Jesus’ Gaze – 26 February 2023

Matthew 4:1–11

The decision to live into this life supersedes all ethical dilemmas as we turn our faces to gaze upon the one in whose image we are all created. Confronted with hunger and possessing the means to turn stones into bread, Jesus fixed his gaze upon God. Tempted by power and possessing the means to display total supremacy, Jesus fixed his gaze upon God. Offered complete dominion and possessing the means to command total control, Jesus fixed his gaze upon God.

Our ethical dilemmas. . . are a matter of choosing between life with God and life without God. When we choose life, we trust God to provide the bread even if it looks like a stone to our untrained eyes. If we remain focused on God eventually we will learn to see differently, and learning to see differently leads to living differently. –– Jennifer Copeland

Romans 5:12–19

Paul reminds us that . . . death does not have the last word. Good and evil are not equal rivals competing for our attention with the future of the cosmos hanging in the balance based on what we decide to do. The future of creation has already been decided; all we have to do is live into it. When we proclaim Jesus died and rose for our sake, we make a bold faith claim about how we will use the knowledge of good and evil to understand death. Quite simply, we know there are some things worse than death.

Of course, this is not to trivialize the enormity of our own death or the anguish of a loved one's death. It is, rather, to acknowledge what Paul claims about the dominion of death over our lives when sin is reckoned against us. The truth Adam and Eve discovered that ties the knowledge of good and evil inextricably to death is now expanded to include new possibilities for meaning based on the reconciliation and grace manifest in the life of Christ. –– Jennifer Copeland

Genesis 2:15–17; 3:1–7

Some say this little exchange between Eve and the serpent represents the “earliest” recorded theological discourse. There is no denying that the two or them are discussing God, making Eve the original theologian—move over, Augustine and Barth. We learn from their conversation that real knowledge is knowing you will die, and knowing about death is bound up with knowing about good and evil. God told Adam, when you have the knowledge of good and evil, you will die.

. . .The knowledge of good and evil includes knowledge of mortality. They were always going to die; they just didn't know it. . . . The ancestors of Homo sapiens developed rituals around the event of death before developing rituals for any of the other rites of passage they experienced. Mourning the dead implies knowledge of death, which . . . could make us good in the sense of becoming more generous, compassionate or hospitable, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. . . making us selfish, callous and arrogant.

. . . We can only be rescued from the fear and anxiety that the knowledge of death brings into our lives when this knowledge no longer dominates our living. –– Jennifer Copeland

Jennifer Copeland, a United Methodist ordained minister, served for 16 years as chaplain at Duke University and as director of the Duke Wesley Fellowship. She is currently executive director at North Carolina Council of Churches in Raleigh-Durham.

Homily Service 41, no. 2 (2008): 15–29.