A Lenten Journey, part 3: Supper with Satan
I don’t know who said that if you want to know someone, invite them to dinner, but in my experience it’s been true. Breaking bread and sharing some wine creates a convivial atmosphere conducive to revealing our ideas, hopes, dreams, and fears to one another. During his time in the desert, Jesus doesn’t exactly dine with the Devil, but they do get to know a lot about each other. During this part of our Lenten journey, I’d like us to consider that the devil is nothing to be afraid of—and that, in fact, there is no devil. At least, not the way we in the West classically think of the devil as an individual entity. The longest of the temptation stories is found in Matthew (4.1-11), with a virtual clone in Luke (except for a slight change of event order for narrative continuity). The story is only a single sentence in Mark (1.13), probably because Mark’s Jewish audience would have understood the underlying metaphor better than Matthew’s partially Gentile, and Luke’s extremely Gentile, audien