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TEMPTATION

Church Publishing Incorporated

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE TEMPTATION OF MATERIAL GOODS

There are so many difficulties in life that we seem to be engaged in a daily battle just to keep from going under. We struggle to keep on top of our job, maintain our household, take care of our children, cope with bad health, homework, and money problems. None of us is without difficulties, sometimes overwhelming ones. We are often advised to turn to religion for help, and in fact the phrase "Christ is the Answer" has even appeared on a bumper-sticker.

But genuine religion begins by revealing to us that Christ is the answer, not in the sense of lifting all our troubles from us, but in directing us to the place where the right battles are to be fought. He reveals to us where we should be struggling. He does not magically remove us from all strife, but shows us which specific struggles will lead us into a haven.

The situation then is not that there are those with troubles and those without them, but that there are those caught in a whirlpool, going around and around, and those making for shore. Christ is the answer in showing us the direction to take, the place where we are to struggle, if we are to find a way that leads to the kingdom of his Father.

We discover what we ought to struggle with by looking at what he struggled with. He did not calmly inform us of the gateway, but he himself labored and pioneered his way through the place we are to follow. All three synoptic gospels tell us that Jesus was tempted; and all three portray the temptation scene as a gateway through which he passed. Before he began his life's work of healing and teaching, he had to pass through temptation. Mark only records the fact; Luke and Matthew give the details so as to reveal which specific conflicts or temptations form the gateway. They tell us that there were three specific temptations, concerned with how he should direct his life in order to create a path to lead people into the kingdom. We will use the account given by Matthew.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'"

Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will give his angels charge of you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'" Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'You shall not tempt the Lord your God.'"

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." Then Jesus said to him, "Begone, Satan! for it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.'"

Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him. (Matthew 4:1–11)

To discover the spiritual reality that is represented in this temptation scene, it is not necessary to believe that there is an individual called the devil or Satan. The main points concerning what we are tempted by—material goods, security, and glory—are in no way increased in intensity or seriousness by believing in an individual called Satan. Nor are they lessened as temptations by disbelief in him. To personify evil does make the scene more dramatic, for we find interactions between personalities more dramatic than any other kind. So the language of the text, which speaks of Satan, will be retained because it is more dramatic.

Let us begin our exploration by noting that the Scripture says that "Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness." It was the Spirit who took him to the place where he was alone, to be exposed to the devil. It was not his idea or desire to go into the wilderness. Nor did the devil control him, or lead him to the place where a crucial struggle was to occur. It was God's Spirit who took the initiative.

We see here the first great law in operation. We are not in charge of the circumstances in which our spiritual destiny is decided; we do not set the terms or the conditions by which we are to find God. We are dealing with a reality who is a mystery, a reality over which we have no control. Here we see that one of the conditions God sets without any say on our part is that we are exposed to evil. Whatever its ultimate source may be, whatever our responsibility for it may be, we presently are in the midst of evil and the gateway to finding God is placed at a point where we are tempted by evil. We must face up to it and renounce it, or we do not find the gateway to God.

The next thing we notice is that temptation does not usually come when we are ready for it. It does not come when we are strongest, when we are at our best. It comes when we are weak. It came to Jesus when he was hungry, very hungry. The Bible says that he fasted for forty days and forty nights.

This time span is symbolic. Moses fasted forty days and forty nights when he was on the mountain to receive the Law from God. Israel, on the way to the Promised Land, was tested forty years in the wilderness. And in the time of Noah it rained forty days and forty nights. Each of these Old Testament stories marks a major turning point, a major change in humankind's relationship to God. God gave Moses the Law, which was one of the conditions of the covenant—a binding contract—between him and Israel. The Exodus from Egypt was what made Israel a nation: before it they were not a people; after it they had their own land. The rain represented God's destruction of the past, a baptismal washing away of all evil and a new start for humankind after the Flood. Forty, then, is a symbol—a symbol for a decisive change about to take place. Here we see Jesus, just before the beginning of his ministry, being tempted. He must endure this trial—he must grasp who and what he is, who and what he stands for, who and what he offers to humankind, for in that struggle a new path to the Father is being created and made available for us.

