The Temptations of Christ

The account of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness is generally understood to be a revelation of His divinity as He eschews the satanic blandishments to forsake the path of perfect righteousness to which He was born.  It is, however, also, a manifestation of His humanity as He confronts the struggle of right and wrong, which is the common experience of all people.

The sequence of temptations encapsulates the gamut of moral choices that humans have to make as the lures of the world call them from the vocation they have from God.

The simplest of them is that where the devil offers Christ the whole world in return for His obeisance.  In an age where the promise, though not usually the realistic prospect, of wealth and power is daily dangled in front of us, this part of the story has immediate significance.  Whilst, perhaps, few of us dream of world domination, there is a constant lure to seek more than we have: rank, material comfort or influence.

Greed, envy and the wrong brand of ambition urge us to sell our souls and compromise what we know to be right as we grasp at opportunities to advance our lot.   We might like to imagine that one little instance of indiscretion will not do much harm, but the timeless experience is otherwise.  The momentum begins and our grasp of the Godly vision fades.  Calling a halt to such a decline is hard as we have become enmeshed in a network of relationships and routines from which we cannot easily be extricated.

A little more complicated is the devil’s suggestion that Christ should throw Himself from the parapet of the Temple and so force God to send His angels for His Son’s protection.  If the first temptation is about what we do not have and do not need, this one is about what we do have and the way we use it.

Here, perhaps, we might start by asserting that there is a fine line between making the most of our resources and exploiting them.  The temptation for us is to extract more from our assets than they can bear.

A example of the moment is our stewardship of the earth.  It has the capacity to provide much more than we need, but, once again, greed, envy and the wrong brand of ambition lead us to plunder it beyond what it can supply without irreparable damage.  More locally, where we fail properly to maintain our buildings and infrastructure, and fail to make the necessary investment, we ask of them more than they can be expected to bear.

In our human relationships, also, we can presume too much.  We can demand a level of loyalty or indulgence, which is wholly inappropriate.  We can force people to make choices simply to gratify ourselves.

This can wreak terrible damage not only in individuals, but in whole communities.  Just as our planet is creaking under our unreasonable harvesting of its resources, so also people can be drained by the perverse expectations that they will endlessly be prepared to humour others. 

Unnecessary divisions can be created as frivolous choices are demanded.  When the point comes where patience finally expires, those who indulge such an approach to life can find themselves friendless – often just at the moment when most they need the affection of others.

Pushing peoples’ patience, forbearance, tolerance and self-control beyond their reasonable limits is highly destructive and when such a course is born of caprice or self-centredness it is wicked indeed, for it unleashes all sorts of consequences as generosity of spirit is circumscribed to ensure that it does not happen again.

Those who tried our national endurance beyond its limits by bombing our trains, set loose a raft of curtailments on our freedoms, which will diminish all our lives; indeed, most rules and laws are a monument to somebody’s excess.  Paradoxically, of course, the terrorists would claim to be a response to the hegemonic overload of Western governments.  Whilst, I would give no quarter to such a pretext for their murders and violence, it does lead us to the third and most complex of the temptations.

At first sight, it might seem that the desire for food is the most mundane and harmless of the temptations; but, in fact, it touches on a conundrum in moral evaluations.

Christ is hungry after forty days of fasting and the devil offers Him the opportunity to relieve His discomfit by turning the stones into bread.  Hungry here means almost to the point of starvation; but the implication is that He must sell His soul to stave off His suffering.

Most of us, I would guess, have rarely found ourselves in such desperate circumstances so it is difficult, maybe, to imagine accurately what we would do.  Which of us would not steal to feed our children rather than see them starve, even if we would endure the privations for ourselves?  Should government ministers betray their principles by withholding from their children a decent education, sending them rather to the local, chronic state school, when they have the means to choose otherwise?

This challenge, moreover, also weaves its way through the other temptations.  When, for example, someone seeks by whatever means to acquire rank or wealth or influence so that they might redress some great injustice – can we really say that they are wrong?  In the face of indifference to their terrible plight, can we condemn them when they force a choice on the complacently inactive?  Such questions lead us to a final consideration.

At what point does the greater burden of sin lie in creating the circumstances in which someone is forced to traduce their sense of what is right rather than the betrayal itself?  Politicians are often pilloried for seeking the causes of malaise in our society as well as simply condemning the superficial wrongs day by day.  It may be that the notion of systemic faults has been taken ad absurdam on occasion, but that does not invalidate either the concept or fact of its reality.  The inequities and corruption of our world do foster suffering that inevitably engender an all-consuming bitterness and resentment from which any human spirit would wish to escape by any possible means.

It is facile simply to point to Christ’s example in the wilderness and condemn those who cannot muster like restraint; we are not Christ and His sojourn in the desert ended after forty days.  Frail human beings facing life-long exploitation, oppression and misery are surely in a different situation. 

In the Old Testament reading we are told that God delivers those subject to such subjugation.  If that is the will of God, then the Church surely cannot simply acquiesce in worldly injustice and tell people that they must endure their lot in silence.

Christ took the discipline of the wilderness upon Himself and explored the nature of right and wrong.  Many of the most disadvantaged in our country and beyond these shores have not voluntarily entered into their wilderness of misery and for them there is no discussion.  The story of the temptations is not a one-size-fits-all pattern for human response to the temptations of life.

It does, however, hold a mirror to humanity and asks of us many questions – about ourselves and the societies we create.

Home page: http://stmatthewsnewcastle.org.uk/