“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”
For centuries upon centuries Lent has begun with the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.
The text from Hebrews (5.8) makes the theological point that underlies the Passion of Christ which, in a very real sense, begins with the story of Christ’s temptations. To be tempted and to be pierced are etymologically related. The point on The First Sunday in Lent is that Christ is tempted for our sake even as he will suffer for us on the Cross. To be tempted is one thing; to give into it is something else. Christ suffers the complete package of temptation; in short, all our temptations are named in his. And we might add, too, that he knows the nature of temptation far more than we do precisely because he does not succumb, as we so easily do, but overcomes our temptations. The text from Hebrews makes a theological point about the Incarnation. “Although he was a Son,” meaning the Son of God and therefore Divine, yet “he learned obedience through what he suffered,” which is only possible through his humanity.
To succumb to temptation belongs to our sinfulness – to our falling away from the conditions of our creatureliness. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all the forms of our disobedience.
The temptations of Christ are a most dramatic illustration of the lessons of human redemption. Christ is the new Moses who overcomes the acts of ancient Israel’s disobedience and ours. The difference is that Moses can only state what Israel failed to learn. Jesus shows us the doing of it. He is ever the Word in motion, the Word that acts and does. And he does so in what belongs to his identity with us; he does so in the soul and body of our humanity. He learns obedience in the being of the creature whose refusal to learn is disobedience.
“Although he was a Son” signals that what he freely is, that he freely wills to learn. It belongs to the mystery of our redemption that “Jesus always receives what he bestows”; that “he underwent what he redeemed”; that “he who delivers from death himself died”; that “he who gives resurrection himself rose from the dead”; that “he who baptizes was himself baptized”; that “he who saves in temptation was himself tempted.” Consequently for us, “because of what he is, he causes in us what he himself undergoes” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar). It is the logic of the Incarnation itself.
The temptations of Christ show us the obedience which he learned and which we have failed to learn. But the lesson is shown so that we in him may learn to be what God would have us be – his obedient sons who are willing to learn through the suffering which our disobedience occasions. The temptations which Christ undergoes are the temptations of Israel and they are our temptations too.
Israel in the wilderness complained to God about bread and water. They tempted God; they put God to the test. In other words, Israel sought to make God serve the demands of our bodily and worldly desires – our appetites – and Israel endeavoured to make God subject to our wills – to do for us what would make him acceptable to us. And that was not all. Israel in the wilderness denied the truth of the God who had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. They worshipped an image of their own making – the fabulous and proverbial golden calf. Thus, Israel categorically denied the God who had commanded that “thou shalt have no other gods before me”– that is to say, “thou shalt not serve any other gods.” And Moses fasted forty days and forty nights in intercession to God for sinful Israel.
That whole Old Testament story is deliberately recalled, recapitulated and re-worked in the person of Jesus Christ. He bears the temptations of Israel in himself and overcomes them. That he does so is not a mere display of divine power, an effortless banishment of the devil and all the vanity of his show; quite the contrary, he does so only through the agony of suffering. “He learned obedience.”
His answers to Satan are the lessons which Moses taught but which Israel failed to learn. The answers are always and ever true but, more especially, they are true in him who does what he says and is what he does. What are those answers? “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”; “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”; and, as if to bring all things home to truth itself, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” The word “only” is the one addition to the passage, and revealingly so.
These are the lessons which have always and ever to be learned by those who would be the humanity that God would have us be. Yet they are the answers which we all have failed to learn. He who is the Word of God wills to bear our disobedience in his free-willing obedience to the Father’s will. He has done so in what belongs to us. He has done so that he may continue to do so in us, if we will go with him. If we will go with him, then, we, too, will learn the obedience of being the sons of God, but only through him who is the Son of God.
“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2012