From the Gospel (Luke, chapter 4) for the first Sunday of Lent, yesterday, the middle part:
Then he took him up and showed him
all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant.
The devil said to him,
“I shall give to you all this power and glory;
for it has been handed over to me,
and I may give it to whomever I wish.
All this will be yours, if you worship me.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It is written
'You shall worship the Lord, your God,
and him alone shall you serve.' ”
Of the power and glory of the kingdoms of the world, the devil in this story says:
"I may give it to whomever I wish."
We really need to keep this in mind whenever we are intellectually tempted towards any version whatsoever of the prosperity gospel, the idea that material, physical, or bodily blessings are the natural reward of faith and righteous living.
There is a practice among comfortable Christians (like ourselves) which, though well-meaning, has always bothered me, and I've had trouble articulating exactly why.
It is this: when acknowledging that one has escaped a bad material situation, or received a material windfall, or simply lived a comfortable life free from major material difficulties, there is a good-hearted desire to acknowledge that it wasn't through wisdom or had work that good befell them, that they aren't taking credit. And there is also a desire to avoid saying, for instance, "We've been lucky," I suppose to deny a superstitious-type believe in "luck" or to assert that the hand of God works in all things and so perhaps even to deny the action of random chance. So, not wanting to take credit, and not wanting to use the word "luck" for whatever reason, they substitute: "We have been blessed."
But... this is also a problem, especially when spoken aloud in a society like ours where many people do believe in the prosperity gospel, whether they realize it or not. Anyone who says "We have been blessed" may mean "We have received this consolation through no deserving action of our own," but a lot of folks may hear "God has looked with favor upon us and rewarded us for our innate goodness and/or our faithful behavior."
So I don't think it's a good idea to use those words.
And the Gospel gives us another reason. Are material goods and comfort and power and respect necessarily blessings?
Are the opposites necessarily curses?
"I may give it to whomever I wish."
(I once heard a perhaps apocryphal story of a page-a-day Scripture calendar that had printed on one page, "All this will be yours, if you worship me." It was meant to be funny, the story; but honestly, I think "I shall give to you all this power and glory, for it has been handed over to me and I may give it to whomever I wish" would work better. I think a lot of people would like to believe that the voice that says this is the voice of God.)
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Satan, of course, is the epitome of the unreliable narrator. But Satan is here a character, not a narrator. The narrator chose the words to put in the mouth of the devil, and chose them with care.
I don't know what phrase we should substitute for "We've been blessed." But I do think we should stop using it that way.
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