The Path of Self-Awareness

A sermon on Matthew 4:1-11.

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.]

I mentioned last week that during the Season of Lent I would be preaching the “Palm Sunday Path,” but I’m assuming most of you don’t know what that is because it is something that has emerged just this year.

The Palm Sunday path is a national, interdenominational movement that seeks to equip Christian people to organize together in visible actions that witness to what Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday actually teaches.

To use the words of Matt Skinner, a professor at Luther Seminary and one of the organizers of the sermon series,

“Our goal for the series is to encourage people to follow Jesus along the path he walked into Jerusalem and eventually to the cross. As he approached the city, he staged a procession, a public display that both called into question the usual symbols and privileges of power and embraced a different way. Of course we know how the story ended, but it’s important to remember…that Jesus’s message was public and provocative.”[1]

The season of Lent has always been about preparing the church for Holy Week, so this effort is not a break with tradition. But it is new in that it is calling us into something more active and transformative than personal penitence. As Skinner says, it’s about a message that is “public and provocative.”

Which might beg the question of why I am then starting this sermon series in the wilderness… in the account of Jesus’s acutely private temptation in which the Accuser is the one trying to provoke Jesus, and Jesus is the one grounding his responses in ancient truth?

To be frank, I’m going rogue with the choice to keep the lectionary reading for today’s gospel. The national sermon series suggests a preview of Palm Sunday by reading Luke’s account today, and Matthew’s on Palm Sunday.

But I actually think that the starting point of Jesus’s public ministry is a really helpful place to start our journey to Palm Sunday.

And that’s because I think that walking this path requires that we start with understanding what we are doing and what it will require of us.

Following Jesus on his path to Palm Sunday means embracing his mission of transforming the world.

And we cannot be part of this transforming work if we don’t understand what about the world Jesus wants to transform, and also how that reality has its hooks in us.

We need to know ourselves and embrace our own transformation to be able to join Jesus in the work of healing the world.

I believe that the unfolding of Jesus’s three temptations offer us powerful insights to serve this purpose, all though each one in a different way.

The first temptation hardly even seems like a temptation.

It is perfectly reasonable to find something to eat when your body is starving.

What is more, Jesus clearly has the power to create food out of unexpected resources – the miracle of feeding the 5,000 demonstrates that.

So why should we even interpret the suggestion to turn stones into bread as a temptation?

Of course, we can look to Jesus’s scriptural citation for the explanation—“one does not live by bread along, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” —but I think we need to be careful to not read his response as a universal exhortation to rely on God alone or to make ignoring our physical needs into some kind of proof of faith.

As a person in recovery from an eating disorder, it is really important that we not assign some kind of holiness or sacred value to food-restriction.

And I don’t think Jesus is really talking about food at all here, he’s applying this scripture situationally because it cuts to the heart of the actual temptation he is facing, which is to abandon what he had committed to do.

Jesus had committed to practice his dependance on God, because he knew it was going to be tested on the path in front of him.

He was going to be tempted to leverage his power over creation in ways that would not serve his mission… in ways that would promote a clash of opposing powers confronting violence with violence….

But Jesus wasn’t embarking on a path toward power… he was embarking on a path to transform all the rules defined by power.

And that’s why this temptation actually has something to teach us.

We will never face the same temptation as Jesus because we do not have access to the same power that he needed to deliberately set aside.

But we do need to set aside the fantasy of power. We need to release any assumption that we are joining a project in which we can hope to wield power in order to coerce or command change.

Because if we embark on the Palm Sunday Path holding onto such an expectation, we will abandon the work as soon as we face roadblocks or failures.

As soon as we get “hungry” for evidence that we are “winning,” we will look for the most secure-seeming source of control (and the powers of this world are really good at promising miracles if we will just rely on them).

The second temptation that Jesus faces in the wilderness is more obviously problematic, although it is less naturally appealing.

“Throw yourself from the peak of this massive building so that angels will catch you.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but does anyone here actually want to try that?

I’m scared of heights. Ziplining on a tested course where there was a big strong human at the end of the rope to physically catch me was about the limit of my willingness to imitate flying.

But, accepting that this could be genuinely tempting, I have to ask what about this proposal might have the potential to hook someone into testing God?

The first thing that occurs to me is the desire to flex one’s specialness.

It’s an ego move. Like a really extreme version of arm-wrestling.

Or, it could me a defensive response to the “if” in the tempter’s challenge… the need to prove that there is no “if” about it. God has promised protection to God’s only Son.

Really it doesn’t much matter whether the target weakness is insecurity or arrogance because the knee-jerk reaction of both instincts is to test God…

To either try to make God “prove” dependability, or else to try to coerce God’s preferential treatment.

Which highlights for us what will sabotage our faithfulness to the Palm Sunday Path:

If we have a secret need to be special… we will retreat from the work of solidarity for the healing of the world… the tasks where we show up and don’t get any personal glory from it.

If we aren’t sure God is actually there for us… we will retreat from any threat we aren’t sure we can handle on our own.

Either way we will be incapacitated in our ability to actually be part of the world-changing work that defines Jesus’s path.

For the final wilderness temptation all veils are ripped away. No more subterfuge. No more subtle, psychological games. Everything is out in the open:

The promise is power. The cost is idolatry.

In this simplicity, it is still important to recognize that BOTH sides of the equation are traps.

Idolatry is obviously wrong… but we only see the wrongness when we recognize that the thing in front of us is idolatry.

Which can be hard to do when the temptation wraps itself in sacred language, like the Christian Nationalism that is assaulting on country’s identity and its people of faith with a coordinated propaganda campaign.

However, we do have a sure-fire litmus test that this is idolatry because it calls us to worship power.

Power is not just the promised reward in the wilderness, it is the substance of the temptation.

Jesus’s is not just rejecting the tempter’s bid for direct worship.

He is also rejecting the assumption that control over all the kingdoms of the world and their glory is something to be coveted.

Because Jesus knows that his transformative work is not about acquiring unilateral power.

It’s about “call(ing) into question the usual symbols and privileges of power and embrac(ing) a different way.”

Ultimately, this is what it means for us to follow the Palm Sunday path with Jesus – it means embracing a different way.

To do that, we need to understand all the ways that the status quo and its defenders will try to hook us:

With the promise to meet our needs;

With the lure of defending our specialness

By threatening our trust that God is really with us.

And lastly, the temptation that can come just as easily from allies as from enemies: the lie that our hope lies in gaining control and coercive power for ourselves.

That lie is why the Palm Sunday Path has to start with self-awareness.

We need to know our hooks, the things that can lure or distract us or divert us.

We have to know ourselves before we can see the ways that Jesus is seeking to transform us.

Only then can we really embrace Jesus’s work of transforming the world.

 Thanks be to God.

[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching-series/walking-the-palm-sunday-path-in-lent-a-sermon-series-for-2026