Year: 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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“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.

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