The Real Temptation of Jesus

Matthew 4:1-11

Stephen K. Nash

Have you seen the commercial (I think it is Southwest Airlines), where the young woman is visiting in the home of a friend? She’s in the bathroom primping at the mirror, when temptation overtakes her and she sneaks a peek in the medicine cabinet. Snickering at the bottles and tubes she finds on the shelves, when she puts one of them back, the shelf comes crashing down and all the contents of the medicine cabinet fall to the floor. “Ever feel like getting away?” is the commercial’s tag line. Ah, the consequences of being caught yielding to temptation.

That commercial reminded me of a similar story I read once of a contractor who was bidding on a job. In the office of his prospective client, alone, he noticed under a jar on the desk a copy of his competitor’s bid, but he couldn’t see the numbers because it was partially covered by the jar. Yielding to temptation he lifted the jar to sneak a peak and his face became ashen as hundreds of tiny bee-bees came spilling out from the bottomless jar and running all over the desk and onto the floor. Busted.

Ah . . . temptation! This story of Jesus’ temptation that occurs in different forms in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is prototypical. That is, it symbolizes for us the very essence of our human spiritual struggle to be the whole people in relation to God we are created to be, or elsedistorted versions of that humanity.

It is a story that pictures for us in three different panels or portraits, the nature of what the church calls “sin.” I went through a phase where I really disliked the word “sin.” Not because I didn’t believe in the reality that the word represented. But because we’ve so trivialized the notion through our misuse of it. Back in the early 1970s, the psychiatrist Carl Menninger of the Menninger Clinic and Foundation wrote a best-selling book, “Whatever Became of Sin?” It chronicled the disappearance of the word “sin” in our national public discourse. But with the resurgence of evangelical influence in American culture over the last quarter century, the word is made a resurgence and has been used to death. That’s why I didn’t like it. But I’ve decided that just because people misuse a word, that I shouldn’t allow them to steal it from the church’s vocabulary. We just need to understand what it means and use it correctly. More on that in a minute.

Today is the first Sunday in Lent, and it’s no accident that the season of Lent is 40 days, corresponding to Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the wilderness, and many other significant 40 day periods in the biblical story. A meaningful symbolic number in the lore of ancient Israel. It represented sacred time. And for Jesus, in this story, it was a period of retreat, of contemplation, of spiritual preparation before he commenced his public mission.

We need those times of retreat. We need to make the journey inward before we can make the journey outward. Life must have a balance between times of active vocation, and inward contemplation. Of high activity and of doing nothing. This was such a period, a key period, for Jesus of Nazareth as he contemplated his vocation.

This time of preparation involved a test. The word “tempt” in English always has a negative connotation, doesn’t it? It always means enticement to evil. And it can mean that. But there’s another meaning in the language of the Bible. That’s simply a “test.”

Before God can use a person that person must be tested. The Jews had a saying “The Holy One, Blessed be his name, does not elevate a person to dignity until he has first tried and searched the person; and if she stands in temptation (testing), then He raises her to dignity.”

There’s an important truth there. The Epistle of James says: “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” The first Epistle of Peter expresses the same sentiment when it says that “the testing of your faith is more precious than gold.”

In the northeastern United States codfish are big commercial business. Now there’s a market for eastern cod all over, but the public demand posed a problem to the shippers. At first they froze the cod, then shipped them elsewhere, but the freeze took away a lot of the flavor. So they experimented with shipping them alive, in tanks of sea water, but that proved even worse. Not only was it more expensive, the cod still lost its flavor and, in addition, became soft and mushy.

Finally, some creative person solved the problem in an innovative way. The codfish were placed in the tank of water along with their a natural aggressive rival – the catfish. From the time the cod left the East Coast until it arrived at its westernmost destination, those ornery catfish chased the code all over the tank. And, you guessed it, when the cod arrived at the market, they were as fresh as when they were first caught. There was no loss of flavor, nor was the texture affected. If anything, it was better than before.

Obvious moral to this story: Each one of us is in a tank of particular and inescapable circumstances. It’s difficult enough to stay in the tank sometimes. But in addition to our situation, there seem to be God-appointed catfish to bring sufficient tension to keep us alive, alert, fresh, and growing. It’s part of a life-long project to shape our character so that we’ll be more fully the people God envisions us being. Understand why the fish are in your tank. Understand why testing is a part of life.

Even Jesus, the Hebrew writer says, learned obedience from the things he suffered. And that perplexes a lot of pious folks. It seems to portray Jesus as all too human. And my response to that is. Yes.

