I would like to propose to you this morning a spiritual
principle that at first will no doubt sound absurd but that is the only conclusion
I can draw from Jesus’ example in today’s gospel, and it is this: We humans are saved by clinging faithfully
to our human fragility…, so long as we offer it to God for him to transfuse it
with the power of his love. Let’s look into it.
In liturgical year C, the First Sunday of Lent presents the
story of the temptations of Jesus in St Luke’s version. The Lucan arrangement
of the three temptations, different from that of Matthew (4:1-11), presents the
episode as a three-leveled succession that begins in the desert, ascends to the
heights, and finally arrives at Jerusalem.
This is exactly the path taken by Jesus’ whole public life in the third gospel.
The narrative of the temptations in Luke is, thus, a preview and summary of
Jesus’ whole public ministry. In other words, it seems Luke means to show that
the reality of temptation accompanied
Jesus throughout his life and his ministry, which began in the desert and gradually
made its way up to Jerusalem, there to be consummated. Luke shows Jesus’ faith in action, and his faith manifests
itself—all at the same time—as a struggle and a choice, a combat and a
decision, and a locus of freedom and obedience. On this page of the Gospel, and
from our own monastic perspective, Jesus may as well be said to offer himself
to us as the prototype of the monk,
whom someone in later centuries defines as “one who possesses freedom and the Scriptures”.
In the first place comes Scripture,
which throughout his lifetime Jesus ceaselessly obeys, listens to and reads
until it becomes his own intimate utterance, his intensely living and lived
word, spoken in his dialogue with the Tempter. In the second place comes freedom, which appears in this particular page of the Gospel as the
capacity to say No, to resist, to
remain anchored to a deeper Yes, and to deny all other possibilities while at
the same time denying oneself. Temptation is a viable possibility that
confronts our heart. The faith of Jesus is wholly rooted in the Yes uttered to
God, his Father, and in the No hurled at the Tempter. To love is to say Yes
unconditionally to a person. From this Yes of Jesus to his Father derive also
all his No’s to the Tempter. To be perfectly clear: Jesus’ life of faith is rooted
in the Yes he gladly speaks to his
Father and, simultaneously, in the No whereby he rejects the Tempter, the diábolos, as Luke calls him, meaning the
divider or opponent. Realistically speaking, every Yes to something implies a No
to something else, a truism we often wish were otherwise. We cannot have it
both ways: in order to embrace something we must reject everything incompatible
with it!
Today Jesus quotes Scripture three times, each time repeating
his Yes to God, which is also his No to the devil. It seems to me that Jesus’
reaction here puts into action what Jesus himself expresses to the listeners of
his Sermon on the Mount: Let your ‘Yes’
mean ‘Yes’, and your ‘No’ mean ‘No’. Anything more is from the Evil One (Mt
5:37). Jesus thus denounces a diabolical excess.
Each temptation Jesus undergoes today proposes exactly this Satanic more.
The Lord Jesus, then, in the fullness of his humanity, is here
showing us how faith becomes word and
choice, the capacity to say Yes and
No and thus to choose, to make decisions. As Dostoyevski well understood in his
“Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in The
Brothers Karamazov, at the heart of all temptation lies the problem of freedom. This is how we
should understand Jesus’ rejection of the three temptations of miracle, authority and mystery,
three different temptations that are perhaps also the three aspects that make
up every temptation.
These three elements of miracle,
authority and mystery can be
easily used by an un-godly mind and will to manipulate the consent of a person,
to impose oneself as master over his or her conscience. According to the
cynical considerations of the Great Inquisitor, this is how one becomes a true
benefactor of humanity which, according to him, “does not seek God, but
miracles” and which therefore longs to see itself freed “from the serious
annoyance and the terrible torment of having to decide personally and freely”.
Luke notes that Jesus, after a long fast of forty days, is
hungry. In the face of hunger, bread is necessary, if by ‘necessary’ we mean what
allows us to live. Here, the devil is proposing something quite subtle to
Jesus: to use his own power in order to satiate his need by changing stones
into bread. But, even though he is tortured by hunger, Jesus does not subvert
creation in order to satisfy his own need: he does not absolutize his need; he
does not seek immediate satisfaction; and he does not give in to the temptation
of performing a miracle. A miracle, here, would be something that comes from
the Evil One and which Jesus opposes. Thus he shows that what is most necessary
of all is what allows one to live humanly
before God, without betraying one’s own humanity and thus obscuring the
Face of the Creator God. In reality, this temptation aims at declaring
superfluous the specifically human, with all its fragility; it suggests
dispensing with the human, avoiding it, considering it obsolete and irrelevant.
