The Bible is about God.

Not us.

I heard another one of those sermons, another us-centric distortion of the meaning of scripture.

The passage was Matthew 4:1-8, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. You know the story. Jesus has been fasting 40 days and nights when Satan appears and twice challenges him to prove he is the Son of God. “If you are the Son of God . . . .” The third time Satan makes an offer: "“All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 

You don’t have to be a genius interpreter to see that Jesus is the central character in this story, and that the central question is what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. The Son of God is nourished by God’s Word. The Son of God does not put the Lord to the test. And finally the Son of God will not, for anything or even everything, worship someone other than God. In the temptation of Jesus we find essential parameters for understanding what the claim that Jesus is the Son of God means. He is not his own lifestyle concierge. 

Yet the sermon I heard never picked up on this central theme of the story, which is incidentally the central theme of the book of Matthew and indeed the entire Bible: the claim that Jesus is the Son of God. Instead the preacher used this story to talk about the temptation we experience as human beings. Satan became the main character - as the tempter. And instead of making the claim that Jesus is the Son of God the preacher explained how Jesus is an example of who we are, how we feel, and how we should behave. 

In other words, like countless sermons before, it extracted mere moral teaching from the astounding claim that God is incarnate in Jesus Christ. And in doing so the sermon demonstrated the endless human capacity for self-centeredness - making God’s Word all about us. 

Now I’ll concede that there are significant passages of scripture in which God instructs humans with regard to appropriate behavior in relation to both God and their fellow humans. Noah, Moses, the Prophetic authors, and even Jesus all inform humans of God’s expectations. But we humans are not what the story is about. The story is about God. He is the Alpha and Omega of the Bible. It begins with God and ends with God and every great leader and prophet is just a walk-on in that story, bit players in a tiny episode in the life of the Divine. 

The fact that we don’t get this, or rather easily forget it because we’re so wrapped up in our own problems and needs, may be the reason that our message is of diminishing interest in the West. With only a modicum of scientific education overlaying the deep culture of Romanticism and common observation of history and nature humans can see that the Christian story as a story of human morality played out on a minor planet in the far reaches of a minor galaxy isn’t very compelling. 

If Jesus is just an exceptional moral example his death on the cross is tragic, but not particularly so. And if his followers remember him and draw inspiration from his life down through the ages that hardly sets him apart from Confucius, the Buddha, or any of the incarnations of Vishnu.  If the Bible is about how we humans are supposed to behave then it isn’t a very compelling book, because there are lots of sound sources of moral advice more up to date with our knowledge of climate change, genetics, and human rights. 

But if Jesus is the Son of God, the God who created the wheeling galaxies and spinning quarks, that is something worth looking at more closely. And if God has chosen to write us into God’s own autobiography so we better understand who we are and Whose we are that is astoundingly important. Indeed, it provides both the knowledge and motivation that grounds our ethical behavior. If we're supporting actors in God's story then we need to pay attention to the script. 

And if in Jesus God has decisively revealed that as God’s creatures we are loved, caught up in the fundamental force uniting and motivating the universe, then that is amazingly good news. 

So maybe we should consider preaching it, especially since it is the heart of every passage in the Bible we read on Sunday morning. 

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