Do you know that Jesus was not the first “Son of God.” The Kings of Israel were called Sons of God. In fact, Ancient Israel as a nation was referred to as “God’s Son.” And as the term is used in the New Testament, it isn’t really a title of divinity, but a messianic title. It has less to do with Jesus’ nature than with his mission. And that mission had to be accomplished as a human person, no less human than you and me.

The temptations Jesus faced were real. They were not charades. He could have chosen to succumb. He was not protected somehow by virtue of who he was from making wrong choices.

In popular Christian orthodoxy, Jesus has often been conceived of as being a sort of half-man, half-god demigod, some kind of superman such as were popular in ancient mythology. Like a Hercules or modern super-hero. If he were your friend growing up, he’d be the first guy you’d pick to be on your team. Never strike out. Hit every pitch . . . a home run every time. Throw every pitch a strike. Never sick. Never stubbed his toe, never ignorant of anything. You sometimes here the glib statement, “there’s only one perfect person who ever lived.” But no. No perfect person has ever lived. The nature of humanity is that there is no such thing as abstract perfection. Jesus was not perfect. He couldn’t have been and been a human person. It isn’t sinful to be imperfect. It is simply human. It is the human condition. Jesus was no more perfect than you or me. When we say that he was sinless, that is, of course, another matter. But even that means simply that he never ultimately betrayed his relationship with God. He made all the right moral choices when it came to what he called the weightier matters of the law: love, justice, and mercy.

The New Testament says that Jesus was tempted in every way like we are, yet without sin.

Now what Jesus was asked to do was not immoral in itself, but very natural. Do you see that?

Nothing wrong with eating . . . turning stones to bread.

Nothing wrong with trusting God’s promise . . . to provide protection.

Nothing wrong with claiming what is rightfully yours.

These three temptations cover three dimensions of human existence: food, faith, and power.

Or put another way: the physical, the spiritual, and the socio-political.

Notice that it’s the things that are natural that are the greatest temptations. Not the heinous things that we can see coming a mile away. But the natural things.

Many years ago, Bobby Leach, an Englishman startled the world by being the first person to go over Niagra Falls in a barrel and live to tell about it. He hardly suffered a scrape. Ironically, some years later he was walking down the street, slipped on an orange peel and was taken to the hospital with a badly fractured leg.

Some great temptations, which roar around us like Niagra Falls may leave us unscraped. But the little, subtle matters of ethics slip up on us unnoticed. Like doing something that is in itself good, with ulterior motives. What is more ethical? An atheist doing an act of compassion simply because it is the good? Or a Christian who does an act of compassion because they think that in doing so they’ll receive some star in their celestial crown because of it? Who is more pure I heart? So you see, sin isn’t as simplistic as it may seem.

The Tempter wasn’t asking Jesus to shake his fist at God. He was asking him only to do what seemed natural to do, but to do that which would nevertheless put his relationship of trust in God in serious jeopardy. That’s the nature of temptation. Anything that would call our relationship of intimacy with God into question. And here we come to my pet peeve of the way the word sin is misused.

The Bible doesn’t talk a heck of a lot about sins in the plural. Individual deeds. It does talk about sin in the singular . . . it speaks of it, at least Saint Paul does, as sort of a powerful dynamic or principle at work in life. An attitude of life. An attitude of alienation. That which alienates us from God, from one another, from nature, and from our true and best selves. The things that we often describe as sins are symptoms. Symptoms of a spiritual condition. That condition can be described in many ways. The church has more often than not preferred to focus on the simple notion that sin is a crime deserving punishment. Breaking one of the rules, for which we can nevertheless be forgiven if we meet certain conditions. But I think that is probably the least helpful of all the metaphors. Sin is a broken relationship, alienation, estrangement. It is an addiction that we can’t free ourselves from by simple willpower. It is a disease of the soul. All those are much more helpful and accurate than to describe sin simply in terms of breaking rules. Sin is not breaking God’s laws, it is breaking God’s heart. That condition of estrangement can take several forms that this story in Matthew’s gospel illustrates.

One dimension of that spiritual condition is pride. That was the test of Bread . . . a temptation to self-sufficiency, symbolizing all of our physical needs and desires and impulses.

As messiah, Jesus would be responsible for meeting human needs universally. The Messianic age was to be an age of abundance and plenty and provision beyond measure. Remember the twelve basketsful left over after the feeding of the 5000? That is an important symbolic statement. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of extravagance . . . of more than enough. What was wrong with Jesus doing what he was meant to do?

