs to the devil. Or that the world belongs to some other mischievous or malicious force. That the world belongs somehow to the trouble that might befall us. That the world belongs to power or to violence, or to greed or to hatred. Or any of the other idolatries that compete for our loyalty and worship in the world. Jesus knew that the world didn’t belong to any of these things, in spite of what looks to us like the sometimes clear sign to the contrary. Jesus knew that the world belonged to God. And Jesus wanted us to be able to hold onto that truth and to live our lives based on that truth and guided by that truth, that the world belonged to God. Because if you believe that the world belongs to God, it will shape the way you act and live in the world. Wanting us to have some sign to see that the world belonged to God. Wanting us to have some help in the midst of the trouble that might befall us in the world. In the midst of the tornadoes and in the midst of the illness and in the midst of the hardship that might befall us in the world. Wanting us to have some sign in the midst of that reality in the world that the world did belong to God. Jesus gave us this Table, that it might be a meal and a sign to us the God still cares for us and is loving us. That God will deliver us and that God would be with us. Amen.
