Temptations in the Wilderness
Jesus is on the brink of beginning his public ministry of preaching, teaching, healing, and stirring things up when the Spirit of God leads him out into the wilderness, to be tested. We are not told why, but presumably this time of trial served to prepare him for all he would face, particularly the temptation to avoid the final walk to Jerusalem and the cross.
His forty days in the desert follow directly upon his baptism, when the heavens opened, God’s Spirit descended like a dove and alighted on him, and a voice from the heavens proclaimed, “This is my Son, the Beloved.”
The next voice he hears is the voice of the devil echoing these very words. The first two temptations begin with the provocation, “If you are the Son of God,”
If you are the Son of God, then save yourself;
If you are the son of God, surely, he will save you from physical harm.
Jesus counters all three temptations with words borrowed from Moses. More specifically, he quotes verses from Moses’ farewell speech to the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. Moses himself would not enter this land of milk and honey, and in the last book of the Torah—the Book of Deuteronomy—concludes the story of the Exodus with his passionate call for Israel to remember to love and obey God’s law.
Jesus responds to his first temptation with words with Moses’s exhortation not to forget God’s faithfulness. Moses reminds his people that God led them for 40 years in the wilderness, “in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna … in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut 8:2-3).
In quoting this last line, Jesus follows Moses’ exhortation to remember the Israelites’ salvation history, and he places his trial in the context this story. Baptism carries connotations of an Exodus, and the forty days recall the forty years.
Moses specifies that God’s intent in leading them was to break their sense of self-sufficiency. The aim of Jesus’ fasting is not to demonstrate piety or strength of character, but to come to a deeper understanding of his utter dependence on the Father. Soon, early in his ministry, he will teach his disciples to pray to God for their “daily bread” (Mt 6:11). In praying the Lord’s Prayer, we come to surrender illusions of self-sufficiency, we come to surrender to God’s will, and plead to be spared being led into a time of trial.
In the first trial, the devil doesn’t actually offer him anything, he just encourages some thoughts that have probably crossed Jesus’ mind: “use your power to make things easier for yourself. You’ve held out so long, you really need this. It’s just a loaf of bread—what could be so wrong with that?” Familiar voices.
This first line of attack is a basic human need and serves as a reminder of Jesus’ full humanity. It is important that unless Jesus faced a real struggle, this would not be a story of temptation.
Soon temptations are compounded. Even as he’s starving, he is led to Jerusalem where the devil quotes from Psalm 91 to suggest that if Jesus jumping from the pinnacle of the temple, will demonstrate his confidence in God’s promises: God won’t let anything bad happen to you! Angels will catch you! It’ll be fine! The temptation is to equate being loved by God with always being safe.
The Psalms actually seem to make this equation a lot – if I am righteous and favored by God, then things will go my way and my enemies will be defeated. The Psalms are in fact more complicated than that; that’s a sermon for another day. The point here is that the devil misleads by taking lines of the Bible out of context. The misuse of Scripture can cause some of the most profound harm that we can do.
In actuality, Scriptures overwhelmingly testify that living as God’s people, with love, justice, and mercy, is hard, and sometimes dangerous, and most certainly does not guarantee prosperity or safety. In the second trial, Jesus responds “No. I won’t test God – I won’t make God’s goodness conditional on my personal safety and wellbeing.” God is good whether we prosper or suffer. Living by faith does not require miracles but rather trust that the One who called the people out of Egypt will see them through to the end of the journey.
The final temptation is the promise of power over all the kingdoms of the world if only Jesus shift allegiances. But Jesus resists earthly power with another quotation from Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Deut. 6:13). Soon Jesus would proclaim the coming of the kingdom of heaven to all those who follow him in the way of righteousness, but this is a difficult trek. The temptation to unite all the world under a single peaceable kingdom in an instant and to forgo betrayal and death must have been real.
Last fall, an exciting conversation arose about the meaning of evil and Satan in our LCF group—a group for newcomers and those who would like to deepen their faith and understanding of God and the Church. We were reflecting on our Baptismal liturgy, specifically the renunciations. We “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” and also “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”
Our catechism doesn’t give a definition of the devil. The adversary, or accuser, which is what Satan means in Hebrew, is one who challenges a person’s faithful relationship with God. Some sided with Augustine’s view that evil is only the absence of good. In this case, evil and the devil don’t have being in themselves. The argument is that we are quite capable of all sorts and degrees of evil behavior without any intervention or encouragement from supernatural beings. Others ventured that there seems to be an intelligent being who is the source of evil.
Today’s lesson presents us with the idea of evil personified, but overall the gospels do not present the devil as a “person” or “creature” in a simple or straightforward sense. In John’s gospel, the devil never appears as a fully realized character; in the other gospels he is at times singular and at other times “horribly legion.” At times, the devil appears as parasitic speaking through Jesus’ disciples. To complicate things further, our cultural conceptions of a devil are informed more by the poetry of Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost than the Bible. Siding with St. Augustine in rejecting the existence of a supernatural devil does not detract from the temptation Jesus faced. Whether the voice he heard was the inner dialogue of all humans or a devil, he faced genuine trials and resisted.
These 40 days in the wilderness were only the beginning of temptations, and serve as something of a preview for his Passion. When he is arrested, he refuses to be rescued either by violence or by angelic intervention (26:52–54). At the crucifixion, passersby and religious leaders taunt him: you’re the Son of God? Prove it. Come down from the cross. Doesn’t God even care enough to rescue you? (27:38–44). But Jesus trusts God to see him through to the end of the journey, and when he dies, the centurion proclaims, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (27:54).
Our greatest temptation is to forget who we are and whose we are. Continually we forget or forsake our identity as baptized Christians. This is why Lent is so important. It is a time when we recognize our illusions of self-sufficiency and seek God’s forgiveness and grace as we are reminded that through Christ we too are children of God.