Jesus' Temptations and Our Own

Jesus... was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.

Jesus experienced three temptations, three forbidden cravings, during those forty days of solitude: the craving for material goods; the craving for status, power and prestige; and the craving for total security. These temptations are presented by the gospel writers in the stunning intimacy of a one-on-one encounter: Jesus versus Satan, two figures pitted against each other in a spiritual combat fought with the weapons of words and wit.

We tend to think of "temptation" in personalized terms, and especially so in the way we engage our Lenten practices: Can I resist alcohol/chocolate/caffeine? Can I control my temper? Can I reach out to someone I really find difficult or irritating or downright unpleasant? Personal resolves are important, certainly, and keeping a holy Lent has much to do with how fruitfully we use this season to slow our own personal clock and enter the desert of solitude where waiting upon God can become a focused intention.

I want to set aside the personal approach today, though, and propose that we explore instead three public temptations to which we are subject collectively, for these are temptations that are woven into our culture, and for this reason we may not be fully aware of how they are at work upon us, how they co-opt us. They correlate roughly with the three classic temptations of our Lord, and I offer them simply as food for thought, mindful of the way in which the public sphere tempts us too, though we rarely acknowledge this form of pressure explicitly.

In the first of Satan's taunts Jesus is tempted to give in to his raging hunger and "command this stone to become a loaf of bread." In our affluent nation, there are serious concerns about how this most basic of human needs is being abused: an epidemic of childhood obesity, over half the adult population officially declared to be overweight, a national calamity of excess played out against the backdrop of one billion hungry people around the globe who are living on less than $1 a day, and for whom a whole loaf of bread would be a miracle. All your offerings at our chapel Eucharists this year are helping to make that miracle possible because Episcopal Relief and Development is a pace-setter in the race to end poverty that we as a Church entered last year by embracing the UN Millennium Development Goals as our top budget priority.

But our collective appetites are perverted not only in relation to food. Jesus retorts to Satan that, "One does not live by bread alone," for to be fully human Jesus knows we also need spiritual food. Yet we find ways to pervert even that hunger by feasting on substitute spiritual foods: violence and voyeurism, to name just two.

I don't know if many of you went to see Mel Gibson's film The Passion of Christ. I was quite conflicted about whether I should go and see it, and when I finally did, I came away feeling more abused than edified. My overwhelming sense was and still is that the film's graphic violence was designed to play into a public appetite that is far from holy, and that, quite apart from any theological issues this movie raises, its explicit brutality exploits and feeds an evil appetite, one that we see taking hold in our children at a younger and younger age, and that is being played out in real life on the global stage, by ourselves and others: in many parts of Africa, as witness Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone", the memoir of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone in the 1990s; and sickeningly for us, in Iraq, where the torture of prisoners by US personnel could not finally be kept hidden. Chris Hedges covered many conflicts as a war correspondent, in El Salvador, Bosnia, Kuwait, and Iraq, and now, looking back, (in his book War is a Force that gives us Meaning) he can see that he became "addicted to war," which he describes as "the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind."

The "Left Behind" series of novels exploit a similarly unholy public appetite - for a kind of voyeurism in relation to the suffering of others while we ourselves remain at a safe distance, above it all, as those who are "raptured" look down at the sufferings of those "left behind" in this frighteningly popular and grotesquely twisted version of Christianity. I learned recently that in Mexico sales of private helicopters are booming: the gap between the super-rich and the grindingly poor in Mexico City is so vast and so ugly that those who can afford a million-dollar helicopter prefer to travel quite literally above it all, above the barrios, above the children picking over heaps of garbage, above the disease-ridden slums where so many eke out a pitiful living.

One does not live by bread alone, but every human being assuredly needs bread. So be glad and generous when the offering plate comes round and you have the chance to contribute to the miracle of bread for those in need around the world.

In the second of Jesus' temptations, the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority... If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." This is an invitation to unlimited power. A similar invitation is being offered to us now, as a species.

The potential to realize a utopian vision of the human condition is now literally within our grasp. We can extend human life by decades already, why not for ever? We now have the means to manipulate the genetic makeup of the unborn, potentially at least, so as to eliminate certain kinds of disease entirely. Thanks to the huge advances in genetic engineering, attempts to "perfect" the human condition are now within our grasp. The first successful cloning efforts were made as long ago as the 1950s, with frogs, but as one wag commented at the time, "Unpredictable variety still rules human reproduction." No longer. It is now perfectly possible to program the sex of a child, and much more besides; but the negative connotation of eugenics (associated with the corrupt experimentation on human subjects by the Nazis) is subtly being replaced by the ethically neutral term, participatory evolution, a cloak for the awesome power now in the hands of genetic engineers whose work holds the potential to modify and perhaps change for ever the human species itself. Even in the name of benevolence and the alleviation of suffering, how can we be sure that we should appropriate this awesome power? Where is the sense of awe that might restrain us now that God is functionally dead for so many people?

Do you not know that [the] body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? [I Corinthians 6:19]

In the third of his taunts, Satan tempts Jesus to throw himself down from the temple, for He will command his angels... to protect you [and] On their hands they will bear you up. Jesus has gone out into the desert with the divine voice still echoing in his head: "Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased."

We can only speculate on how such a divine endorsement must have given Jesus pause, must have made him ponder and puzzle over whether he was to enjoy special immunity as one so favored by God. And it is at this moment when he is weakened by hunger, his mouth and throat unbearably parched as the sun beats down mercilessly on him, that he recalls that indescribably consoling divine voice, amplified now by his weakness, a prey to wild animals, to the scorching sun, to the slightest threat. Satan insinuates to him that he has no need to succumb to his fears: Deny your humanity! Deny the vulnerability that is part of the merely human condition. That condition is not truly yours at all: You heard the divine voice addressed to you alone. You can escape all your fears if you will only trust that voice. Even in his weakened state, Jesus knew the promise was a sham, that only a demonic power would promise invulnerability.

We of course have chosen our own demonic saving power. The USA commands an arsenal of over 7,000 nuclear weapons. Russia's count is around 6,000. The 21st century has seen the breakdown of the decades-long inhibition against pre-emptive nuclear strikes, and while none has as yet been made, the logic of pre-emptive warfare is now seemingly acceptable, and the global trend today appears to be entirely toward more not fewer nuclear powers. 187 nations have signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1970, but since 9/11, we have not heard much about that treaty: our own national rhetoric and foreign policy have been focused entirely, not to say fixated, on the ideal of national security. For security read invulnerability. It seems that much of the earlier realism about the kind of damage that the actual use of nuclear weapons would cause has been lost in the unholy power struggles of today, but as Richard Fenn writes in his hair-raising recent book, Dreams of Glory, "If the world's arsenal of such weapons is actually used, the planet itself will become uninhabitable." Trusting that nuclear weapons can make us invulnerable is a dangerous fantasy, an insane illusion.

Jesus summoned the wisdom of Scripture to counter the temptations put before him. We need to learn the same strategy.

To counter our distorted appetites, Isaiah offers a vision of universal health and plenty [Isaiah 55:1]:

To counter our insatiable curiosity in the quest for power, the Psalmist [Psalm 131] counsels acceptance of our human limitations:

We are vulnerable, not invincible, and our ultimate safety is in God and not ourselves. Therefore, echoing St. Paul:

And the God of peace will be with you.