By Bread Alone
AUG 2019
Luke 4:3-5 and Luke 13:31-35
Satan said, “If you are God’s son, tell this stone to become a loaf of bread.” But Jesus replied, “It is written in the Scriptures, that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” A few minutes later, some Pharisees said to him, “Get out of here if you want to live, for King Herod is after you!” Jesus replied, “Go tell that fox that I will keep on casting out demons and doing miracles of healing today and tomorrow; and the third day I will reach my destination. Yes, today, tomorrow, and the next day! For it wouldn’t do for a prophet of God to be killed except in Jerusalem! Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem! The city that murders the prophets. The city that stones those sent to help her, how often I have wanted to gather your children together, even as a hen protects her brood under her wings, but you wouldn’t let me. And now – now your house is left desolate. You will never again see me until you say, ‘Welcome to him who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
When Jesus was tempted by the devil or as we would say, ego, coercing him to turn the stone to bread, etc. We forget that it was not going on outside somewhere. This was all playing out inside His own mind. He was being tested from within. The small separated self, doing battle with the unified All that is God. The decision He was making was the same one we all make every day of our lives. Do I choose to identify with the physical realm and by so doing fall under its influence, its spell; or do I instead take the higher road, and choose to obey and honor the laws of the Spirit, thereby allowing myself to be held in a state of Grace under the direct influence of the divine?
We would all like to think we forego the bread for the promise of heaven, but do we really? Jesus even went so far as to entertain the thought of leaping off a cliff. Still, even Jesus knew that you don’t tempt God, because as soon as you shift from being in alignment with God the All, to instead choosing alignment with the small, separated world, you are under its influence, no matter who you are. God may or may not bend the laws of nature to support your survival.
You don’t play around with those things. We don’t test God. We don’t barter with Him with that, “Oh, I will align with you if you give me this thing or that outcome.” We forego all that and instead choose the state of grace we have become acquainted with in the course of our work here together. As Jesus said, " Gather us under his wing like a hen would do with her chicks. God wants our comfort but not our complacency. We must continue to strive for good.
My best friend, Christian, died last week in large part because he could not make peace with the mundane, nor could he look outward enough past his own problems to think of others, not realizing we can only keep what we give away. He was always in full flight from reality. He was an escape artist, and this time he escaped to a place from which he cannot return. But that is not transcendence, that is negative denial, which is doomed to fail, because the only thing to be rescued from is our own insanity. Transcendence is achieved by looking past the things of the world, through them, beyond them to the rock, the home that Jesus speaks of in this passage. We choose to forego worldly rewards and reach instead for the rewards of the spirit, and in so doing, we often gain the abundance we missed by living the other way. Christian thought he was an exception to this rule, but all that is only another clever disguise of ego wanting us to take false refuge in the small, separated self, whether that separation has to do with not fitting in or, more often, taking the form of specialness. We don’t want to become terminally unique. It is not that this world is bad; it is simply that it is nothing. Our goal is to release our sense of specialness and be a sunbeam that once more rejoins the sun. A drop of water that now returns to join the mighty oceans of the world. Our greatness comes from our humility--our contentment from being what we are-- simply a Child of God. And that is enough. Go in peace and GO LOVE!