In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
We have just heard Saint Matthew’s account of Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. This passage is not merely a report of what happened to Jesus: It is also a summary of the temptations that confront his Body, the Church, and each person who has been baptized into it.
In each temptation, Jesus – and all of us, and each of us – is offered the same thing that was offered to our first parents, which was a do-it-yourself shortcut to fulfillment. However, if he – or we, or any of us – is to accept any of these proposals, he – or we, or any of us – must decide to forget Whose he is and to get for himself, by himself, what his Father already means to give him.
Let us look more closely at each of the three temptations.
The devil first tempts Jesus to make bread from stones: He encourages Jesus to use the power that comes with his station to satisfy his wants and to prove who he is. He tempts us in the same way to trade on our identity as Christians for the sake of worldly gain. In order to do this, we must make the assumption that our identity is our possession, to use and to dispose of as we wish.
The Church which yields to this temptation does so by conforming its preaching and its policies to the values of contemporary society so that it may have influence in that society and profit from it institutionally. Emphasis on holiness of life may be soft-pedaled so that those who are living wickedly are not offended or are, as they say, “affirmed” in their life-style. Or the programs and methods of the church may be tooled toward attracting more dues-paying members instead of fostering more faithful witness to the Lord. The problem of yielding to this temptation is that it always backfires – the institution that does so finds itself shrinking, not growing, and less rather than more influential. It finds that stones do not become bread; not only do the stones remain stones, but the bread it has in its keeping becomes stone as well. This ought to come as no surprise, since the Tempter is a liar and a deceiver from the beginning who has no desire to feed anyone, only to feed off of everyone.
On the personal level, this is the temptation to satisfy our own appetites for wealth, food, social acceptability, knowledge, or sex before attending to the requirements of God’s standards. The result is spiritual starvation, as the bread which we thought we had made from these stones turns back into stone in the belly of our soul.
The means for defeating this temptation is shown by Jesus: We call to remembrance who we are and why we are: “Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God” – the God who gives bread in the wilderness to those who seek him. We are made in such a way that we can only be filled by what God gives to us.
Having failed the first time, the devil then tries another tack. He takes Jesus to the highest point of the
If we yield to this temptation when it comes to us, we have to assume that God is our lackey rather than our Lord and that we can count on his unconditional protection. In other words, we must assume that we can use God as we seek to fulfill our self-selected agenda, whatever that may be.
When a church yields to this temptation, it comes to see itself as the owner, not the steward of the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Sacraments, the Apostolic Ministry, the souls of the faithful, the faith itself. It comes to believe that it has a license to do what it will with what it assumes to be its own treasure and to do so safely because it falsely assumes that God’s promise to preserve his Church is as unconditional and as indiscriminate as its own experimentation. There is no whit of scriptural and historical evidence for such an assumption: The promise is made to no institution, but to “the mystical body of [Christ], which is the blessed company of all faithful people.”
On the personal level, we yield to this temptation when we take foolish risks with our spiritual well-being, such as when we put ourselves in proximate occasions of sin and either rely on our “will power” to pull us through or count on God’s assistance to pull our chestnuts out of the fire when we get in trouble. The fact is that if we thus cast ourselves down, we very likely will fall the whole way. If we put ourselves outside of God’s protection, he is under no obligation to rescue us.
We must have the mind of Christ, who recognizing God, not as his lackey, but as his master and Lord, was able to repel this temptation by saying, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”
The third temptation is that of worldly power. The devil, aware that Jesus’ mission involves wresting control of the world back from his own satanic self, offers him an easy way to achieve that goal (which, not incidentally, is one that will leave him as the real power behind the throne): “I will give it all to you, if you only bow down and worship me.”
A church yields to this temptation when it adopts worldly assumptions and the methods of worldly politics to gain worldly power to change the world as it is. Churchy PACs are formed, lobbyists are hired, and high ecclesiastics make piously bombastic pronouncements on matters of foreign and domestic policy about which they know little more than what they read in the mainstream press or see on the network news. In its interior life, such a church becomes little different from the Mafia as it coerces its people into conformity or silence through threats of property seizures or career failures or pension denials, and because of this it cannot be taken seriously when it speaks on the moral issues of the day.
On the personal level, we yield to this temptation when we use force, craft, and manipulation to get our own way. Instead of saying, “I will love you into loveability,” we say “I’ll love you if you change to suit me,” thus exposing ourselves as spiritual slavemasters capable only of using people for our own ends, not loving them for their own sake and for the sake of God.
This temptation is overcome by remembering who we are and who God is, as does Jesus when he answers Satan by saying, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.”
In each of these temptations, Jesus, the Church and the Christian are tempted to seize for themselves what God is going to give them, and in fact has already given them. Like Eve and Adam at the first, we are tempted to take good things in a bad way. The fact is, however, that all good things are ours if we will receive them as a gift. If we try to grab them for ourselves, we find ourselves not possessors, but possessed. Jesus is tempted to become a glutton, a hypocrite, and a tyrant – just as are we – but he overcomes these temptations by doing what our first parents did not do, which is to rely upon the sufficiency of God’s declared Word as the guide for his action and for his refusal to act. In so using the Word of God, he shows himself to be the Word of God. The Word of God does it God’s way – and such is our only winning strategy.
When we resist temptation in God’s way, then what happened to Jesus will happen to us: “The Devil left him and angels came and ministered to him.” If we do it God’s way, we receive what Jesus received – the bread of life by the word of God, acknowledgement by the Father as his own, and authority through Christ to heal the world’s hurts in God’s way and so conform it to his image. By the grace here given us, may we choose that way.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Saint Stephen’s Church,
March 1, 2009
