“And him only shalt thou serve”
The temptations of Christ belong to the logic of redemption, to the Passion of Christ. Christ wills to be tempted for us even as he suffers for us on the Cross. The accounts of the temptation show us the intensity of the encounter. There is a real struggle, a struggle for what is good and right that is greater than anything we can imagine because we have become so used to giving in and going along with the things that draw us away from our true happiness and good which is found in the will of God.
The story of “The Temptations of Christ” is about our temptations as endured and overcome by Christ. As the Fathers so often observe, Christ is our Mediator who not only overcomes our temptations but also gives us an example for doing the same. The temptations belong to the reality of the human condition. They take us back to the Fall and they point us to the Crucifixion. Strange as it may seem to say there is something good and necessary about temptation. Why? Because what is good and true has to be known as good and true and willed as such.
The temptations comprehend all of the temptations known to us. All temptation, in other words, is brought in under the three temptations of Christ as presented by Matthew and Luke, even though the second and third temptations are reversed by them. Luke presents the second temptation of Christ which Matthew presents as the third. Yet whatever the order they are, by all accounts, a summary and comprehensive view of our temptations. They put us to the test about what truly defines us. They do so after the fact of our awareness of our separation from the goodness of God. In a way, the temptations raise the question about what is the good.
What are they? Ambrose observes that the cause of temptations are the causes of desires which he enumerates as “the lust of the flesh, the hope of glory, and the eagerness for power” following Luke’s account. In terms of Matthew’s account, that would mean “the lust of the flesh, the eagerness for power, and the hope of glory.” The point nonetheless remains; all temptation is brought under these headings. They encompass all the lesser goods which we substitute for the greater good and they disclose the nature of all our false loves. They belong especially to our baptismal renunciations of “the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh.”
That there is a struggle for the good speaks about ourselves as intellectual and spiritual beings, and, especially, about the interplay of our knowing and our willing. They challenge us precisely about where our hearts are. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” as we heard in the Ash Wednesday Gospel. The deeper point and, perhaps, the more troubling one, is that we are already compromised in one way or another, already defined more by our temptations than by the overcoming of them. The whole point of Lent is “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,” as next week’s Lenten Collect reminds us. Lent is not a self-help project, that is the way of vanity and vain-glory, the way of presumption and pride; in short, the way of the devil.
The devil. How paradoxical that after the parade of destruction and devastation that belongs to the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first, there should be a kind of disquiet and discomfort about the idea of the devil when in fact we need to think more deeply about the nature of evil and about the forms of our own evil. What do we mean by the devil?
Here in today’s Gospel, the devil is simply the tempter, the one who puts Jesus to the test. About what? About who he is and what defines him, about the goodness of God really. By extension, the story of the temptations belongs to who we are in Christ in his overcoming of our temptations; in short, about what defines us. “If thou be the Son of God,” the devil says twice to Jesus, tempting him by suggesting that he needs to prove himself to the devil (and to us). In the last temptation, Jesus names the devil as “Satan,” implying another dimension to the idea of the diabolical. It is not just about being put to the test; it is also about defying the will of God, pride as the ultimate illusion. As if we are the centre of the universe. As if we are God. St John in his Revelation joins together the image of the dragon (looking back to the serpent in the story of the Fall) with the devil and Satan. Another term used in some contexts is Lucifer, literally, the lightbearer who betrays the light of his own being and so becomes “The Prince of darkness”. All of these interrelated terms belong simply to the principle which opposes the truth and the goodness of God: the devil, and the devil in all of us.
We need the wilderness of Lent to clarify our hearts and minds about what really matters. The paradox is that, in the ascetic traditions, going into the desert, into the wilderness, was about the spiritual struggle, the very inward struggle to be defined by our attention to God and his will for us over and against our easy conformities to pleasure, convenience, and comfort and to how we are seen in the eyes of the world. The point was to confront the very principle of evil itself. The struggle is in us, in our souls.
That remains the great struggle in our own times. Amidst the great confusions and certainties and uncertainties of our culture and our churches, there is the pressing need to reclaim the project of Lent, not simply for ourselves but in the context of our relations with one another. There is the need to reclaim the wisdom of a spiritual tradition that deals profoundly with the awareness of our own shortcomings and our own evil but also insists on the greater power of God’s will for our good revealed in the life of Christ.
Temptations are one thing. Giving into them is another. The giving in is the sin. Today we face the temptations of our souls but we do so through the one who has faced them for us, the one who has felt them more intensely than we can possibly imagine and has overcome them in what belongs to our humanity. We can, too, though not of ourselves but only through him who calls us to himself through his Word. To name our temptations belongs to our self-examination and to the possibilities of redemption. Matthew’s account recalls us to the primacy of worship, to who we are in the sight of God. It is the counter to all of the temptations for the simple reason that it returns us to God. He adds one word to what is written in the Jewish Scriptures. That one word is only. “And him only shalt thou serve.”
Only in serving God can we defeat the temptations and our yielding to them. Yielding is the sin but the good is to be achieved through our not yielding to what is less than who and what we are in the sight of God. The temptations clarify our commitment to Christ and to his life in us.
“And him only shalt thou serve”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2018