fogparty: luke four-ensics...

on a walk recently i was thinking about luke 4... the story where Jesus is in the middle of nowhere for 40 days... without food... forced to share a pup tent with the devil... and then launches his semi-overt ministry as the manGOD.

for some reason this "man vs. wild" passage has always intrigued me.

for starters... verse 2 is very curious.

"...where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry." (NIV)

of course he was hungry!!! he hadn't eaten for almost a month and a half!!! and i'm pretty sure he was hungry starting at about day 3!

only one translation that i could find interprets it as "at the end of them he was very hungry", suggesting that's when he was at his lowest, rather than when his hunger finally kicked in. which is probably more how how we all tend to adjust the text. and likely why i've thought the story was about Jesus fasting & praying for forty days in prep for the big test at the end.

but that's not what it says. it says that he was tempted for 40 days. whether the devilish encounter described in verses 3-13 constitute a final testing on day 40 or 41... or whether they are the story of what happened during the 40 days... we can't be sure. i know i tend to read the 3 temptations as though they all took place in about 15 minutes. but when i think about it... i'm sure it wasn't so neat & tidy... ...& efficient.

there's about 75 acres of once wooded land close to our house that was cleared to become a food bank for sand and gravel hunters. then it was massaged in hopes of growing up to be a subdivision. but now... because of our starved michigan economy... it lies in a coma. naked. lifeless. silent of color through every season.

anyway... on my walk through my next-door desert, i guess i was thinking about the passage and how tough it would be to not eat for that long... and to be tempted at the same time by the big bad subversive ex-angel for 960 hours. and as i walked, somehow The Great Storyteller began hand-weaving the images & sensations with my feelings from this past year... as well as with what i imagined Jesus' wilderness/temptation feelings might have been.

and somehow my brain jumped to thinking about how when it comes to Jesus, i tend to exalt the cross-sufferings way over his normal-life-sufferings. you know... the stuff we never think about... like the fact that he got headaches, vomited, hated spinach (which i'm sure he did, even though his jewish mother stood over him... and then he had bad gas for the next day or two.) basically... how hard it must have been for Jesus to be manGOD and not G*D. how hard it must have been for him to live "normal" every day. not "privileged" normal, like a royal. but "tasting the daily suckiness of life" normal... topped with an extra layer of suckiness that comes from being royal in a world of commoners.

and i somehow entered the story... or it entered me.

i found myself crying... which is pretty unusual for me these days, but which is becoming more & more frequent at interesting times. anyway... i think i experienced Jesus' story overlapping with mine in a way i hadn't felt for a while.

it doesn't explain everything people go through. but it does help me to better appreciate that G*D truly does understand my/our daily pain. that he weeps for us not simply because he is aware of it... but because he, himself, lived in it... and yearns for the day we will be free from it.

why do i so quickly bypass the life of Jesus in my hurry to run to this death? (not to diminish the value of grabbing onto that part of his pain) but i think it's equally important for us to comprehend that he maneuvered through the same suffering you and i experience... the sufferings of life...

...from losing a friend ...from hunger ...from being misunderstood ...from injustice ...from a high-fever ...from getting a splinter ...from childhood rejection ...from watching his parent's fight ...from being blamed for something he didn't do ...from having to do chores when he'd rather play ...from getting a "d" in woodworking and the subsequent pain of rejection from his carpenter dad ...from being picked on ...from watching things happen that seemed unfair or didn't make sense ...from temptation ...from frustrating disciples ...from eating spoiled fish ...from living under foreign-domination ...from being the first-born in a jewish home ...from realizing you don't fit and that no one else can understand your deepest thoughts ...from the weight of knowing you're responsible to save the world ...from anticipating the approaching pain required to do so.

i find it interesting that whenever we encounter stories of the humanness of Jesus... we tend to quickly shift to his divinity and rescue him from the real pain of living. but only when we allow Jesus to be fully man will we begin to experience the comfort of knowing that G*D truly does understand what we go through.

having a friend in hard times doesn't fix or remove the pain... although it certainly helps.

but having a friend in hard times who has felt the pain of regularly stepping on one of life's thistles like we do... well... that's even better.

and knowing that he is the Cares-About-Us-And-Will-Never-Leave-Us-Although-We-Can't-See-Him-G*D... it helps me to realize that he's got a plan to some day make it all right.

G*D anticipated our suffering... entered it... experienced it... persevered through it... attacked & overcame it... walks with us in it... will someday end it... and promises life with him beyond it.

i hate much of what i've been through in life. i hate that my kids have & will go through that pain as well. i hate that kids live without fathers and mothers and food and shoes and access to the medicine that could make their lives so much easier. i hate that people are born without limbs and bodies that work properly. i hate that the bad decisions of a few bring pain to the many.

i guess i'm saying that engaging the reality that Jesus' own skin ached whenever he fell off his desert bike somehow makes me not want to hold this world's craziness against him so much.

trust is slowly being restored. and the story's not over.