Trust Fall

Luke 4:1-13 

Jump!
Go on, jump!

If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”, and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”

Jump! God’s not going to let you get hurt!

Don’t you trust God???

Would you do it?

Would you jump – off the roof of the cathedral, off the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sears Tower – if you knew that God would catch you?

Why wouldn’t you jump if you knew that God will catch you?
Wouldn’t not jumping be a failure of trust in God?

Trusting God is what Lent – the wilderness experience itself – is all about.

The Israelites had to trust God for food, water, leadership – for life and identity – in forty years of wandering. Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness, not eating, trusting God for life itself. You and I give things up for Lent, confess together more wrongs than we usually think about, change our prayers and habits just a little, all ways of practicing our trust in God.

So it makes sense that the last thing the devil tries on Jesus, the peak, the climax of the scene and the story, is about jumping, falling, to prove his trust in God.

I’m pretty sure I’ve met this devil before.

Mostly in wilderness experiences of my own: Girl Scout camp and “team-building” retreats.

The peer pressure from other second-graders to jump off of successively higher piles of chairs onto a mattress on the floor, or off a higher rock into the lake.

The overly cheerful “team-building” leader urging me to let go, and lean into a “trust fall,” dropping blindly into the outstretched arms of my co-workers.

Voices that literally urge you to “jump!” or command you to “Fall!”

because it will prove something.

Prove that you belong to the group, that you’re brave enough; prove that you trust your companions to protect you. Or prove that your companions are trustworthy, themselves – strong enough and willing to carry your weight, dependable enough to encourage you, willing to share the same risks and rewards.

It kind of works.

The stomach-churning lake or mattress plunges of camp build confidence and adventure and the in-group experience that pulls groups together. 
The “trust fall” is a pretty obvious demonstration of the fact that we’re stronger together than individually, and that we ultimately have to rely on others.

If Jesus had jumped, he’d have demonstrated a miracle of God’s care AND prove his specialness in a way nobody watching could miss, saving him hours of arguing later with the scribes and Pharisees who thought he was nobody special.

If you trust God,

wouldn’t you jump?

It’s a reasonable question, particularly if you remember that “the devil” started out generations ago as “the Satan,” God’s prosecuting attorney, responsible for trying people to see how faithful they really were to God.

If the satan, the devil, is in fact on God’s staff, then it’s not surprising that Jesus is being tested with opportunities that have great potential for good, not just obvious self-indulgences.

After all, a God who turns stone into bread is a God who will not let an empty wasteland stand in the way of feeding hungry people. And God’s people had been pleading for generations, centuries, for God to take a personal, practical active role in ruling the kingdoms of the earth,

(a tendency we can still find in ourselves when we ask how on earth God could let those crazy people run our own country!)

So an appeal to make the promises of scripture real, to trust so visibly and viscerally in God’s promise to catch and protect us, is at least as reasonable and good as that “team-building” instructor urging me to tip myself off a much-higher-than-it-looked platform into the arms of my co-workers and fellow kayak guides.

But Jesus doesn’t jump.

Doesn’t turn stone into bread,

and doesn’t accept the direct and personal rule of the nations of the world (though that last had a devil-worshipping catch big enough to make it an obvious no-no).

Right at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus refuses this set of opportunities to prove God’s power in a way that should wipe out doubt, just the same way he refuses the appeal to come down off the cross and demonstrate God’s power in the world at the end of the story.

And looking back from where you and I sit,  it’s obvious that those were the right choices. But I think we can’t truly appreciate the story – any part of the story – unless we remember that the opposite choices were good, too, and that the right kind of trust isn’t always obvious; that God cannot be proven.

To turn away from the pinnacle of the Temple, to refuse the demonstration of God’s power that could guarantee to witnesses that he was the Son of God, Jesus had to go back to daily, difficult life and ministry trusting God without proof, for him or for us.

The same way you and I have to trust our co-workers to be honest, careful, and committed in daily ways that can’t be proved by whether or not they drop you on your back during a closely supervised activity.

To leave those stones as stones, not bread, Jesus had to trust us to feed one another when resources are scarce, without proof or even hopeful trends to inspire that trust. And to leave the nations of the world in the hands of their current governments, then and now, Jesus has to trust us to learn from what he taught, without proof, in the face of millennia of messy human history.

Now that’s trust.

That’s the model of trust that matters in the wilderness: the ability to trust in the absence of evidence, or even when the evidence seems to prove we can’t trust, when we stay lost, or sick, or alone, or afraid, in spite of fervent prayer and every effort we can make.

That’s the trust that matters in the wilderness.

That kind of trust is hard to find in the everyday world we live in, and even harder to practice.

That kind of trust lets us give more – to family members, friends, strangers – when what we’ve already given seems wasted and unappreciated.

That kind of trust means refusing to care about our own self-interest – the polar opposite of what we’re urged to do in an election season, by every advertisement on TV, and by most self-help resources.

That kind of trust is radical and difficult, and there’s no easy way to find it.

But we can practice it, just a little, this Lent.

Giving up worry as well as chocolate,

giving away more than we think we can,

choosing other over self even when we don’t have enough for ourselves.

Jesus chose that: stepping back from the peak of the Temple,

staying alone and forsaken on the cross,

rising again to a new life his best friends hardly believed and no one could comprehend.

Jesus chooses that by trusting us, day after day,

whether or not we believe, whether or not we’re doing our best.

So how will you trust, this Lent?