03/04/01 Temptation 01/06

"Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit through the wilderness, being tempted there by the devil for forty days."

Luke 4:1-2.

Temptation does not seem to be as important as once it was in the dynamics of the Christian spiritual life. Our emphasis on the unconditional and virtually inescapable grace of God makes our spiritual life relatively easy. We accentuate the positive, look forward to new experiences of the goodness of God and press on forgetting what is past. This is, of course, a true and healthy attitude; God is overwhelmingly gracious and He loves us unconditionally. So what shall we make of the temptation of our Lord and the ancient practice of identifying with him in his struggle during the forty days before Easter? What wisdom may we, who want to grow and mature spiritually, find here?

Before we try to understand the precise nature of the three temptations to which Jesus was subjected we might consider some general truths about temptation. Temptation is always an attempt to break our relationship with God. A power emerges from deep within us and joins with external circumstances in an effort to damage our relationship with God. The Bible has many examples of this temptation. Consider Job, a rich and righteous man who loses all his wealth, all his children, and is stricken with disease, whose wife tells him to "…curse God and die…" and to whom he replies, "Though God slay me yet will I trust him (Job 2:9-10)." God allows Satan to test Job to prove that Job’s love of God is pure and not motivated by the gifts God has showered on him. Consider Abraham whom God called to sacrifice his only son to prove his loyalty. God tested Abraham to see whether Abraham’s loyalty was to God alone and not to the project of his posterity and prosperity. In both cases the test takes the form of cruel deprivation of this world’s comforts - goods, children, health – and throws the victim defenseless on God alone. The series of afflictions is the test, the impulse to abandon faith in God as a result of the test is the temptation. So temptation is always the lure of unbelief, of doubt and lack of trust. Temptation therefore is the challenge to faith that comes with the experience of a test or trial.

For this reason our OT lesson features the first confession of faith in our history, the creed of ancient Israel. Our father was a wandering Aramean and God led him to Egypt, and then out of Egyptian bondage. Wherever he wandered God was with him and guided him. Our faith is therefore confidence in God, confidence that he will not leave us nor forsake us. The test is always a test of this confidence and the temptation is to despair of God and to turn to our own devices.

We have surely all experienced the difficult times that test our confidence in God – illness, loss of money, loss of job, loss of confidence in oneself, broken relationships, intractable children, addiction and betrayal. These are the forms the test takes and they have an impact on our faith in God, easily driving us to doubt his goodness, love and very existence, driving us, that is, to temptation. I think it is true to say that temptation in this sense is unavoidable; we cannot avoid dire things happening to us. So this is the first form of temptation, arising from our circumstances.

There is another and more mundane form of test and temptation that arises from ourselves. Simply let your mind wander and you will be appalled at the cruel and outrageous images and desires that swim up from the unconscious depths to the level of consciousness. In my youth they were called impure thoughts; I haven’t heard that term for a long time although I refuse to believe that the reality to which it refers has disappeared. The standard spiritual strategy for such occasions is to refuse to give hospitality to such thoughts. It is no sin that temptations – and here the distinction between test and temptation is not clearly made- should arise from the depths of our mind, as long as we do not consciously entertain them and plan how to carry them out. Temptation in this sense is a representation of our lower nature, however we construe that nature, and it is essential to spiritual health and growth that we resist these temptations. We can’t do anything about those idle thoughts but we need not accept them and act on them.

This self-awareness has been part of Western ethical discipline for a long time. The ancient Greeks said that the flesh was the source of these irrational images and that the rational mind had to keep the irrational flesh under control if there was to be any virtue. Traditionally it was important not to give in to what one feels; latterly we are urged to "get in touch with our feelings," an idea traditional moralists would find dangerous, because our feelings are irrational and disorderly, and the moral life is rational and therefore orderly.

Temptation in the inclusive sense of test and the threat to our faith part of being human, and Jesus the Son of God experienced it too. In the letter to the Hebrews we read "…because he himself has been through temptation he is able to help those who are tempted (2:18)", and "for it is not as if we had a high priest who is incapable of feeling our weakness with us; but we have one who has been tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin" (4:15). His temptation in the wilderness was part of his identification with humanity in all its facets, noble and ignoble, vulnerable and strong. In temptation he entered into the most vulnerable aspect of our human being, and healed it by virtue of his resistance to the devil. We all, from Adam to us, failed to resist and fell into sin. Jesus resisted, triumphed, and emerged pure and holy, thereby giving each human being the promise of spiritual support in times of trial

Let us look now at the nature of Jesus’ temptations as recorded in the gospel. They are all designed to shake his faith in God. They all begin with the snide rhetorical proposition, "If you are the Son of God, then turn these stones into bread" intimating that he is not the Son of God. Jesus has just come up out of the waters of baptism when he heard the divine voice proclaim him Son of God and now immediately he must endure 40 days of doubt about whether he had heard aright. "If you did hear aright and are indeed the Son of God then prove it by turning stones into bread, casting yourself down from the temple and taking worldly power for yourself," says the voice. Each of the tests is a temptation because each implies that his relationship with God as Son cannot be trusted and has itself to be tested and proved. "Test your Sonship," says the Satanic voice, " by working a miracle; test it by putting yourself at mortal risk."

These two temptations assume that he is already doubtful about his relationship with God and needs to prove to himself that he is indeed Son. He is invited to test God. It’s like saying to someone you love, "Prove that you love me by doing this or that remarkable thing for me." We all know that at such a point the relationship is already dead. So also in the case of our relationship with God, we have already broken it if we put him to the test and say things like, "Show me you are God by healing my loved one, giving me this deal, finding me an apartment, turning this stone into bread and catching me when I fall of this high ledge!" Our faith in God cannot be put to the test any more than we can test the love of our beloved; it simply is or it is not.

The third temptation, to accept political power over the whole world, is the most vulgar and adolescent of all. It shows that the devil is desperate, or not as subtle as reputed. We all know how fleeting such worldly power is and how enduring the power of the divine love is by comparison. So it is not necessary to say anything more about that adolescent fantasy of ruling the world. The devil must have been desperate to come up with such nonsense.

The greatest comfort of today’s lesson is the assurance that Jesus went through the same temptation as we do, and did not succumb. This means that as we identify with him in his temptation so he identifies with us when our faith in God is tested by bad times. In Jesus God entered our darkest temptations and conquered them. He was tempted as we are, but, unlike us, never yielded, never committed sin. He won where we lost and for that reason Jesus is able to support us at times like that, and bring us to victory.

So in conclusion, we identify with Jesus in his temptation when we pledge ourselves to a holy Lent of self-denial and special discipline. When we do that he identifies with us and gives us the power of his own victory over temptation. This power protects us from sin and so enables us to grow spiritually. That’s what Lent is for, to grow spiritually by experiencing the power of Christ’s union with us in our temptation.

Amen.

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