Sunday, February 17, 2013 (Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13)

Our Deuteronomy passage is set in the land of Moab, beyond the Jordan, maybe where Jesus went after his baptism and ordination. The 40 years in the wilderness are over, and the children of Israel have not yet been allowed into the Promised Land. Similarly, Jesus’ temptations came to him after he had fasted for 40 days and before he began his ministry of taking a new people into a new kingdom.

Moses is coming to the end of his speech. He is asking the people simultaneously to look forward and to look back—forward to the abundance that they will be receiving in the Promised Land and backward so that as receivers of abundance they will never rest on their laurels and think that their abundance is their due. Instead they will remember the great precariousness through which they have come—spiritual offspring of a precarious Aramaean and dependent on great generosity.

How does the looking forward appear? It looks like celebrating abundance by offering its first fruit—not by ourselves, however, but alongside two partners who together act as pulls against our self-congratulation. They are the Levites, who are experts in worship, and the aliens, who have been put into positions of precariousness by a self-congratulatory ethos. Abundance is real, but it can really be enjoyed only if we are celebrating the source of abundance and only if there are no victims of our abundance.