So don't worry about whether a person can actually do without food for forty days or not. Forty is a symbol—an important one—to mark this event as the hinge on which a turn is made into a new future for all of us.

And yet, he did fast. There was no food, and he grew hungry. It was then that the temptations started. When he had grown weak, when he was not physically strong, when it became hard to see straight and clearly in the dazzling sun of that sun-drenched land, it was then that temptation came.

Here again we see a condition set by God. We are spiritual beings—spirits are beings who must choose their destiny. But we are spirits who are animals. Spirits whose bodies cause us to suffer, so that we are vulnerable and exposed, able to feel every twinge of our complex organism—to have our whole consciousness filled with blinding pain so that all else is shut out and all we can think is, "Take it away, take it away." We are spirits, people who must choose our destiny, with bodies that are vulnerable, registering every little irritation and craving our daily food. We did not decide that this should be our situation; this is a condition established by our Father.

Jesus was exposed to terrible hunger, his body giving him no rest. Perhaps he was looking at the smooth round stones that lay at his feet. They looked something like the smooth loaves just out of a baker's oven, and then it struck him, "Turn these stones into bread."

It was a temptation to use his powers to bring comfort to his body, to use his unique relationship to God as a magic wand to care for his earthly needs. That was a personal temptation he faced: to avoid the pains of a bodily life. More broadly, it was to avoid being subject to one of the common human conditions we face. It was a temptation to reject a condition set by God, namely, that we are to seek him as beings who must eat, who are vulnerable to starvation, as beings who are made to desire material goods and who can therefore become greedy, covetous, envious. To use his powers to provide food in a miraculous way when he was in trouble would have been to reject a condition his Father sets for us. He could hardly have pioneered a new way for us to the Father if he rejected one of the conditions to which we are subject in our pilgrimage. He must have a kinship with us; he must share our situation, if he is to lead us from where we are to the Father. As Hebrews 2:18 puts it, "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted."

But it was also for him a temptation that concerned the welfare of others. He could have made his mission to the world an attempt to satisfy people's bodily needs. He could have tried to see to it that everyone had food, clothing, and shelter; to see that everyone's sensuous needs and desires were fully satisfied.

His Father faced that decision when he made the universe; he could have protected us from all shortages, from being vulnerable to starvation. But clearly we are vulnerable and we are not fully protected. Whatever the reason for this situation, it is where we are. The decision the Father made at creation, to allow this, was now faced by Jesus. He had to ratify or to reject his Father's decision by deciding what his mission was to be—bread or obedience to his Father's will.

That was for him a temptation, a terrible temptation. For are not we all, as he was, frequently moved by compassion at the suffering of people, their terrible suffering? All people are not being fed. At the same time do not we all know that people do not live by bread alone? None of us is hungry. We have foods for our breakfast that even a king couldn't have had five hundred years ago. Orange juice, for example, was not available to lands of the north, far from the warmth of Spain or Africa. We drive cars that have more power than an entire factory had in the eighteenth century. And yet are we happy? The human capacity for unhappiness is so enormous that the entire world cannot fill it.

In the legend, Faust was also tempted by the devil, and he gave in. He was able to taste and savor all things, to have every delightful experience and enchantment imaginable. All the sweetness the earth could offer. He became bored. It could not satisfy him; it could not fill him except for a little while. There is about us an indefinable craving, an indefinable chasm that the whole world cannot fill. It may take a person a long time to find that out; for we are also animals and take animal delight in what we consume. And we should, for it is needed and it is good. But that is precisely the temptation: our need and its goodness. We consume and consume and consume, and we learn the hard way—if we learn at all—that we cannot be satisfied this way. We need it; it is good; yet it does not fill us. We find here that we are tempted into evil, not by something that is evil, but by something that is good.

So we are faced each day with the terrible temptation, the powerful pull of two forces: our need and enjoyment of goods that are of this world, and our need for the good that is not. We need both. For we cannot live by bread alone; we do not live without it either. How can we face that temptation?

