Not by Bread Alone
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 2/26/23
Not by Bread Alone – Matthew 4: 1-4
Why does it seem like the devil always shows up when it’s the most inconvenient? Have you ever observed this in your life? You don’t even have to call it the devil to have experienced times when you are already hungry, hurting, tired, vulnerable, or pushed past your limit, when some challenge seems to choose that exact worst time to get right in your way.
Well, that’s where Jesus is in today’s story in Matthew. He’s famished and alone in the wilderness, when someone the text calls “the tempter” comes along and says to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
What are the limits of the Son of God? What can he do? What will he do? I’d like to know, and I’d like to know what that means for me, too.
There seems to be a story a lot of us carry about being beyond limits, like we should be too smart or pious or giving or good or kind to ever experience human limitation, and if we do, it must be because we haven’t yet become as smart or pious or good or worthy as we could be. This scripture text reminds me that the pressure to pretend that I don’t have limits does not come from God. Call it what you will, succumbing to that pressure doesn’t have my best interests at heart or yours either. Because, as annoying as it can be and as much of a relief as it can be, we’re not God, and God doesn’t need us to be. God knows we’re human and loves us anyway.
In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes “The God I know does not ask us to conform to some abstract norm for the ideal self. God asks us only to honor our created nature, which means our limits as well as potentials. When we fail to do so, reality happens–God happens–and the way closes behind us.”
Palmer goes on to list different times the way has closed behind him, which is how he describes running up against human and earthly limitations. But I trust we can name plenty of our own way closings, times when we suffered losses, didn’t meet our own expectations, or simply realized our lives and our abilities are far from limitless.
This is part of the human condition, and it is a part of the human condition Jesus does not forego. Maybe he could turn stones into bread but we can’t, and Jesus has chosen to partake in this life of limitation. So, he turns the tempter down. “It is written,” Jesus responds, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
A few years ago, when I was getting to know this congregation, I spent some meals with guests at our Saturday night Soup Kettle. They were eager to tell me that ours is the best one all week. Those were their words not mine. When I asked why they thought that, one person told me, “Well, it’s the real plates and silverware for one thing, but it’s more than that.” His friend added, “Yeah. It’s the way we’re treated like we’re real guests. It’s like we’re real people.”
I don’t think it’s that Jesus didn’t feel human hunger or didn’t care about feeding the hungry. In the gospels Jesus is often found eating or feeding others. No, I don’t think he underestimates the importance of food. I think he knows that food isn’t the only thing that sustains us.
There were people who brought food over to my family when our babies were brand new and adorable overloads of responsibility. The food was helpful but even better was the idea that someone cared and had our backs.
In the overwhelming affluence so many of us experience in this country, it may be easy to take food for granted. Soaring inflation may have shaken some of us from the delusion that food is a relatively unlimited commodity, but the truth is it is limited and quite precious. Every time we eat, we have the opportunity to pause and remember the preciousness of the food that we take into our bodies. We have the opportunity to remember the preciousness of connecting with each other in the sharing of food. That can mean connecting with each other by sharing time, space, stories, tears, and laughter around a meal.
But even if we eat alone we are connected to the web of humans who put the food on our plates from the growing fields to the supermarket to the kitchen and every place in between. In the moments when we remember the precious limited commodity of food, life, and connection whether we speak a word of prayer or not, I think we can be said to be experiencing a kind of table grace. The more often we do so, the more often we may be able to remember that the bread is no unimportant object, and yet the spiritual sustenance that comes from the source of all life and love that I call God is also part of what is keeping us alive.
Numbers in the Bible have great significance. They carry meaning and connect original hearers to stories with which they would have been familiar already. When original hearers of Jewish heritage heard in Matthew 4 that Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, they would likely have recalled the fasts of Moses and the 40 years the ancient Israelites wandered in the wilderness and were kept alive only by the manna provided miraculously by God each day.
