From Our Archives

For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, Wednesday’s Ashes (2023); Debie Thomas, Tempted (2020); Dan Clendenin, The Whisper of Eternity (2017); Debie Thomas, My Flannel Graph Jesus (2014); Barbara Pitkin, Tempting Fate (2011); and Dan Clendenin, Super Tuesday Meets Ash Wednesday (2008).  

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ.

Matthew 4:8: “The devil took him to a very high mountain.”

At the Aqbat Jabr refugee camp on the edge of Jericho, Um Faras brought us a huge plate of rice with chickpeas, baked chicken, cucumber and tomato salad, and mint tea for dessert. 

We talked about our travels, and when I mentioned Egypt, our guide said, “But how was the food there?” 

“It was good,” I said. “It was fine.” 

He disagreed. “Everybody says that the food there is not good. We know how our food should taste. But the tourists, they don’t know better.” 

I shrugged. Maybe so, but the differences seemed slight. In Egypt we also ate chicken and rice, cucumbers and tomatoes. Um Faras’s version was delicious. Later I learned that Um Faras was from Egypt and had moved to Jericho through an arranged marriage many years before. 

We had been hiking for three days on the Masar Ibrahim, a 330-kilometer trail that runs from Rummana to Beit Mirsim, and whose guides are Palestinians. The night before we arrived in Jericho, we had stayed with a small community of bedouins. I can’t say that we had spent a peaceful night there because once the generator had been turned off, the dogs started barking, then the donkeys braying, and around two in the morning, when the dogs and donkeys had gone quiet for a moment, the roosters started in, as if the quiet was just too much for them to bear. On the wall of the small school room that doubled as a guest room were maps that had been made by the West Bank Protection Consortium that showed the connections between water, roads, and violence. 

The Temptations of Christ, 12th century mosaic at St. Mark's Basilica, Venice.

When we arrived in Jericho we learned that this particular day was the deadline the State of Israel had given to a small community of bedouins, like the ones we had stayed with, to move out of their homes. The government wanted to build a road to connect settlements. If the community refused, they would bring in bulldozers. In the West Bank, a general strike had been called to protest the government’s actions. 

I hadn’t intended to make a political statement by hiking the Masar Ibrahim, but I had quickly learned that you can’t breathe or eat in Israel-Palestine without making a political statement. If you think you can, then you just aren’t paying close enough attention to what you are saying. By the time we arrived in Jericho, I had passed enough walls and barbed wire and military personnel with machine guns, seen enough graffiti, talked to enough people, slept in a Jewish settlement as well as a refugee camp, that I was beginning to understand, with my body, where I was and what that meant. The night that we had been “sleeping” in the bedouin camp, a Palestinian teenager had been shot by Israeli police in Jericho, but not killed. When I finally got access to WiFi, I had to search deep past the U.S. dominated headlines to find any news of it. 

Despite all of these complexities and not being sure what, if anything, would be open given the general strike, our first stop in Jericho was the Mount of Temptation, the place where Jesus was said to have undergone the temptations that appear in this week’s lectionary texts. I was surprised by how close to Jericho the Mount of Temptation is. After a lifetime of Sunday school lessons, I had pictured Jesus much farther out into the wilderness, maybe one that looked something like Utah. I hadn’t pictured a cave right about town. But when Constantine’s mother Helen traveled here in the late fourth century, this was the place where local people pointed her for that crucial encounter, recorded in all of the gospels. 

The Temptation of Christ, ca. 1125. Hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga, province of Soria, Spain .

We climbed the stairs to a little chapel built into a cliff (the tram was closed because of the strike) and stood for a while in front of the altar. Years before, Ali, the priest at my Episcopal church, had given a sermon about the three temptations that I have never forgotten. It returned to me in this tiny, cramped space, perched on the top of a rocky hill above the Jericho plain. For each of the three temptations, she had posed a question. 

When Satan urges a famished Jesus to turn stones into bread, Ali asked, “What is truly nourishing?” When Satan tells Jesus to throw himself off the rocky mount and let the angels save him, Ali asked, “What is true safety?” And when Satan proposes that all kingdoms of the world will be given to Jesus for a single act of worship, Ali asked, “What is true power?” 

As I stood on the Mount of Temptation, I understood these questions as personal, but also communal, societal, and political. These are not easy questions to answer. 

When I think of true nourishment, I think of food like Um Faras’s. I think about the way that, in my own society, calories are cheap, but nourishment can be a lot harder to come by. I also think about the nourishment of time with friends and strangers, of sharing food around a table. I think of how fully and deeply I have been nourished by time spent at my church’s Community Meal. I think of the day when I walked into St. George Episcopal Church more famished spiritually than I knew I could be and was met with the rhythms of ancient poetry. Somehow that was food I needed.

When I think of true safety, I think of a man I met at the Community Meal who talked about the moment he decided to take his gun out from under his pillow. He said he gradually understood that he was letting fear drive him and that fear was begetting fear inside his head. Fear was a far greater threat than any perceived enemy. I imagine what it was like for him the first night he recognized that true safety had nothing to do with the weapon under his pillow, how frightened he must have been, how great the risk must have seemed after all those decades of imagined safety. In Jesus’s case, the risk appears to be walking undefended into human life itself. That’s the leap he’s already taken — no wonder that cliff didn’t seem like a challenge worth indulging.

Temptation of Christ 'Bible historiée toute figurée', Naples ca. 1350.

The question of true power lies at the center of the entire Christian experiment. We learn again and again, or we fail to learn again and again, Jesus’s own central teaching: true power has nothing to do with governments or kingdoms or popularity contests or how many people you can command. I think of non-violent protestors at one end of the Selma Bridge and baton-wielding police officers at the other. I think of a person in a frog costume facing a man with a gun. There are countless examples the world over where true power stands in the face of violence, political pressure, or money. True power is the mysterious path that Jesus walked. It comes with no guarantees. It is self-giving surrender, the strangest of paradoxes, and it leads to the cross.

We climbed down from the Mount of Temptation. Our driver Omar was waiting for us in the cafe and asked if we wanted a coffee before we headed onward. We had juice; he smoked a shisha. We looked out over the valley and listened to the wind. What is true nourishment? What is true safety? What is true power? I felt like the questions hadn’t changed in two millennia.

Weekly Prayer

Reginald Heber (1783–1826)

Bread of the World, In Mercy Broken

Bread of the world, in mercy broken,
Wine of the soul, in mercy shed,
By Whom the words of life were spoken,
And in Whose death our sins are dead.

Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
Look on the tears by sinners shed;
And be Thy feast to us the token,
That by Thy grace our souls are fed.

Reginald Heber (1783-1826) was an English poet, hymn writer, and Anglican priest. In 1823, after refusing twice, he became Bishop of Calcutta.  He died while visiting Trichinopoly, India, on April 26, 1826, at the age of 43.

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Wikipedia.org; (2) MetMuseum.org; and (3) Tumblr.com.