Jesus faced it by quoting the Old Testament: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." We shall live by listening to all that God tells us. So attend to that craving in yourself that only God's words can fill. The danger is that we shall not notice or we shall forget that the world cannot satisfy us. We overlook that craving that goods do not satisfy. That emptiness is only one desire among a multitude of desires, and so it may easily be thought to be insignificant.

But do you remember the experience of thinking that if only I had—a what? Whatever it was, you fill it in. And remember when you got it? How wonderful it was? Remember how after a while it didn't matter so much and you wanted other things? Such experiences are of vital importance. They tell us about our restless heart, our craving. For we are tempted to forget the one thing that points us to God: our restlessness with all that the world has to offer. Only he can fill that void.

We must, in other words, forsake the world. This is what we must renounce before we can enter the gateway of a new reality and receive. To forsake is not to hate the world, or to reject it. It is not to turn from material goods—food, drink, clothing—and become an ascetic; for as Jesus said, "your heavenly Father knows that you need them all." It is instead to recognize that all this world's goods are not able to satisfy us.

In facing this temptation that forms the gateway into a new reality, we are not choosing God. To believe in God at this stage is not a decision we can make: for God is initially unimaginable to us, and until we enter the gateway, we do not have a proper idea of the kind of reality God is so that we could choose him. All we can do at this stage is to decide not to give ourselves to anything that is of this world, to anything that we know or can imagine. It is not to allow a thirst and a hunger for what the world cannot satisfy to be blunted by gluttony, or smothered by greed for possessions; or to let our lives become filled with covetous desires for goods, or to seek to establish our personal importance and worth by our homes, our cars, our style of life. It is not to have our consciousness saturated by envy for what others have and what they have achieved. It is not to become callous to the needs of others and fail to share our possessions.

All this sounds negative, but to withhold ourselves is to allow ourselves to be open to a new reality. All of these desires stand as barriers at the gateway, and any one of them can keep us from entering. For they can be what we keep turning our attention to, so that the single, bare, unique desire that cannot be satisfied this way is lost to view. We must hold to it with such attentiveness that we thirst and hunger, yearn and long, for what we cannot even imagine. This is what it is to seek for the kingdom first and not to have our whole attention filled by what we shall eat, drink, wear, and possess. For though it is but one item among the many that make us up, it is not a small insignificant desire; instead it is vast because the whole world cannot satisfy it.

But suppose we are not gluttonous; not consumed with a sensuous passion for food or possessions; not seeking status through money. Suppose we do not envy others but are quite content and even grateful to have what we have; not callous toward the poverty of others. We might be quite free of all these, and yet still not find the gateway. We may miss the gateway because we are so conscious of human suffering. We may be so upset by poverty and our mind so filled with human misery that we fail to notice the small craving we and others have for what the whole world cannot give. It gets pushed aside. But Jesus retained that craving, and never lost sight of it as he faced the hard fact of human hunger. We saw both sides: the terrible suffering of people who lacked bread, and the fact that we do not live by bread alone. He did not reject or ignore the second half because of the first. The strain of keeping aware of both is terrible, but it is a strain that is unavoidable, if we are to find God. We can fail even to see that there is a second half because we attend only to the more obvious need people have for bodily sustenance. We fail to find the gateway because we fail to face the tension between human need for material goods and the need for what this world cannot supply. It is at the point of tension that we find the gateway. Avoid the tension by saying that both a world of suffering and a loving Father simply cannot exist, and we fail to find the gateway. Only after facing the tension and entering the gateway can we learn to endure a universe with such suffering. We are never to condone it, for we are always to strive to overcome such suffering. But once we have entered the gateway, we can endure what we cannot relieve, and still trust, because we know that there is a loving Father. We can trust him even though we do not fully know why there is so much suffering. At this stage in our pilgrimage, however, all that we are asked to do is to retain that small craving that the world cannot satisfy and not allow it to be pushed aside by the horrors of poverty.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from TEMPTATION by Diogenes Allen. Copyright © 2004 by Diogenes Allen. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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