“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” (Matthew 4:1).
In nomine etc..
I’ll keep my remarks very short, since our liturgies for the first Sunday in Lent have plenty to say to us on their own. But the story of the temptation of Jesus does present warnings and reminders, about what religion is, and what it isn’t, that we can keep in mind throughout Lent and beyond.
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Led by the Spirit? What is going on here? What have the Spirit and the devil to do with each other? There’s a relationship here that we need to look at.
The Spirit is clearly in charge, and the devil in this story is doing as he is told. The devil, in other words, is subordinate, and has a rather limited collection of possibilities open to him. The first possibility is his role as tempter. That is all. And he apparently has powers to change the environment, or at least the appearance of the environment, when he presents Jesus with different locations: the desert, the pinnacle of the temple, and lastly, a very high mountain with an impressive view. So the devil is limited to tempting and scene-changing. The Spirit is allowing these behaviors, and no more. From this we may conclude that there is no balance of forces between the Spirit and the devil, that the Spirit outweighs temptations of any kind, and the role of our religion is to remind us of this, especially during Lent.
“Command these stones to become bread.” Jesus ignores this demand, he deflects it actually, by saying something about the place of bread in the greater scheme of things. Mere survival is not the goal of life; the true bread is the word of God, and true life is life with God who sustains us with his presence. In John’s Gospel Jesus tells us that he is the “living bread that came down from heaven.” True religion is not magic that turns stones into bread, but provides us with living bread, which is life with God.
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down” from the roof of the Temple. It is hard to understand this demand as a temptation. The first temptation would of course be attractive to a very hungry man. But the second temptation, so called, is really an effort to tempt God and the angels, to prod them to reveal themselves and their power, hardly likely to succeed with them, it seems to me. So it can be understood as an effort to inflate Jesus’s ego, to get him to imagine that in his humanity he has godlike angelic powers that he can rely on, that put him above the level of ordinary humans, that exempt him from the limitations of human nature. How better to prove Jesus’s claims, the devil thinks. The temptation to make religion into a display of divine power is ever-present; this is a constant temptation to religious people, to use religion to give themselves power over others. But true religion is about loving participation in the life of God, and it is love of our neighbors, not power over them, that makes this possible.
“The devil...showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you.’” Well, I said a few minutes ago that the devil in this story is a tempter and a scene-changer. What he says in this third temptation is not true, so we can add liar to his titles. The world does not belong to the devil. The devil’s claim to worldly power is ‘fake news,’ to use the current phrase. But in us the temptation to worldly power is always present. The thirst for power of many religious people is obvious in our world, which makes clear to me, at least, that the real object of their worship is power itself, and not God. But Jesus says, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” I hear this as an unmistakable command, to avoid power-seeking of the kind we see so much of today.
“Then the devil left him, and...angels came and waited on him.” Free of these temptations, Jesus is free to participate in the divine life, which is what the angels represent. The Spirit, in the form of angels, replaces the devil, and leads Jesus out of the wilderness, and on to his ministry in Galilee and beyond.
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
In nomine etc.. Amen. (4-5.III.17 Adv.)
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