And, above all, this temptation intends to make God useless by enthroning one’s
own need in the place of the living God.
Faced next with the vertigo of the heights to which the devil
leads him, with the vision of “all the kingdoms of the world in a single moment
of time” and the promise to give him “all this power and their glory”, Jesus
does not shy away from the limits of space and time inherent in humanity. Luke
in this way gives us the image of temptation as mirage, as dazzle, as hallucination.
Jesus does not read the ability offered him to see the whole world and its
glory in a single instant as a very special spiritual experience, as a gift of
God, or as an action of grace. Instead, he sees this as a distorted vision, an
unreal vision of reality, a hallucination. Why? Because, always, in the eyes of
God, concrete reality is the measure of the authenticity of spiritual
experience. Jesus does not allow himself to be fascinated by the prospect of
his own success in the path of glory and power. Jesus does not yield to the
temptation of power; he does not allow himself to be carried away by the
delirium of omnipotence or by the perverse fascination of mastering “all
things”. Jesus does not make of himself a god, an idol; he does not aspire to
mastering the whole of reality, but rather retained always a sense of human limitation,
of the uniqueness of God and of the human distance from God: You shall worship the Lord, your God, and
him alone shall you serve.
No, indeed: Jesus, like us in all things except sin, does not
forget the essential fragility he has in common with us. But what seems to be
even more “diabolical” and per-verse in this temptation is that it tends to make God marketable. The
devil is, in fact, saying that even God can be bought, that even God has a
price. The devil proposes a quid pro quo
which is very advantageous for Jesus: for, what can a trifling gesture of
adoration (that will soon be forgotten) matter in exchange for might and
wealth, power and glory that will abide and that promise to keep death itself
at bay? In reality, what we have here is the most radical attack conceivable on
the image of God, on faith itself, and on the spiritual life, all of which are
here put up for sale on the market of
temptation. But Jesus rejects the corruption that consists in putting a price
on faith, in making it a bargaining chip, a conviction that Dietrich Bonhoeffer
summed up in his famous dictum: “Grace is not cheap”.
Finally, led by the devil up to Jerusalem, Jesus refuses to make
the temple the foot-stool of his personal affirmation. He rejects the
temptation of the phenomenal, the spectacular, the extraordinary, and he does
not shy away from the limits of his own body. He does not impose his status as
Messiah on people with an exceptional display of prodigious boldness and strength,
by throwing himself from the temple parapet and being saved by angels. Jesus
does not abuse or violate consciences, but rather entrusts them to their own
freedom. The devil’s proposal in this third temptation intends to debase the
human being, to deceive us, to delude us with the mirage of immortality and
indestructibility. But Jesus refuses to push God out of his proper place as
Lord and make him the servant of the human ego. Everything extraordinary is
here rejected by Jesus as superfluous, that is, diabolical, as capable of
distorting the face of man and the face of God. We do not have “God-on-tap”,
available to fulfill our every whim and delusion!
In the light of this dramatic gospel, then, we conclude that
temptation is an exorcism of the fragility, weakness and mortality of the human
condition. To possess goods and glory, to control consciences and to lord it
over them, to enforce on others a relationship of dominion and control: all
this is revealed by Jesus to be an illusion. Temptation is a dazzle that
blinds. We could say that humility, in the etymological sense of adherence to
the humus, to the earthiness of the
human condition, is the first form of safeguarding the truth of the human and
of escaping from the false promise of life inherent in power, be it worldly or
religious. And Jesus not only sets the very highest example for us, his
followers. In Jesus, as children of God by adoption and as members of his Body,
we have already overcome the world of
diabolical delusion. We have only to live that victory in our own lives. For, whoever is begotten by God conquers the
world. And the victory that conquers the world is our faith (1 Jn 5:4). Vintage photograph of our original monastery of Our Lady of the Valley in Lonsdale, RI. Homily for the First Sunday of Lent by Father Simeon.
