Temptation in the Wilderness 2002

*Preached at Grace North Church February 17th, 2001.*

In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the holiest scriptures of the Hindu religion, Prince Arjuna is surveying a battlefield. On one side are his brothers and the many mercenaries they were able to raise during their long exile in the forest. Leading the opposing armies are Arjuna's cousins, who stole his brothers' thrones. He also sees his lifelong friends and his teachers in the opposing army. Suddenly despair overwhelms him, and he drops his bow to the dirt and falls to his knees, crying out to God.

Fortunately for Arjuna, God is not only nearby, he is driving his chariot. Krishna, the incarnation of the ultimate godhead, feels compassion for his friend, and seeks to comfort him. "What is the matter?" Krishna asks, even though, as God, he probably knows. Like any good therapist, Krishna knows that we have to work through these things for ourselves sometimes.

"How can I go through with this?" Arjuna wailed. "How can I go out and kill my friends, my teachers, my own family? How can I destroy the very people I fight to save?"

And then and there on the battlefield, Krishna comes down from his perch in the chariot, and while the armies on both sides bristle for the horns to blow and the battle to commence, Krishna gives Arjuna a introductory course in cosmology.

"Do you see all these people?" He asks. "They are all just a part of me. That general is a fingernail on my hand, this whole battlefield is as my thigh. All things in heaven and earth are a part of me. And here's the secret: I am the eternal God. I never die. And since all things are a part of me, and I never die, nothing ever really dies."

Then Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in all of his glory, a kaleidoscopic vision which leaves Arjuna disoriented and breathless. Afterwards, Krishna entreats his friend, saying, "This battle is part of a story which must be played out for the good of the universe. Go and do your duty. Yes, go on out and kill, but do it with a twinkle in your eye, because everything is me, and I cannot be killed."

Arjuna takes courage from his friends' impromptu philosophy lesson, and joins his army for the battle about to commence. Arjuna discovers that he is, in fact, not really, foundationally Arjuna. His being Arjuna is revealed to be an illusion. In reality, he is a part of Krishna, he IS Krishna, and that moment of realization is his salvation. Now, while there are certainly disturbing aspects to this story, it clearly illustrates a kernel of truth which one can find at the heart of every one of the world's religions, Christianity included.

I am a great fan of Carl Jung. Now, while the man doubtless had certifiable clay feet, and would be the first to admit to his own shadow, he gave scholars of religion an inestimable gift in that he provided a new, psychological vocabulary to describe religious experience. The advantage of this is that by using Jung's categories and terminology we are able to see what is going on in a religion's teachings without getting bogged down in proprietary terminology or dogma. And the amazing result of this is that we are able to see just how much we have in common.

In Jung's system, we human beings suffer as much as we do because we think that we are our egos. As long as I identify with my ego, I am going to have a difficult time because the ego needs to think that it is in control, it is terrified at the prospect of its extinction, it has a great investment in my believing that "I" and "it" are synonymous. But deep within ourselves there is another Self, a Self with a capital "S". This Self is synonymous with the universe itself, we might even call it God if we were to revert to religious terminology. This Self speaks to us "between the cracks" in our consciousness. It takes over when we sleep and dances through our dreams, it shows itself in moments of creative insight, it leaps out during psychotic episodes. The Self is the great unconscious well from which we all draw. Jung called it "the collective unconscious," and as such it is common to all peoples in every place and time.

The spiritual journey, according to Jung, is for us to realize that the ego is not us. It is a pretender to the throne. It is a "persona" a false face that we develop in early childhood to erect a barrier between ourselves and the unconscious so that we can distinguish between fantasy and reality and become functional in the world. As such, the ego is a very useful tool and is developmentally appropriate. But just as a pacifier is appropriate when a child is one or two, it becomes problematic when a child is five. Just so, the ego is important when we are emerging out of the unconscious into the material world, but as we grow into adulthood, the ego's tyranny becomes apparent. We learn the hard way that we are not the only being in the universe, that others have feelings and needs, and that very often our own desires must be set aside so that others might have their most basic needs met.

That is called "growing up," but if the ego has its way, this process will be circumvented before we actually get to the bottom of it all. For if we keep going in this line of inquiry we are forced to ask the question, "If the ego is just a part of who I am, who am I really?" And Jung's answer to this is that our true identity is the capital "S" Self, the ground of all being.

This is the meaning behind the promise of immortality every religion holds out. So long as we identify with our ego, we will die. But if we find our identity in a larger and more permanent entity, then our survival beyond the death of this fragile body is assured. Let's look at some religions, and I'll show you what I mean.

