Day: February 18, 2024

“He learned obedience through what he suffered”

The temptations of Christ in the wilderness on the First Sunday in Lent are a kind of commentary on Creation and the Fall and on the Ten Commandments and the Exodus. ?hey speak to the truth of our humanity as “co-workers with God” and the untruth of our humanity in its negation of God. They illuminate the struggle for us to take a hold of the grace given in Christ and as such they illustrate what Paul says in 2 Corinthians about our life in Christ. “We go up to Jerusalem” with Jesus as he told us last Sunday. We go up “as workers together”, having “receiv[ed] not the grace of God in vain.”

He uses three little words to describe the pilgrimage of our lives: two prepositions and a relative pronoun or conjunction: in, by, and as. They reveal the human condition. We struggle to work with God’s truth and mercy in the face of the disorders of our humanity, in the forms of suffering the various distresses of the world. We endeavour to do so by way of the qualities of God at work in us, the spiritual disciplines that allow us to face such things – “by pureness, by knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness,” etc. And we do as those who unite the seemingly contrary aspects and paradoxes that belong to our finite lives, ultimately “as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” He is talking about how we live in the wilderness of the world while being one in Christ; “as dying, and, behold, we live.”

The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept the givenness of the created order and the transcendence of God; in short what God wants us to do and to be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures – it belongs to the truth and good of our being. The temptations are our temptations. They recall us to the meaning of the Fall in Genesis. In this sense they follow logically upon the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday; in short, to Creation and the Fall, and to the Exodus journey of learning through suffering.

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