Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, with the ashes of repentance and the idea of turning back to God. “Return to the Lord your God”, the prophet Joel exhorts us. But there can be no turning back to God without an awareness of our having turned away from God. That is the reason for today’s readings from Matthew and Paul, the one about the temptations of Christ, the other about our striving with God. Against the idea of the wilderness as a pristine place empty of human presence, Paul seems to suggest that the wilderness is inus. That is where the struggles of the soul for the good take place. And that is the true meaning of the story of Christ’s temptations. It illustrates the forms of our temptations.
The story of the temptations of Christ reveals to us a very basic and fundamental principle. All temptations have to do with our relation to the essential goodness of creation and to the will of the Creator. The very nature of God and the goodness of God is a challenge to us about what we think truly matters and what is truly good. This is what is set before us in the story of Christ’s temptations. The whole aspect of temptation turns on the idea of the good. That is what is primary and what the sequence of temptations in Matthew’s account shows us.
The temptations are about being put to the test. Temptation in that sense is about the relation of our knowing and our willing. Temptation tests us about our relation to what is good and true. They all involve a question about power in relation to truth. The devil here is the tempter as in The Book of Job and, as in The Book of Job, the matter of temptation is explicitly allowed by God; in other words it belongs to our good. Here Jesus is “led up by the Spirit”. The point is not about mere play-acting; the point is that the devil himself is good as a created being. His evil and the nature of all evil lies in his denial of his creatureliness and in his pride and presumption to be God himself. That is to will a lie. It is to turn your back on the truth of your own being. It involves a perversion of the good, a refusal to will the good order of creation and the will of God.
Temptation itself is not sin; sin is the yielding to temptation. The story of the temptations of Christ teaches us two things: first, the nature of all our temptations; and secondly, the way of the overcoming of all our temptations. In other words, we are shown the temptation and we are given the true response.
The temptations are really ours. Christ is tempted for that reason because it belongs to the nature of our humanity as rational beings to know and to act upon what we know as good and true. As fallen creatures we don’t always, we haven’t always, and we can’t always do that for we are always sinners. That is the point of the prayers of confession in our liturgy. I rather like the reformed maxim derived from Augustine that our humanity before the Fall was posse non peccare, ‘able not to sin’; that after the Fall, it is non posse non peccare, ‘not able not to sin’, but that in Christ, fully and completely, our humanity is non posse peccare, ‘not able to sin’. We are caught in the tension between the second and third, ‘not able not to sin’ – sinners always – while seeking to be what we are in Christ, ‘not able to sin’. Lent is about the pilgrimage of the soul in love with the good, seeking the goodness of God as the truth of our being. The seeking is the striving for the grace and goodness of God.
“Command that these stones be made bread”, the tempter says to Christ in the barren fastness of the wilderness. The temptation harkens back to the wilderness journeying of the Hebrews under the leadership of Moses. There, as here, is the question about God’s providence, about his provisions for us in the wilderness journey of our lives. As such it turns on the matter of trust. This temptation speaks, I think, to some of our contemporary concerns about our power over nature, our ability to manipulate the things of the world. On the one hand, such is culture in the sense of cultivating the natural world. But for what end? That is always the question. On the other hand, just because we have a certain power, a certain techne, doesn’t mean that we should or have to use it. The good lies in the use. This is the challenge of our age. We can make nuclear bombs that have the power to destroy on a massive scale but to use it? That is the primary ethical question which is to say that power must be subordinate to truth, and to a higher end, the good. Christ as God can change stones into bread but doesn’t.
We are only too aware or at least we should be aware that our power over nature does not always result in good outcomes in spite of all our intentions. Knowledge is power, it is famously said. It is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but what he actually said was that God’s knowledge is power. Our knowledge and power are quite different and need always to be subject to God.
Jesus’ response to the tempter’s first temptation is not to deny the necessities that belong to our human appetites, our need for the basic provisions of food, shelter and clothing, for example, but rather to insist that those provisions, which are about human life, are really only for the real purpose of human existence which is about our life with God and for God. We “do not live by bread alone”, a metaphor for the things of practical necessity, “our daily bread”, as it were, for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus reminds us that our lives are for a spiritual end. We live truly and in all aspects of our daily lives “by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”. In other words, we live truly when we act and live out of the providence of God as “workers together with him”, as Paul suggests. It is about our striving with the will of God in the good order of creation and not by our destructive manipulation of that order to other ends. The struggle is always going to be not just about what can and cannot be done but about what can yet shouldn’t be done.
Timothy Findley, in his classic anti-war novel, The Wars, sums up the temptations of technology in the form of an incomplete syllogism. The two world wars saw the development of many weapons of massive destructive force. He connects the development of flame-throwers to the invention of other things such as dynamite and airplanes, etc., things which can be used either for good or for ill but which involve a kind of power over nature in its giveness. He says about our humanity in its technological idolatry that “they wouldn’t; they couldn’t; yet they did”. The ethical is first – “they wouldn’t” do something that is massively destructive. “They couldn’t” implies a limitation, a sense of the impossible. The conclusion logically should be then that “they didn’t”. Instead, he says, “they” – we – “did”. And we do. Such are the contradictions in our very being, our sinfulness. We have to know this in order to seek the correcting grace and strive to live according to God’s word revealed in the witness of the Scriptures and provided for us sacramentally in the life of the Church. Here is the bread that is the word of life.
The second temptation is about our vainglory and its vanity. The first temptation deals with a question about human needs and necessary goods albeit by ignoring the providence of God. The second temptation is simply about power for power’s sake as if that itself is a good. The devil tempts Christ about his fundamental identity in all of the temptations: “If thou be the Son of God”. Here it is about the use of that divine power for no other end than for the sake of power. There is no good in it. The evil lies in attempting to make Christ prove himself. The response is clear and biblical. It recalls the Ten Commandments and the whole pageant of the Old Testament. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”. God is God and we are not. God is not subject to us. We are subject to God.
This is what the devil and all evil seeks to deny and which comes out even more fully in the last and greatest temptation. It brings out what is inherent in the other two, the desire on the part of the creature to be God and to want to be recognised, worshipped by everyone and everything. We would presume to be God. We are not. Jesus’ response here is the counter and corrective to all and every temptation because he recalls us to our primary vocation, to the radical truth of our being. It is found in the worship and the service of God. As Jesus adds, “him only shalt thou serve”. Our lives are to be lives of prayer meaning that all we do is understood as being in the service of God. Everything is to be ordered to God. Prayer is not just about words in Church. “Prayer signifies all the service that we ever do unto God” (Richard Hooker) in all of the circumstances and situations of our lives as the Epistle suggests. Such is our striving. It is about our constant turning back to God from whom we turn away in our sins and follies. Our turning back can only be about Christ’s grace in us and our striving and “working together with him” and his grace. We “strive to strive towards the things” of God’s grace, if I may turn Eliot’s phrase in his poem, Ash Wednesday, knowing that our good and our joy are found in him. “O Lord, I believe, help my unbelief”.
The temptations of Christ reveal the struggles of our souls and all the trials and tribulations of our lives. But even more they show us the overcoming 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”, as we recall from the baptismal liturgy. We renounce the things which stand between us and God in order to embrace what belongs to our identity in Christ. The temptations of Christ illumine the way of the purgation of our souls and the way of our union with God.
Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2019