In Judaism, one is not so much an individual as a part of the family, the tribe, the people of Israel. Judaism is one of the least transcendent religions in that it promises no survival of the ego after death, but exists to ensure the survival of the tribe through time, resting in God's promise that they will thrive and endure. Judaism invites its followers to divorce their identity from their individual egos, and asks them to invest their identities in the Jewish people as a whole. Thus, a man or woman might die, but Israel never dies. Thus, anyone who invests his or her identity in the Jewish people achieves a kind of immortality.

In Buddhism, the ego is revealed to be our "false face", and so long as we continue in the delusion that the "false face" is who we are, we suffer. But when we recognize our "true face" as being identical with all of being, we accept things as they are, and our suffering vanishes. We discover that we all have "Buddha nature" and that this common nature connects us not only across all national, racial, and social boundaries, but to all beings.

In Islam the ego is forced into "submission", which is the meaning of the word "Islam". Muslims submit their will to the greater will of Allah, and strive to serve as conduits for the divine will. Islamic mystics go even further, discovering in their ecstatic trances that "Allah and I are one." The ego is thus defeated, living in submission to the true will governing the universe.

In Christianity, Jesus says that we must "be born again," we must experience a shift in our consciousness. Jesus said that a seed must fall to the earth and die before the kernel of wheat can take root and spring forth with new life. It is not hard to see the seed as the ego, and the resulting, triumphant plant as the true Self finding expression in one's life. St. Paul describes this as "putting on Christ." "No longer do I live," Paul tells us, "But Christ lives through me." In Christianity believers become part of the Body of Christ. Christ is our new identity, in Christ we "live and move and have our being." And because Christ never dies, so we, too, when we have put on Christ, have put on immortality.

What made Jesus, and the Buddha, and all of the world's great mystics so profound and powerful in their teaching, is that they were able to make this shift in identity. In our gospel reading today, Jesus goes into the wilderness, the symbolic place of spiritual dryness, where we are all vulnerable to temptation. There he is met by Satan, who sets before him three temptations. Let's look at each of them. In the first, Satan tempts him to suspend the laws of the universe in order to turn stones into bread. We might say that Satan suggests that he violate the integrity of Creation in order to fill his own belly. "Who cares about the whole," he is saying, "When you are hungry?" In other words, "Why not feed the ego at the expense of the Self?"

The second temptation is larger in scope. Satan shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world and promises him dominion over all of them if Jesus will only bow to Satan's authority. Satan is definitely making a play for Jesus' ego here, but Jesus is not identified with the ego. Jesus is identified with God. As God is already lord of all the world, and, as Jesus says, "I and the Father are One" what Satan is really offering is a demotion, not a promotion. Again, Satan wants Jesus to feed his ego at the expense of the Self, and Jesus is not biting.

In the third, Satan is even craftier, for in this temptation Satan play's on Jesus' ego's need to be accepted and believed. If the people see a miraculous rescue, if they see Jesus being born down to earth by angels, surely they will believe him. Satan is tempting him to put his money where his mouth is, to prove his legitimacy to his followers and perhaps even to himself. But Jesus has no need to prove anything. Jesus is not his ego. Jesus is God. The shift in identity has already been made in Jesus' mind, and Satan's temptations cannot touch him.

We would do well to follow Jesus' example, here. We, too, can find our identity in God. For most of the violence in our world is the result of fear, of people needing to protect the things their ego's say they "need" to survive. But if we were able to truly shift our identity from this hollow shell that will die to the Whole which will never die, our actions might be quite different. We would not cheat one another, for we would be conscious that we are a part of one another, and if I cheat you, I cheat myself. We would have no poor or homeless people because people would provide for others, knowing that providing for others is simply providing for themselves. When Jesus said, "Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brethren, you do unto me," he was speaking from precisely this perspective. And he was speaking a much more literal truth than people normally associate with this verse.

Like Jesus, we are beset by such temptations every day, in ways big and small. How we respond to them will largely be determined by our identity. Who are you? Are you this small bag of bones and flesh in whom the light of consciousness will soon be extinguished, never to flame again? Or are you the universe, which lives forever? The choice is yours to make, and if the religions of the universe are any guide, then hear them, for on this matter, they speak with one voice. You are not your body. You are not your mind. You are infinitely more than you can ever comprehend, and your story has no end. If you can make that shift in consciousness, if you can "put on the mind of Christ," if you can recognize your true face, then, my friends, Satan, death, and hell cannot touch you. And that is good news, indeed. Let us pray

God of the individual and the whole, you cry out to us in our dreams and our imaginations. You whisper to us in unguarded moments and speak to us our true name. Help us to see through the cobwebs of many centuries of tradition, interpretation, and theologizing to see the truth of your very simple message: that whosoever would save his life, his ego, will lose it, and whosoever will lose his ego, his life will save it. Comfort us and reveal to us on the battlefields we face every day the glory of your splendor, and of our place in you. For you invite us to drink from your mouth, and promise us the living water, after which we will never die. For we ask this in the name of Jesus, in whom we live and move and have our being. Amen.