Taking the Test (Reflections on Lent 1, Year C 2025)

 

“It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Luke 4:12b)

I had the good fortune, in my seminary days, to study the New Testament under the tutelage of the distinguished Bible scholar, the late Reverend Doctor John H.P. Reumann. Dr. Reumann was a scholar’s scholar. He had an eidetic memory, was scrupulously detail-oriented, and his examinations were tougher than John Wayne with a hangover. Perspiration still breaks out on my forehead whenever I recall sitting for his final exam on the Gospel of John—an exam which, I’m sorry to admit, I actually flunked[i].

In our Gospel lesson for Lent 1, Year C (Luke 4:1-13), Jesus is undergoing a pretty grueling exam of his own. If you read this passage in the New Revised Standard Version, verse 2 might read, “where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” Dr. Reumann would be proud of me (I hope) if he knew I had looked this word up in the original Greek and discovered that the word for “tempted” is peirasmos, which has the original meaning of “tested.[ii]”

I’ve been a teacher in one way or another for much of my working life. Whether it was lecturing to college students, teaching special ed in middle schools, or trying to cram Luther’s Small Catechism into the heads of youngsters in my parish preparing to make their Confirmation, I have had to rely on giving tests. I don’t think I’ve ever met a student who looked forward to taking a test. Tests are, generally speaking, regarded with a certain sense of dread. And yet, they are necessary. The reason tests are given (at least for the one who gives the test) is to discover what a student does or does not know. Tests are a necessary diagnostic. We test something or someone for the purpose of discovery.

Even if test-taking is your least favorite activity, you have to admit there is something to be gained from the experience. When I return a student’s paper and they’ve marked an answer wrong, I always let them know what the correct answer is. In this way, even a wrong answer becomes a learning experience. I don’t give tests to embarrass students or trip them up.

Neither does God.

The tests and trials of our lives, as unpleasant as they may be, are all learning experiences. They are meant to teach us about ourselves. We can also learn a bit from the way our Lord was tested.

Two things are important in this Biblical narrative. First, Jesus might be on a high because he’s just been baptized and named God’s Beloved Son.[iii] Second, he’s been in the wilderness for forty days and hasn’t eaten anything. Both circumstances are great opportunities for the devil to do a little testing. Whenever you think you’ve got the world by the Fruit of the Looms or whenever you think you’re lonely, in a confusing and empty place, or deeply in want—that’s the time you’re going to find yourself tested. Whenever we start thinking it’s all about us, the devil is waiting.

Knowing your scripture is a great way to get through a test. Jesus could quote scripture to the devil and was quick with a rebuttal when the devil started quoting scripture to him.

We also learn here what Jesus really cares about. Jesus didn’t come to rule the world. If he did, he had his chance. As Christians, it’s not our job to dominate everyone in society. We’re called to be witnesses, servants, and teachers, not rulers.

We also learn we can be tested, but it’s not for us to give the test. If we start thinking what we do is going to influence God, we are going to be disappointed. It’s pretty dangerous to start firing questions at God and demanding explanations like Job in the Old Testament. We’d best be on our guard against magical thinking which expects God to answer to us. Whenever we do this, we’ve left religion for superstition. True faith is to let God influence us.

Perhaps the most important lesson is knowing that Jesus has gone through what we go through. God understands what it’s like to be tested. So does everyone else. You are not alone in the wilderness, even if it feels as if you are. You can reach out to Christ and to your neighbor.

Finally, we learn there is no final exam. The scripture tells us the devil “departed from him until an opportune time.” There will be another test after this one. You will do just fine on that one, too. Don’t let your heart be troubled, and do not be afraid. You have Jesus. You have the scriptures. You have your brothers and sisters in Christ. You have faith. You’re going to ace this.

God’s peace to you, my friend, during this season of Lent. May the disciplines of Lent draw you closer to God and to yourself.

