Day: March 5, 2023

“It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs”

There is all the difference in the world between wrestling with God and wrestling against God. And, perhaps, nowhere is that better illustrated than in this outstanding and yet disturbing Gospel story. Wrestling against God, we might say, belongs to the Temptations of Christ presented to us last Sunday. Wrestling against God is really about putting God to the test either by presuming to manipulate the natural world at the expense of its truth and integrity, turning stones into bread, as it were, the technological idolatry of our times that contributes to a kind of denaturing and a dehumanizing of ourselves, or seeking to be ourselves the ultimate authority and power of all reality, itself a repeat of the Fall, and a denial of our creatureliness and of God as creator, and, finally, as in Matthew’s account, the worship of ourselves which is really the worship of Satan, the worship of what is simply the negation and denial of God himself, the worship of what opposes God in its self-delusion. Wrestling against God is profoundly anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-God.

The Temptations of Christ are all a reworking of the great exodus themes of the trials of Israel in the wilderness. Exodus is the Greek term for going forth and is the Greek name for the Second Book of Moses, known in the Hebrew as Shemot, or Names. Numbers is the fourth Book of Moses but its Hebrew name means simply “In the wilderness”. The whole point of the exodus as recounted in the Torah and re-presented in Christ’s being “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness. to be tempted by the devil” is about learning through suffering; in particular, our learning through the sufferings of Christ for us and with us. He suffers our temptations to teach us the overcoming of temptation in him and not simply in us. It is an illumination at the same time as it reveals what needs to be purged in us, namely our false attachment to the things of ourselves and the world that negates their truth and being. It is only through our going with Christ into the wilderness that we learn the radical truth of ourselves as found in him.

Exodus complements The Odyssey of Homer which is about the homecoming of the Greek heroes from Troy. That homecoming is about discovering the order of the cosmos, the intellectual and spiritual structure of reality, in which we find our place. For the Greeks, our place in the cosmos is found in the polis, the community or city-state, so to speak. For the Hebrews, it is not so much about a place but about creation as grounded by definition in the will of God. The exodus journey is about an education that brings us to the Law, concretely and concisely expressed in the Ten Commandments. The Temptations of Christ recall us to the Law in countering the various forms of idolatry which are always about confusing the created with the Creator. In the Temptations we see the radical meaning of that confusion. It is Satan, the devil, the accuser and the tempter, who is defined by opposition and denial of the very principle of his own being and nature. He exists in contradiction to what is prior to himself.

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