February 20 Lent 1
The most stylized temptation scenes I know of are these: Eve and the serpent, Jesus in the wilderness, and the summer camp game “Honey if you love me, smile.”
Of the three, you might not be familiar with the camp game. But its rules are fairly simple. Campers sit in a circle, and someone is designated as the asker. Then he or she finds someone vulnerable to approach, and says, “Honey, if you love me, smile,” a statement that may be accompanied by gestures, expressions, or anything else short of touching the “Honey” in question.
All the person who has been approached must do is say, “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.” Without smiling, of course.
I’ve thought about using the game as an ice breaker at vestry meetings, but decided against it. The game works best at camp, among kids who are still learning the essential grown up skill of not doing what you feel like doing.
Even if we happen to be all grown up, we conceive of temptation in about the same way. It’s about keeping our desires beat down and kept from the world.
And so whether it’s forbidden fruit in Eden, or a stone to be turned into bread in the wilderness, temptation is about not doing something we want to do, especially when it’s a devil who wants us to do it. And devils can take the form of serpents and giddy tempters, especially of the opposite gender, at camp
The story in Genesis and the story we just read from Luke both invest the particular temptations with a lot of symbolism. The fruit bearing trees aren’t just any trees. They’re the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Likewise, Jesus’ temptations are about hunger, and political power, and, well, I guess the temptation about jumping off the temple was really just the age old temptation to be a show off. A religious show off, if you want to be more specific.
We may see Jesus’ temptations as pointing us to broader sorts of issues in our lives. But if we imagine Jesus as actually being tempted in a way that we can relate to, aren’t his responses roughly equivalent to, “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t jump off the temple”? Spoken, of course, with a straight face that only the second person of the Trinity could muster. And if Jesus’ temptations were this kind of testing, are they really worth recording in Holy Scripture?
So maybe they’re not. Maybe resisting temptation is nearly opposite from what we think. Rather than keeping our deep desires stuffed down and our true selves concealed, maybe resisting temptation is about checking whether our responses come from the best parts of ourselves or not.
Let’s think again about the passage from Luke. There’s nothing inherently wrong with turning stones into bread, is there? He got famous for feeding 5000 people with a few loaves and fish, which means he wasn’t categorically opposed to bread related miracles.
As to the last temptation, Jesus himself prayed that God’s kingdom would come, teaching us to do the same. Would it be a bad thing to have Jesus in charge of the kingdoms of the world? So other than the temptation to fall down and worship, the others don’t seem inherently evil.
So maybe the story is just about not obeying the Devil. The temptation in the Garden of Eden is often read this way too. God forbids eating from a couple of trees. And Adam and Eve can’t stand not to, just like the kid who is told not to stick beans in his nose. We can think of Jesus’ temptation in the same way. Just don’t do it. Don’t do what the Devil says.
If life were a cartoon, and we each walked around with a haloed advisor on one shoulder and one with horns and pitchfork on the other, the story might be relevant to us. But it’s a little more difficult to sort the advice of devils from that of angels in real life.
So let’s try out the notion that Jesus’ temptations were about testing whether his responses were coming from the best parts of himself or not. Maybe weathering temptation is about integrity.
The devil first asks Jesus to prove himself. “If you are the Son of God…” he says. So the part of Jesus that’s being prodded is the part of ourselves that needs to defend and prove who we are. This is tricky moral work. Because the part of ourselves that wants to justify is close to the part of ourselves that just wants justice and fairness. And the part of ourselves that cares about the truth is nearby.
But learning not to need to be justified in other people’s eyes was certainly part of the character that made Jesus the sort of person who changed the history of the world. We might never understand why offered so little defense of himself before Pilate and Herod, but strangely, Jesus would be diminished if he came off as needing Pilate to understand him. If Jesus needed to justify himself to Pilate, Jesus would be weaker in our eyes, wouldn’t he? He would lose something integral to being Jesus.
Perhaps that temptation in the desert wasn’t just about not obeying devils. And maybe it wasn’t about resisting a bad part of Jesus’ self so much as accessing the deepest, strongest part of Jesus’ self.
In one of his poems, Wendell Berry describes his Mad Farmer as a man “whose words lead precisely to what exists, who never stoops to persuasion.” The power of Jesus’ character across all these centuries is certainly related to the way his words led precisely to what exists, and the way he never stooped to persuasion.
Something essential to himself didn’t need to defend or justify. We probably can imagine a way for Jesus to tell Pilate the truth without seeming to sin. But if Jesus needs Pilate to understand him, Jesus isn’t quite Jesus, is he?
Could this temptation experience be less about sorting right answers from wrong, or sorting the devil’s requests from those of angels as it was an experience of Jesus realizing who he really was, and learning to respond to this world with complete integrity?
Maybe Jesus’ temptation in the desert wasn’t about putting down a desire to do something bad so much as accessing and nurturing his God given strength, becoming a man who didn’t need to explain himself or justify himself to devils or governors or kings or us.
If Jesus just achieved the cosmic equivalent of winning a round of “Honey, if you love me, smile” with the devil in the desert, holding a straight face, resisting all urges to the contrary in himself, his testing would have been little more than a game.
But if Jesus’ experience in the desert was about Jesus becoming himself more fully, we might understand temptation differently in our own lives. And we might even have different ideas about the kind of people we want God to form us into as well.
It may be that faithful responses from each of us to the devil would be a little different. I suppose the devil’s questions might have been different for each of us, too. But our soul work would have been the same. Our soul work in Lent and in all of our lives, as we seek to be growing, faithful Christians, is the same. We want to be like Jesus. And becoming like Jesus is less about becoming people who can resist every urge, as it is about becoming people of integrity. People who have accessed an essential God given strength in ourselves.
And won’t our forty days of Lent have been fruitful if we emerge from them as people a little more like Jesus? As people whose words lead more precisely to what exists? And, perhaps, as people who stoop to persuasion a little less than we did before? Amen.