Of all the artistic renderings of the devil, the least convincing are those that portray him as a red-suited guy with horns and evil eyes. That’s far too comical and could lead us not to take the devil very seriously. We ignore the devil at our peril. The most convincing images are those that depict the devil as “an angel of light,” as St. Paul once described him. In these portraits, the devil is remarkably handsome, fair-haired, looking like a movie star or a magazine model. These portrayals of the devil get under our skin because the devil looks unnervingly human, a bit too much like us. It’s an eerily human kind of representation of the devil that surfaces in Jerome Witkin’s painting The Devil as a Tailor, where the devil is a man sewing uniforms for the Nazis.
But I know of no depiction of the devil as a rather ordinary looking human being playing a game of cards. I don’t mean this in a facetious way but in a very real way. We shouldn’t make the devil into a joke. So, imagine the devil sitting at a round card table with all of humanity, playing a game with us, and keeping his cards close to his chest.
In this game, as in any card game, there’s a finite number of cards. Some cards outrank others. The cards are dealt according to chance and luck. Some people get a good hand, while others are saddled with a bad one. In this imaginary setting, as in real life, the devil is wily and cunning. He knows intimately the rules of the game, and oddly enough, he plays by the rules. That’s how he operates. It would be too obvious if he were to break them. The devil operates quite efficiently in our world, which we usually view as nothing more than a zero-sum game. And appropriately, as the devil is comfortably seated at life’s card game, he emblemizes one of his Scriptural names. He’s the adversary, the one playing against us, even though the terms and conditions of that game are no more than the status quo of life.
The problem with imagining the devil as a red-suited guy with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is that it’s so obviously farcical. But the devil is no farce, and as wise Christian interpreters have known, the devil has been quite adept at assimilating himself into our finite, fallible, broken world.
This is why we could picture the devil sitting at the game table of life, holding his cards close to his chest, playing along very nicely with the usual rules of the game. He has an excellent poker face. He relishes the limited number of cards, and it works in his favor that the distribution of the cards is uneven. Some people are given a bad hand. Others seem to win all the time, as if they’re indestructible, unable to lose, always getting ahead, always trampling over others.
Don’t you see how this works? We know as well as the devil the rules of the zero-sum game, and this way of thinking is seductive because it’s so real. It begins to shape our idea of what’s fair and unfair. Our perception of justice is based on this zero-sum game, where life is nothing more than a bunch of fallible, weak, and love-starved people seated at a card table, where, of course, the devil is seated, too.
Based on this view, the one who cheats at the game or abuses the rules must pay. In this world, it’s an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In this view of the world, God gets drawn in to sit at the table with us. And soon, God becomes another person, just like us, playing the same old game of cards, whom we can manipulate just like the rest of the people at the table.
Now, we must treat God like a dispenser of magic tricks. Now, God must bring justice on our terms, not on his. Now, we test God with our prayer and make deals with God. God, if you take away my illness, I’ll never miss a Sunday service again. God if you get me that new job, I’ll serve you the rest of my life. We idolize our earthly rulers, equating their authority with God’s authority so that they can make things right as we want them to be. We even live recklessly, betting that God will save us every time.
But others respond differently. They can no longer remain at the card table because they see God sitting right there next to them. They believe that God is the one dealing the cards, where some get a disastrous hand, and others get a good one. Evil people have a hand of cards stacked with aces, and consistently good people lose every time. Those who leave the game are tired of things being so unfair. They’d rather God turn stones into bread so that there would be no hunger or third world poverty. They want God to prove himself.
When Satan appears to Jesus in the wilderness, he sits down at the game table of life to engage in a round of cards. For forty days, Jesus’s humanity is tested and tried, and Satan utilizes all the tactics in the usual rule book. Jesus is hungry and so are others. It would be easy to turn stones into bread, to do the right thing for the wrong reason. The Roman Empire was the inflictor of searing injustice and blatant evil like so many earthly governments. It would be tempting for Jesus to usurp earthly authority from abusive hands, although the cost would be high.
And the last temptation may be the most significant of all. I suspect that it’s more than a mere invitation for Jesus to hurl himself down from the pinnacle of the Jerusalem temple. Jerusalem is where Jesus is headed in Luke’s Gospel. It’s where he’ll suffer and die, but it’s also where he’ll rise again from the dead. Jerusalem is nothing less than where God shows exactly what kind of God he is. Jerusalem is where the truth of salvation confounds all our expectations and upends the card table of life. The devil really wants Jesus to ask God to save him from an ignominious future, to take the easy way out for our salvation.
But Jesus’s perfect humanity shines through in all this. Jesus doesn’t leave the table. Jesus doesn’t scream at the devil. Jesus doesn’t fight him. Jesus stays in the card game, willingly sticking with the hand he’s been dealt in his earthly life. In fact, unbeknownst to the devil, Satan’s hand has already been revealed.
If the traditional understanding of the devil as a fallen angel is true, then he’s been cast out of heaven. Based on his arrogant and preposterous claim in that second temptation, the devil does have some power in this world, which is dominated by corrupt rulers. It’s a perpetual card game where the odds are always stacked against the least of these. And yet, we can also rest assured that the devil is ignorant of one very important thing that we should know because we live in Christ.
If the devil knows this, he acts as if he doesn’t. God isn’t sitting at the card table with us and Satan, engaged in a competitive exchange of limited goods and tit-for-tat thinking. God, who’s beyond time and space and our fragile understanding, knows exactly what’s in the devil’s hand, and God knows exactly what’s in our hands, too. God knows that our life is more than just a whimsical stack of cards dealt out randomly. And God invites us to remember that he’s not like us. God is not one more person seated at a card table, enticing us to fall for the cutthroat competition of a zero-sum game. God is drawing us into the divine life of ceaseless love. In this divine life, there’s enough love for everyone. There’s enough blessing for everyone. There’s enough forgiveness for everyone. God himself is more than enough for everyone.
In the three temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, Satan tempts Jesus, just as he tempts us, to reduce the loving infinitude of God to the misshapen finitude of human existence. And in doing so, in a profoundly ironic twist, Satan has inadvertently shown us the startling, marvelous truth of who God really is. We learn from Jesus’s temptations that God doesn’t divvy out answers to prayer based on the deals we make with him. God’s relationship is far deeper and far more loving than a needy codependency where God dishes out kneejerk responses to our passionate requests. God is incapable of being gambled with, even though we might believe he only responds to our good behavior. God doesn’t make us choose between feeding the poor and trusting him alone. God doesn’t need earthly rulers to defend his honor as they persecute their enemies. God doesn’t need us to jealously protect him either. God doesn’t need to prove his power through magic tricks or excessive miracles.
God doesn’t need anything at all, even though so much of the world’s evil is based on making God like us and in being overzealous for God’s sake. No wonder the account of Jesus’s temptations occurs at the beginning of Lent, for it’s all about letting go, letting go of our need to control and letting go of our disastrous attempts to make God in our own image. God’s image needs no help from us, but if we go deep enough within ourselves, we’ll discover the image of unbounded love which has been there all along. And no one, not even the devil, can take that away.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
March 9, 2025