The temptation of Jesus is all about Jesus
in his humanity. And we don’t so often think about Jesus in his humanity, so we
don’t tend to consider this a very important story. I mean, of course Jesus
wasn’t tempted by Satan! He was perfect, obviously. When we think about Jesus, we
tend to default to his divinity; the human side of Jesus doesn’t tend to
interest us, I suppose because we are all human. We know what that looks like.
Jesus as fully God is easy. It allows us to
focus on him as this perfect creation. He was without sin, we say. He died to
save us. He lived exactly the life he was supposed to. This is easy. But the
temptation of Christ reminds us of another very important reality: Jesus was
also human. Fully divine. Fully human. And the question of which would win the
day had not yet been answered when Satan takes him up on the tower.
This story only makes sense if we
put ourselves into the shoes of Jesus, the one being tempted. This story really
only makes sense if there’s some chance that Satan will be successful.
Something deeper is going on here than a mere object lesson in how awesome
Jesus is. A real question is put to Jesus: Can you do what every other human
has failed to do? Can you refrain from reaching out and taking the fruit of the
tree?
This story has happened before. You
have to go back to the beginning. In the Garden of Eden, there was that tree of
the knowledge of good and evil that God planted. It was the one tree from which
Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat, so naturally it was the one tree that the
serpent used in order to tempt them. He told them that if they ate from it,
they would become like God. This is a huge temptation: Just eat this little
fruit and you will know everything. You would eat it. You do eat it. In a
million ways, we all eat that stinking fruit. In that moment, which has been
lived out again and again throughout history, humanity’s weakness triumphed
over God’s desires for us.
It’s the same story all the time.
Satan assumes that Jesus will fall into the
same trap. Every one of us does, after all. The boy-king is unlikely to be any
different.
So, let’s return to it. Imagine you are Jesus.
This shouldn’t be a hard thing to do, because most of us are experts at
imagining what it would be like to be God; we’ll never admit it, of course, but
we LOVE the idea of playing God. So, imagine you are Jesus and you are tempted by
the devil to do these things—to turn stone to bread, to leap from the tower and
have the angels catch you, to have the whole world at your beckoning.
But it’s not enough to only be God, because
you are also human. If you were God-alone, then it wouldn’t be much of a
temptation. But since you are both human and divine, there is this little voice
that says, “I wonder if I can do
that.” Perhaps I should test it out…
Jesus in his humanity is actually tempted by Satan. Satan’s old trick—trying to make us
be like God—has worked every other time. You want to be like God? Just eat the
fruit! Just leap. Satan, having worked this trick on the first Adam, doesn’t yet
know that this second Adam is capable of something entirely unexpected.
This Jesus is capable of saying, “No!”
because he recognizes that true power is turning the other cheek. True power is
often refusing to use the power you have—to have the ability to turn the stones
to bread and refusing to do until it is actually needed. True power is not
defined by its use but by its ultimate capacity for goodness.
This is so counter-intuitive, because when
we play God in our heads, we are always using that power for something. We are
raising the dead. We are defeating our enemies. We are hiding our misdeeds.
Nobody plays God and then says, “OK, now that I have this power, I’m not going
to use it!”
But Jesus does!
It’s a strange way of interacting with the
world. We would much prefer that God always
acts. That way, when we prayed, we could be assured that God was going to
do whatever we asked, being the loving God that God is. And when we asked for
protection, we would be assured that God would protect us and everybody we
cared about. This is the God who acts, and we like this God, because this God is on our side in a way we can
recognize.
This is the world of Jesus leaping from the
roof to showcase his power. It is a world based not on faith but results. Now,
don’t get me wrong, this is a much
better world, but it is better because it is a world without sin. The fatal
flaw with this plan is that our world is still broken by our own doing, and the
proof is in the temptation that we all fail to overcome: Every one of us would
have turned stones to bread. Every one of us would have jumped and been carried
by angels. This is because we want to be God without understanding that to be
God is to have responsibility for the whole picture, and, more than that, to be
God is to walk the lonely road to the cross. The only way to undo taking that
fruit from the tree in the Garden of Eden is to do as Jesus does—to resist
taking the crown and instead taking up the cross.
The way of the cross is the path to
righteousness, because this world continues to groan in pain. And it’s groaning.
Every day it groans—in so many ways that the internet had to be created to
showcase all of it. The world is in pain, and it isn’t going to be fixed by
turning stones to bread. The little miracles matter, but they aren’t the
thing—the one thing—that we need most of all. All of us would give the world to
save ourselves, but Jesus does the unthinkable and gives himself to save the
world. The temptation is our first look at what this might mean. It is a
backward kind of power—one we will perpetually under-value.
Yet, at the end of the day, it’s the only
power that can save us.
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