Jesus response to this temptation is well known. Often quoted. “You shall not live by bread alone, but by every word the proceeds from the mouth of God.” He’s quoting, of course, from Deuteronomy 8:3. But notice this. In that verse, the contrast is not between spiritual things and physical things. That is not a legitimate nor biblical distinction. He is not contrasting spiritual bread with physical bread and saying that the spiritual is better. No, humans are spiritual/physical creatures, not one or the other. The two are inextricably entertwined. We need physical bread to live. Notice what that verse in Deuteronomy says. Hear it with me. Listen carefully:

“Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

Now notice, the food God provided was physical food, manna and quail. The contrast is not between the physical and the spiritual, but between trusting God as the ultimate provider of our needs and the thought that we are somehow self-sufficient. That is the point . . . not to downplay the importance of physical needs and desires, and to make us more “spiritual.” But to show that we are ultimately dependent upon God as the source of our life and being.

This first real temptation of Jesus was the temptation to pride. Putting ourselves in the place of God. Only God can be God. We do a miserable job when we attempt it.

The Second Temptation was, we’ll call it, “The Leap of Doubt.” The desire to ask God to prove something. During his ministry, perhaps even before this time, Jesus was rejected by his own family and his friends. The beginning of his mission would not be easy. There was the natural temptation to find out if God is real . . . if God is behind his mission. To jump off the temple in response to the promise of Psalm 91 that the Tempter cited would be asking God to show some “proof.”

Again Jesus quotes a passage from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massah” a reference to Exodus 17 which says: “they called the name of the place Massah, meaning “proof,” because of the faultfinding of the children of Israel, and because they put the Lord to the proof saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

That’s what Jesus would have done had he taken that leap. It would not have been a leap of faith, an expression of faith. It would have been a leap of doubt, asking for proof that God was with him.

Jesus could go to the cross in faith that God would vindicate him. That was his leap of faith. But he would not take a leap of doubt. He would not ask God to supply him with proof. A leap of faith is not one you take to find out if God is there, or if something is God’s will. But a leap of confidence in what you already believe to be true.

A man hiking in the mountains took a wrong step and slipped off the edge of an extremely steep precipice and was about to fall to his death when he was able to grab hold of a root a few feet below the cliff. He cried out in prayer, “Jesus save me! Can anyone hear me.” Silence. Again, “Can anyone hear me? Dear God,” he prayed, “if you can hear me, prove yourself. You know I’m a person of faith. I go to church every Sunday. I tithe my income. I’m good to my neighbors. You owe me one. Please help me. Prove to me that living for you has been worth it.” It was then he heard a voice from above. “I can see you. I’m here. Just let go and I’ll catch you. Trust me. This is the Lord.” After a few moments of silence, the man took a deep breath and then this man of faith shouted, “Can anyone else hear me!”

Jesus experienced the same questions and crises of faith that we experience, I believe. I think he had many doubts. But he refused to succumbed to those doubts . . . or to the temptation to ask God for proof, until he was finally vindicated by his victory over death. Jesus walked the dark nights of the soul, like we must walk, by faith, and not by sight.

The final temptation deals with another dimension of our lives . . . the basic human experience of power, dominion, personal authority. Each of us as a steward of creation has our God-given place of dominion, no matter how small. Our own place of power. How will we use the dominion God gives us?

Jesus understood that the wisdom of God is not the wisdom of the world. The power God uses with humanity is not the power of might, of force, of coercion. God stoops to conquer rather than stands to conquer. God is strong enough to be gentle. Powerful enough to be merciful. Secure enough to be a servant. It is the power of Love that is the strongest power in the world. That was the heart of the ministry of Jesus and the subject of this temptation. Jesus shows us the that way of God is not the way of throwing weight around, but of servanthood. It does not demand respect, but earns it through humble acts of service.

It was the French scientist-theologian Teilhard de Cardin who said that some day after we have mastered the power of the winds, the waves and of gravity, we will master for God the power of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, mankind will have discovered fire.

A woman dreamed she visited a museum of the celestial city. No throne or king's miter were there, not even Martin Luther's inkpot. A widow's mite, a tattered robe, a hammer and some nails were in view. She inquired of the curator, "do you have a towel and basin with which the Lord washed the feet of his disciples?" No, was the reply, "for you see that they are in constant use." It was then the woman knew that she was in the holy city.

Our pilgrimage together through the Lenten Season toward Holy Week will be a pilgrimage in which we remember that we are not God, but are ultimately dependant on God for the wonder and delights of our physical existence. It will be a pilgrimage during which we learn to walk by faith in the spiritual vocation to which he has called us And it will be a journey where we remind ourselves of the greatest power in the world . . . the power of Love.

Amen.