 

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[i] Yup. Got a big, fat “F” on this one. Fortunately, so did many of my classmates. Dr. Reumann—a great believer in grace—re-weighted his exam to give more credit for the numerous definitions portion of the test and less to the massive essay on the possible theories of the Fourth Gospel’s origin. I’d managed to remember just enough of the later part to get snuck up into a passing grade.

[ii] I remembered in John 6:6 Jesus jerks Philip around by asking him how he thinks 5,000 people are going to get fed. The verse says, “He said this to test him.” The word peirasmos is used in this passage for “test,” so I’m assuming it’s the preferred reading of the word. I can feel Dr. Reumann smiling.

[iii] Luke 3:22

Who Do You Want to Be? (Reflections on Ash Wednesday, 2025)

 

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1)

Lent always begins with something uncomfortable. “Remember,” we are told, “that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” It’s the same thing God told Adam back in Genesis 19:3 when he and his woman were expelled from Paradise.

On Ash Wednesday death takes center stage. In his classic theology, The Cost of Discipleship, the German Lutheran pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” This annual remembrance of our mortality, the black smudge we receive on our foreheads, shaped in a cross, the symbol of humankind’s obscene talent for cruelty and murder, the recitation of David’s penitent Psalm, are all meant to remind us of what Bonhoeffer called “costly grace.”

Costly grace isn’t some reward bestowed because we’ve piled up enough godly works or avoided anything our world might see as grossly sinful. A reliance on our own merits only leads us to arrogance and hypocrisy. We all know that. But Bonhoeffer wanted more than just a formulaic reliance on the doctrine that God is love and will forgive all our shortcomings as often as we choose to exercise them. As a good Lutheran he believed that God’s law brings death—not because we choose to ignore the Law, but because in our frailty we can never keep it. As Jesus teaches us in the appointed Ash Wednesday Gospel (Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21) our temptation to sin overtakes even our most pious actions and intentions. The law reminds us of our hopeless, selfish weakness and forces us to look in the mirror of our souls and see a very unflattering reflection. Our notion of ourselves as somehow special and deserving has to die so we will come weeping back to the arms of our savior in all our brittle neediness and fear. The awareness of ourselves as not being who we really want to be makes us like toddlers lost in a shopping mall, desperately crying for the secure embrace of the parent from whom we have wandered away.

The first of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses reads, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he meant for the entire life of a believer to be one of repentance.” He explained in the Small Catechism that we are to die every day to sin and be raised again to newness of life.[i]

If pondering our own death leads us to ponder our life, I’d ask you to think of the turning points in your personal journey which made you who you are today. I would be willing to wager that there was some kind of death connected to those moments. Perhaps it was the death of one of your parents. Sadly, at times, it’s the death of a child or a close friend. It could be the loss of a relationship, or a job, or a dream.

When everything we think we are is stripped away, when, as Shakespeare said, “nothing can we call our own but death, and that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones,” we still return to Christ. It was the death and resurrection of Jesus which made the disciples die to the notion of who they wanted Jesus to be and rise to live as God intended them to be.

There’s a story (perhaps apocryphal, I don’t know) about Luther teaching his Wittenberg students about the power of God’s grace triumphing over the demands of the Law. Supposedly, a stunned student asked the professor, “Doctor Luther, does that mean we can do anything we want to do?” To which Luther replied, “Yes! But what do you want to do?”

What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? Who does Jesus say you are? The Gospel text—even for such a solum day as Ash Wednesday—gives us courage. Jesus says to us, “Whenever you give alms, whenever you pray, whenever fast.” He doesn’t say, “If you give alms, if you pray, if you fast.” He assumes we are people willing to exercise the desire and effort of discipleship. He knows we want to die to our old frustrations, selfishness, and guilt so we can rise every day to seek his will through generosity and compassion, confession and forgiveness, and renunciation of those things which curve us in on ourselves and keep us from experiencing a relationship with God.

God’s Holy Spirit be with us during this Lenten season, that we all may say in our hearts with Saint Paul, “…living is Christ, and dying is gain.[ii]”

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[i] See section IV of Luther’s explanation of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism in his Small Catechism.

[ii] Philippians 1:21.