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Detour Ahead. Don’t Take it.

Jesus got to the wilderness in Matthew chapter 4, fasting and praying. If he’s getting ready to go show the world how to love, how to wake up and be what they are, then this little ascetic trip to the desert must have been about something more than proving how tough he was. It must have been endurance training for a life thrust into relational environments that give little, but absorb much. It was a tough experience, fasting gin the desert. But i bet there were days with the disciples where Jesus longed to go back to the relative blessedness of starvation and heat stroke.

Just as the hunger and the isolation were about to start messing with Jesus’s head, over a month in, the Tempter starts up a conversation about relief.

Noting Jesus used scripture to make his points, the Devil took a stab at quoting from the Good Book himself. He’d taken Jesus to the highest point of the Temple after failing to get him to turn stones into bread. He’d not been able to get him to give into his belly, so he was using the Bible to goad Jesus to do a multi-storey trust fall for the Lord.

“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself off,” the Devil said to Jesus as they stood on the pinnacle of the Temple. “Because, it’s written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

The Devil was quoting from Psalm 91, written several hundred years before. But he was doing so selectively. There is a peculiar omission he makes from the text from the old Psalm, leaving us to wonder what he was trying to avoid.

If you go back to read the actual psalm, you’ll find the passage he was quoting from in its entirety reads this way:

For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.

In the Hebrew language, the word translated “ways” is the word you might use to describe someone’s behaviors or intentions. But generally, it’s the word used to describe a an actual path or a road.

Literal and figurative journeys.

The Devil intentionally leaves out the part about traversing the distance between here and there. As though he didn’t want Jesus thinking about the journey, just the end. The reward, but not the work to get there.

At the end of a forty-day fast, Jesus would leave the desert, be reunited with family and friends at home, and eat. The Tempter said “Why wait? Eat here and now.”

Jesus wanted to put his awakened, others-centered life on display so that people would trust The Way and not their religious fabrications. The Tempter said “Why wait? Prove the goodness of God now.”

Jesus insisted power isn’t something held over others, but something that comes up from underneath, humble and serving. The Tempter said “Why wait? Have all the power now.”

The whole exchange shows the Devil taking Jesus to the Temple, taking Jesus to the Mountain, removing the awareness of a journey. The journey was made to seem like a clumsy detail. Shortcuts and clipped corners. Let’s get to the pay off. And yet Jesus continues to resist, choosing more meaningful results via harder means. Luke resisting the Emperor’s invitation to embrace the Dark Side’s fast track comes to mind. Both scenes feature robes.

The word Compassion is two words, meaning “together suffer.” It’s difficult to understand how I can simultaneously live as one committed primarily to avoiding difficulty while growing in my ability to enduring suffer with others. Shortcuts often excise awareness and love. Doesn’t the bypass usually steer us around the more troubled parts of town?

As though life can always be reduced to an industrious Work Smarter – Not Harder, you and I are ever tempted to avoid Love’s hard roads. On the level of instinct, or at least the level of an untrained, drip tray of a mind, we want favorable ends in our social standing, by whatever means necessary. The self-centered animal willingly reduces itself to an isolated, petty relief-hunter who wants nothing as much as immediate gratification and ease. One who gets angry when its course and schedule are interrupted. One who begins to see people as obstacles to overcome rather than the objects of its Compassion. It scouts out easy paths and demands others do their part to take hardship out of their journey. Pissed off people in the express lane, mad at the children for interrupting sleep, vilifying the President for taking the country and the economy in a direction not fitting their preferences. Everything is colored by an increasing inability to cope with delays and disappointment, an unwillingness to submit to others’ pace or to the Universe’s uncontrollable outcomes. And this not getting what we want when we want it actually becomes a kind of pain, a kind of suffering, expressed in eye rolls or divorce or criticisms or the unfollow button. People are just too hard to deal with.

And the easy road is paved with the swiftest judgments. There’s no lazier path than getting to a verdict on who you are. For many of us it’s intolerable to turn off and really know someone once we get used to being a habitual shortcut taker. Not only am I less patient with the pace of real life, with the real difficulties of reality, I can less and less be burdened with knowing you beyond the cartoon I’ve made of you in my head.

We’re losing the ability to together suffer, because our goal is to excel and be relieved, have our minds all made up. But not suffer.

Christ takes the long road not so we’ll be impressed, but because his goal was Love of others, which can only be encountered in the exhausting, patience-demanding, grace-drawing paths of real life.

Then he said “follow me.”

Not around, but through. It’s a far more difficult road to walk than the bypass of self-interest, or academically focused religion.

I love being first and most powerful and at the top. To take the detour around all the frustratingly underdeveloped, under-informed, wrong and annoying people around me to secure for myself a personal paradise. And yet I’ve never felt less loved than when I was told I was in your way, that I was an anchor to be cut from your leg, a social liability to be quarantined, an annoyance, a draw on your emotional account, one requiring too much of your time and space for you to have the day you wanted to have. I know what it’s like to be the subject of a workaround.

So I choose the narrow path, so long as I remember to choose it, trying to ignore all the invitations to bypass you on my way to where I want to go.