In nomine etc..
The story of the temptations of Jesus presents warnings and reminders, about what religion is, and what it isn’t, that we need to keep in mind throughout Lent and beyond. The temptations of Jesus are archetypal, patterns of common spiritual tendencies that we need to recognize and avoid.
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the desert for forty days 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, a very high altitude with an impressive view in a very short time period, and the parapet of the temple. So the devil is limited to tempting and scene-changing. The Spirit is allowing these behaviors, and no more. From this we conclude that there is no balance of forces between the Spirit and the devil, that the Spirit can overpower diabolical deceptions of any kind, and the role of our religion is to remind us of this, especially during Lent.
“Command this stone 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 whom we live and move and have our being.” 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.
“The devil...showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and he said to him, ‘I shall give you all this power and their glory, for it has been handed over to me.’” I said a moment ago that the devil in this story is a tempter and a scene-changer. What he says in this 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 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 any kind in the name of religion.
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down” from the parapet of the Temple. It is hard to understand this demand as a temptation. The first temptation would of course be attractive to a hungry man. But this 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.
“When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.” Having passed through these temptations, the final steps in his preparation for ministry, the final steps of his initiation, which began with his baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus is free to participate in the divine life. The Spirit replaces the devil, and leads Jesus out of the wilderness, and on to his ministry in Galilee and beyond.
In Nomine, etc..
