This story of Jesus’ fasting and temptations begins with the action of the Holy Spirit. The same spirit that, at his baptism, descended upon him in the shape of a dove, now drives him out into the wilderness to be tested. And this is a classic pattern in the tales of spiritual heroes. After the bestowal of a divine gift, the revelation of a new self-understanding and a new holy purpose, the saint must undergo tests and trials. These two actions of the spirit are closely linked. The enlightenment experience is not complete until it has been refined in the crucible of suffering and temptation.
In the case of Jesus, the agent who carries out the tempting is identified as diabolos. This character is not clearly and consistently defined in the New Testament. There is good reason for that, if you think about it. As monotheists, the Jews and their Christian descendents would have been reluctant to suggest that there is an evil power in the world who exists independently of God. At the same time, their experience of guilt and the manifest presence of injustice and evil in the world demanded to be accounted for. And so a personified notion arose, a malevolent angel that opposes God’s will and seeks to injure God’s creatures. The ambiguity of this character is seen in the present story, for the devil in Matthew is definitely trying to mislead, corrupt, and destroy Jesus. But in the process, he is carrying out the Spirit’s work of purification.
Maybe it helps us make sense of this paradox to think in terms of delusion. The devil is the archetype of the rational creature who falls prey to the delusion that he does not need God. He imagines that he is a new kind of being, free from the limitations and obligations of having a place in a greater whole. Of course he is actually completely un-free because, like a child determined to show his parents that they do not control him, all he can do is reflexively oppose whatever God wills. And he is even mistaken about that, because God’s sovereign wisdom is able to use even the actions that he intends for evil in the service of the divine drama of salvation.
You can see something like this in the story of the fall in Genesis, where the serpent deceives the first humans into taking for themselves what belongs to God. The serpent’s logic is childish but effective—why would God have forbidden you to eat this fruit, out of all the fruit in the garden, unless God was trying to keep something really nice all to himself. There is treachery in the serpent’s guile that takes advantage of the man’s and the woman’s naiveté, their envy, impatience and pride. And so what seems delightful and liberating comes with an unexpected cost. We wanted to taste Godlike knowledge, and did, but ended up swallowing nakedness and death along with it.
And yet for all its pathos this story is leavened with the sense that things had to happen this way. For it is the introduction of tragedy into human existence that creates the tension out of which all the subsequent drama arises. We cannot imagine how we could be really human without having our eyes open, even if the world we see sometimes seems meaningless and cold. Would we really want to forgo the power of our discriminating intellect, even if we do not have the wisdom and moral strength to handle it in a healthy way? There is a tradition of Christian interpretation of this story that says “O felix culpa”—“Oh happy fault!” because it is the germ of this premature and incomplete realization of our Godlikeness that flowers into perfection in Christ.
So, returning to the gospel, one of the first things that the devil does is to reveal to us, the readers, that the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus brought with it the gift of power. You and I would not be tempted to turn stones into bread, no matter how hungry we were, because we know we cannot. Most of us would not be tempted to throw ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple, either. Jesus in these encounters is in a position similar to that of the woman in Genesis, because the devil appeals to his sense of entitlement—“if you are the Son of God”—and reveals to him that Godlike power is there for the taking. We may not think that we have that kind of power at our disposal (although there are numerous passages in the New Testament that suggest that we might be mistaken about that) but what Jesus shows us in today’s Gospel is that having or lacking power is not our first concern. What really matters is how we relate to God.
The assumption of the devil is that God is an instrument to be used for our purposes. If we are hungry, we should use God to obtain bread. If we are reckless and self-destructive, we should prevail on God to save us. I probably shouldn’t be using contemporary politics to illustrate diabolical logic, but I caouldn’t help but be reminded of the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy who recently said that there is no need to worry about rising global temperatures because the 8th chapter of Genesis states that God promised Noah that he wouldn’t flood the earth ever again. Never mind that this is a highly questionable application of scripture. What’s really troubling is the way it uses God as a convenient excuse to shirk human responsibility.
But Jesus puts forward the opposite view—God is not our pawn, to be used in the service of our agendas. Instead, our real satisfaction, our real safety, our real nobility and power stem from our willingness to be at God’s disposal, to be instruments for God’s purposes. That is the aim of this season of spiritual renewal that the Church calls “Lent.” When we fast, and abstain from creature comforts that are not really necessary to sustain life, we are opening up a little space for God. When we break the cycle of automatically satisfying our little desires, there is a space in which we can ask “what is my big desire?” Or, to pose the same question in another way, “What might God want for my life?”
Or when we practice penitence, examining our thoughts and actions and being really honest with ourselves about our obsessions and errors of judgment, we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives. The nagging anxieties about money and prestige, the little lies and carefully tended resentments, the self-pity and excuses and things we always manage to put off for another day—it is painful to look at these things squarely and call them by their true names. But the same paradox that we see in the story of the Fall and in the temptations of Jesus is also true of us. Those same areas where we meet the tragedy of our lives, and I don’t mean misfortunes that are beyond our control, but rather the countless ways we sabotage ourselves and fall short of becoming the persons God created us to be; these exact places are where we have the potential to break open to the healing of the Spirit.
We have to resist the temptation of mocking up a God to keep our attention somewhere else, who will tell us what we want to hear, and make us stronger in the ways we already imagine we are strong. But if we can do that, a tension is created in us between the persons we know ourselves to be and the new persons that we are becoming in the love and grace of God that are ours through Christ. And that tension, though it sometimes feels like suffering, is a hope more precious than all the world’s kingdoms and their splendor.
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