“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”
Lent begins, we might say, with the temptations of Christ as set before us in today’s Gospel. It ends on Good Friday with the crucifixion of Christ, with his being pierced on the cross. Between the Greek verbs for being tempted, πειραω, and for being pierced, πειρω, there is, we might say, merely an ‘alpha’ of difference. The words are closely similar; each alludes in some sense to the other. They belong to the radical nature of the Incarnation in terms of the pageant of human redemption. God’s engagement with our humanity includes the whole range of the human condition and thus its brokenness.
The Litany is the earliest part of the English liturgy translated largely from Latin litanies into English by Cranmer in 1544. It marks the beginning of what would culminate in The Book of Common Prayer. In the Litany, we pray to be delivered from various forms of sin and evil, from disorders both natural and human that belong to the fallen world and to ourselves, but we pray for deliverance only by the grace of God in Christ. The obsecrations or sacred entreaties in the Litany begin as follows: “By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation, Good Lord, deliver us.”
The Litany is a way of praying the Scriptures as credally understood. In these petitions there is the unpacking of the essential doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. The “Incarnation” is the collective term and principle of all that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ as the Word made flesh, such as his “holy Nativity” which is the Christmas theme, followed by his “Baptism,” an Epiphany theme, but then immediately associated with his “Fasting, and Temptation,” the themes of early Lent. They, in turn, give way to his “Agony and bloody Sweat” recalling Gethsemane, his “Cross and Passion,” his “precious Death and Burial,” the themes of Holy Week. Out of those moments comes his “glorious Resurrection and Ascension,” his “sending of the Holy Spirit,” his “heavenly Intercession,” and his “Coming again in glory.” It is essentially a way of praying the Creed and highlights the inescapable interrelation of these themes.
“By thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation.” It is a powerful triplet of complementary and interrelated ideas. Christ is baptized for us even as his baptism is also an Epiphany of the Trinity and thus baptism incorporates us into the life of God through his being with us, even to the point of his being “made sin for us.” But what about his fasting and temptation? How is that an essential aspect of the Incarnation? Because it belongs to the larger pageant of redemption which is about God entering into our broken world and our broken lives to bring us back to himself. That turning back is repentance expressed and embodied in the activities and disciplines that belong to our being, as the Epistle puts it, “co-workers” with God in Christ.
Matthew and Luke provide us with the story of the threefold temptations of Christ; Mark simply notes that he was “in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan.” All three emphasize the role of the Holy Spirit who “drove him into the wilderness” or “led him up into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” The story looks back to the story of the Fall and thus to the nature of our separation from God. The serpent in Genesis is the devil, Satan, variously interpreted as the accuser, the deceiver, the one who puts God to the test, hence, the temptor. But in what way? For what end? Simply put, to be God.
Matthew and Luke present us with three temptations. They are really our temptations. They speak profoundly to the contradictions that belong to our fallen selves. Along with echoing Genesis, they look back to the Exodus, to the times in the wilderness journey when the people of Israel tempted or put God to the test at Massah and Meribah, words that mean or refer to testing and contention. They are explicitly recalled in the Venite at Morning Prayer, Psalm 95. 8-10.
Today, O that ye would hear his voice:/ ‘Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, and as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness;
When your fathers tempted me,/ proved me, and saw my works.
Forty years long was I grieved with that generation, and said, / “It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways”
Both Matthew and Luke have in mind passages from Exodus and Numbers and particularly Deuteronomy. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah” (6.16.). In Matthew’s account this is the second temptation; in Luke’s account it is the third. This difference in the order or sequence suggests, perhaps, a difference of emphasis. Either the temptations end with a positive injunction by Christ, again quoting Deuteronomy, but adding one word, only, as in “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve,” or they end with a negative injunction, “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,” which gets to the heart of all temptation.
In either case, the text captures the essence of the problem of temptation. It is about putting God to the test, making God accountable to us, as if we were God. This is the great lie and the great contradiction that underlies all of the disorders of our hearts and minds.
The first temptation speaks especially to our technocratic world. To turn stones into bread is not about working with the order of creation but undermining it by denying the integrity of things in themselves, by transforming the things of nature through negating their nature; in short, presuming to be God ourselves, to be ourselves the Creator and as such forgetting that we are ourselves creatures. Jesus’s response to our technocratic idolatry recalls us to the truth of our humanity. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Our idolatry of the technological is not simply about enhancing our world and human capacities, the positives of techné or skill, but about replacing and destroying them, the negative side of technology. A form of hubris or pride, it ignores and negates who we truly are in our God-created humanity. It is the counter to the ideology of progress in its preoccupation with material ends and interests at the expense of things intellectual and spiritual. But it, too, is about putting God to the test; in short putting ourselves in the place of God.
Lent as a time of spiritual discipline is not a self-improvement project any more than it is about revelling in a kind of self-abasement, itself a species of pride. For both are always and only about ourselves and blind us to everything and everyone else. They are really all about a kind of self-obsession which is a failure to attend to the truth of ourselves as found in God. Lent, after all, is not about giving up things so much as it is about giving up our attachment to things. That equally means our attachment or preoccupation with ourselves which effectively turns us into things. This, too, returns us to the problem of the first temptation. The temptation to a kind of alchemy of nature leads to a kind of ‘transhumanism’ of ourselves that is really ‘anti-human’, a denial not only of the goodness of God and his creation but of the goodness of our own created being.
We are being recalled and returned to God by the motions of his love illuminating our confusions and contradictions, purging our loves in disarray, and uniting us to God in his truth and wonder. This is Matthew’s point in making the last temptation about self-worship, the worship of ourselves. Our self-seeking is really about a kind of lust for power and glory, about attention to ourselves in the culture of narcissism. In Genesis, the questions of God awaken us to self-consciousness about our separation from God so as to recall us to him. So here, Christ, himself the very Word and Son of God, recalls us to the primacy of worship, to the honouring of the God in whom we find the real truth and dignity of our humanity. He is the incarnate Word, the Word of God embodied in our nature, soul and body, flesh and spirit, to recall us to the truth of ourselves in him.
There is all the difference between wrestling against God and wrestling with God. The first is about putting God to the test, putting ourselves in the place of God. The second is about the journey of our lives to God and with God. Here in the story of the Temptations of Christ we have the essence of our baptisms in the renunciation of “the world, the flesh and the devil,” the renunciation of the false gods of our devising so as to affirm with joy our redemption in Christ. But it means our journeying with him in his journeying with us.
“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2023