Receive not the grace of God in vain
There can be no greater vanity in all senses of the word than the yielding to temptation. It is both empty nothingness and narcissistic self-absorption. It is not by accident that the First Sunday in Lent begins with the story of the temptations of Christ. We ignore it at our peril because it speaks so directly to our hearts and minds and presents a pressing (and depressing) dilemma and challenge. Temptations ‘r us, to be sure, but the point so often missed is that temptation is really about our relation to the good. The story reveals our temptations. Christ is tempted for us and for our learning about the nature of temptation and its overcoming. Thus, temptation has altogether to do with a necessary testing of our wills in order to bring out the truth of our willing and our knowing, namely, that upon which they depend.
The Gospel shows us the making known of the essential forms of temptation and their overcoming. With respect to such forms, we confront a fairly sophisticated understanding of temptation that is far deeper and wiser than what our therapeutic culture offers, only because the latter is so divorced from the moral and ethical traditions to which this story belongs. We have here an order of temptation and a making known of the constitutive elements of our humanity. To put it bluntly, what is revealed negatively through the temptations is the positive form of our relation to the goodness of God. We are tempted in certain ways and they all reveal that to which we so easily succumb. Such is our weakness in contrast to the strength of Christ who is “tempted yet undefiled,” quite unlike us. He is tempted for our sake, for our learning and living, we might say. The Gospel shows us the overcoming of temptation not by us alone but, as the Epistle suggests, by our working with the order of grace.
Nothing could be more counter-culture. Why? Because our culture defines you by your temptations and says that is what you are. It means being defined by a negative. Such is the culture of addiction, of dependence and co-dependence, of this diagnosis and that. There are, of course, certain conditions and diagnoses that are part of human experience. But is that what fundamentally defines what it means to be human? Are you the diagnosis, the condition, the disease? Once you assume the medicalization of society and human behaviour, then there is really no temptation; there is only the collapse and capitulation to a deterministic way of thinking that denies accountability and agency. There is no temptation, only determinism. You are determined and defined but at the expense of personality and agency, at the expense of your humanity.
Temptation does not define us ultimately in terms of who we are in the sight of God. Yet it becomes, and this is the great counter-culture moment of this Gospel, the way in which we are returned to God. It has entirely to do with our working with the grace of God which underlies, upholds, and informs the created order. The temptations reveal the disorder of our relation to God and his creation, yet God and creation is what is entirely presupposed in each and every temptation. What defines us?
The answer of the Gospel is that we are to be defined “not by bread alone” that is to say not by our material and social and economic circumstances, important as they are, but “by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” The first temptation speaks directly to our technocratic culture which assumes our manipulation of nature, as if we can completely change the world to suit our ends. The idolatry of technology and progress ignores the ambiguities, limitations, and dangers of our human engagement with the world, not to mention its disastrous results. It is the Faustian bargain with the devil; we gain the world but at the expense of the world and ourselves as signalled in the second temptation. Turning stones into bread is really part and parcel of the domination of nature for our sakes which leads in turn to the exploitation of others. It means the denial of the God of nature and the denial of the God of our humanity in the vanity of human power.
The lust for power, prestige, and attention signalled in the second temptation is about the exploitation of others. Nabokov’s famous novel, Lolita, is not simply about sexual abuse or, to put another way, sexual abuse is really about the usurpation of another’s life. This is the heart of the matter with respect to all forms of abuse and violence. The counter is the reminder that we have no power over anything apart from God. As Jesus says to Pilate, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.” In a way, it is enough to say, “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,” for that recalls explicitly the historical and experiential vanity of our thoughts and actions. We presume to have a power over others that negates our common humanity as the children of God, negates the created order, and negates God himself.
There is a progression from the manipulation of nature in the first temptation to the exploitation of others in the second temptation and to the denial or rejection of God in the third temptation. It is not just about putting God to the test, more fundamentally, we put ourselves in the place of God. Such is idolatry versus true worship. Idolatry in its deepest meaning is the worship of ourselves as if we were God. God is, by definition, truth, and the honouring of the truth of God is the only and great principle that belongs to our lives in Christ. The answer to the first and second temptation is, at least partly, a negative statement. “You shall not live by bread alone … you shall not tempt the Lord thy God.” But the answer to the third brings out the underlying positive principle. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” One word, and one word only, has been added in Matthew’s account to this commonplace from the Jewish Torah, the word only. “And him only shalt thou serve.”
As Paul suggests we have to work with the grace of God. It is a profound statement about the relation between God and man. Paul signals the powerful idea of our participation in the divine life, “as workers together with God.” That means the acknowledgment of the grace of God in whatever circumstance and situation, even afflictions and distresses, we find ourselves. It requires something from us, namely our active working together with the grace of God “in much patience … by knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness” and yet, only through the qualities of grace at work in us, “by the Holy Spirit, by love unfeigned, by the word of truth, by the power of God.” Lent seeks to make us aware of the nature of our engagement with the grace of God.
In this sense, Lent both shows us the redemption of our humanity in Christ and the sanctification of our humanity by our working with that grace in our lives. We are not simply victims, determined and defined; the temptations speak to the activity of our souls in relation to the goodness of God. We can only work with God’s grace which overcomes all of the temptations that belong to the disorders of our lives. Anything less is utterly in vain.
Receive not the grace of God in vain
Fr. David Curry
Lent I, 2020