Quotidian grace and the temptation to spectacle.
The church’s daily bread and the call to the kerygmatic life.
This article was originally written for Mockingbird.
It goes without saying that the accounts of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness in the Synoptic Gospels endure as some of the most vital texts in the life of the church. Parallels abound between the testing Jesus endured in the desert and that which our first parents endured in the Garden, highlighting the ministry of fulfillment that Christ came to embody and carry out. The Lord’s categorical victory in the wasteland signals his ultimate triumph over death and darkness, which remains the eschatological hope of all of God’s saints. Considering not only the spiritual or Christological but also the ecclesiological themes on display in the temptation accounts compels us to pay special attention to the first of Satan’s three recorded offensives, in which he attempts to lure Jesus into providing nourishment for himself by turning stones into bread (Matt. 4:3).
This initial deceit, like the second, is couched by the devil’s “if,” which aims at material proof of Jesus’s God-ordained identity as the Son with whom he is well pleased (Matt. 3:17). Jesus, of course, resists by invoking the words of Moses to corporate Israel, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4; cf. Deut. 8:3). Consequently, Christ demonstrates his unalloyed devotion to trust in and do his Father’s will. He who was co-equal to the Father had humbled himself “by taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7), as one whose glory is in self-giving.
Jesus resists any sustenance acquired through spectacular means and insists that mankind subsist on the Word alone. In order words, the means of survival for those who follow the Lord aren’t the dazzling and dramatic displays of power but the ordinary means of grace. This is the contention of twentieth-century Lutheran historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, who argues that the modern church’s “desire for the miraculous and the spectacular” reveals just how “deep-seated” the temptation is to “succeed through the miraculous and the spectacular rather than through the kerygmatic” (252). By “kerygmatic,” of course, Pelikan alludes to the mode of apostolic proclamation found throughout the New Testament, especially the Book of Acts, which has as its particular focus the announcement that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God (Acts 2:36). The concept of the “kerygma” or “kerygmatic preaching” emerges in relation to the Greek word kērussō, which means “to publish,” “to proclaim,” or “to announce openly and publicly” (cf. Mark 1:4; Luke 4:18–19; Rom. 10:14). Accordingly, life is established and nourished by nothing more or less than the Word of God. Nothing else can sustain one through all of its ebbs and flows.
Those means of grace, which are so often labeled “ordinary” — namely, the Word and the Sacraments — are only designated as such because of how quotidian they seem. After all, no one appears to be breaking new ground as they nibble on unleavened crackers and sip on grape juice. Most essential of all, of course, is the preached Word, which imbues those pedestrian elements with cruciform significance. It is “the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17), that is, the kerygma, that suffuses the church’s ordinary liturgies with the extraordinary gift of grace. When this determination for the Word subsides, we very quickly lose our way. An exchange takes place, one in which the grandiose and spectacular are pursued at the expense of the ordinary. This is not only true of life, it is, according to Pelikan, the perennial temptation of the church:
When a ministry ceases to be basically kerygmatic and prophetic in character and becomes instead a ministry of public relations and publicity, statistics and meetings, then someone has forgotten, or is at least in danger of forgetting, that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word proceeding from the mouth of God . . . One of the great threats to church life in American Protestantism, it seems to me, is its preoccupation with externals, its endless church societies, and the gradual atomization of its parish life through the substitution of bread and circuses for the living proclamation of the living Word. The revival movement, which has characterized American Protestantism for two centuries, is in many ways an admission of its failure on just this score and an attempt to substitute something spectacular for its utterly unspectacular failure to hold men by other means. Call it activism or social consciousness or busy church life, anything which leads men to believe that they do not live by the Word, and that the Church does not live by the Word, represents the Church’s “Yes” to the temptation to which our Lord said such a decided “No” . . .
As in New Testament days, men will always seek a sign and marvel at a miracle; they will be taken with the spectacular and the miraculous. God help the Church if we ever permit the Tempter to succeed in substituting this standard of values for the standard Jesus sets down in this first temptation, not bread alone, but the Bread of Life, the bread which He broke beside the sea, the bread which does not pass away as did the manna of old, the bread by which all bread and all eating and drinking are sanctioned and made truly epiousios [“daily,” Matt. 6:11], the word of grace and mercy and pity which God spoke at diverse times through the Prophets, but which now for the last time He has spoken in His Son. By this bread man shall live, and in this bread is the source of the Church’s life as well. (252–53)
Despite being over seventy years old, Pelikan’s analysis remains as trenchant as ever. One doesn’t have to search too far or too wide to find evidence of the American church’s “preoccupation with externals.” No matter which end of the spectrum of orthodoxy one occupies, the temptation for the spectacular lingers. This is manifest both in the smoke and lights of neo-evangelicalism as well as the suits and ties of conservative fundamentalism. Consequently, the tempter’s wilderness dilemma persists, bewitching clergy and laity alike to chase the pageantry of turning stones into food. Like the Lord himself, though, our life subsists in the Word that alone addresses the deepest needs of the soul. It is the “daily bread” of the Word that kills and makes alive through the irrevocable offering of the Christ of God for the sins of the world.
Grace and peace to you.
Works cited:
Jaroslav Pelikan, “The temptation of the church: a study of Matthew 4:1-11,” Concordia Theological Monthly 22.4 (1951): 251–59.