I don’t know about you but that story always kind of makes my skin crawl. I like to plan things out, and I suffer from the delusion that I have everything under control. But the ancient Israelites couldn’t do that. They weren’t even allowed to save some of today’s food for tomorrow. They had to trust that they would wake up tomorrow, and the manna would again miraculously appear. That’s beautiful. And, I hate it because it requires so much trust.
Usually, God tests my trust not with food but with other people. It’s tempting to want to fix other people or the situations they’re in. I just want to make all the bad stuff go away or at least feel helpful and productive. But it turns out other people, including me when I’m the “other person,” don’t want to be anyone’s project. Help is good but when it comes to fixing something, especially in our emotional or spiritual lives, where people tend to invite me, each person is going to have to do that work largely for themselves.
Parker Palmer writes about that in Let Your Life Speak, too. He describes one of his two prolonged bouts with clinical depression during which all manner of well-meaning helpers showed up with buckets full of advice. They advised he should get some fresh air or reminded him how many people he’d helped in his life and how wonderful he was. He didn’t find this advice-giving nearly as helpful as the friend who came to just sit with him periodically and offer no advice at all.
“Here’s the deal,” Palmer writes. “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”[1]
I do trust that those resources, like holy manna, come from God. I have seen incredible Spirit-led growth take root when folks are ready and able to call upon those resources to do whatever is before them to do. It seems to me that learning to trust my own limits, helps me better respect others limits, too, and that that’s the humble place where God does some great work.
Sometimes in the Bible the word word is logos in the Greek, meaning Jesus, among other things. So, I looked up the Greek word translated into English as word here and found out Jesus is not talking about himself when he tells the tempter, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The Greek word means utterance. Utterance catches my attention because it doesn’t have to be language. It could be anything that emanates from the mouth of God. I don’t know about you but there are times when I stumble upon utterances that have little to do with language but that sustain me all the same.
I was met with an utterance biking home one day this week. I was biking on the sidewalk at 5:20 in the evening otherwise known as walk your dog o’clock in Elgin, IL. A bike, a leashed dog, and a dog walker are pretty pressed to share the sidewalk safely. The dog walker looked at me, and I looked at him. I had just about decided to stop, when he stopped, got down on his haunches next to the dog, and tucked them both up close to the downtown building we were passing. I rolled by slowly, thanked him, and then I thought about him all the way home. Was I that scary on my bike that he needed to take such drastic action? Maybe. Should I have done something differently? Maybe. Do I wish there were better options for bikes for everyone’s safety? Definitely. Then I remembered some dog training tips I had one time received. I was taught that if you want your dog to be calm in a given situation, it doesn’t help to stand and scream at the dog about it. I have tried this with my now passed on dog, Jasmine. Whenever she would chase cars down the dirt road we lived on in Iowa or bark at strangers, I would yell at the top of my lungs for her to stop. It didn’t work. The tips I got suggested the dog just thinks a yelling human is joining in on the barking. Another approach I learned was to keep the dog close to you in a situation the dog may find stressful. Speak calmly and reassuringly. Give good pats and offer treats if you have them. That way the dog learns even stressful situations are okay because you’re there. I don’t know if that particular dog walker got the same advice I did, but his dog was calm and relaxed as I wheeled by.
Maybe the devil does show up when it’s least convenient. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve found the temptation to deny my limits can be very strong and very alluring. But I’m pretty sure that God shows up, too, in our moments of limitation. I think God shows up like the gentle friend who will come alongside us, gets right down with us, and let us know that one way or another it’s going to be okay.
This Lent, we may do well to remember that we’re not God. We’re human, and that’s okay. Jesus accepted the limitations of this human life, and so can we. If we practice letting go of the need to deny our limits and trusting in the accompaniment of God, then whether we find ourselves at a table or not, we may find holy, sustaining grace enough for each day.
May it be so. Amen.
[1] Palmer does write about this in Let Your Life Speak. He also puts it more succinctly in a blog post here: https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2188. The verbatim quote I use above comes from that blog.
