Drama in the Desert
From the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and all the way to Golgotha, we see plainly that Christ Jesus did not come into this world to tread the broad and easy way. As his disciples, we should keep that fact foremost in mind. On the contrary, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit he goes without detours to the place where divine battles are fought: that is, to the depths of the human heart, symbolized in Matthew, first, by the depths of Jordan’s waters, where demonic monsters were thought to lurk, and, today, by the desert, where only the saint or the demon can survive. If Satan is the hero of the world—the lord of the earthly-minded, plotting the disruption of the divine order of unity and love at every step—Christ is the divine Hero who comes to confront Satan’s logic with clear-headedness, dogged determination and humility. In this forbidding wilderness two diametrically opposed solutions to the human plight are at loggerheads: on the one hand, capitulation to the comforts of the satanic suggestions; on the other, surrender to the mercy of God’s Providence. Either option requires listening and yielding to a voice from beyond ourselves, though resonating in the depths of our being. Who can doubt that such a tug of war is at the center of the human drama? And to which voice will I pledge my allegiance and devotion?
The desert is the place of utter poverty and, therefore, an invitation to heroic trust in God. When we experience our own barrenness, when we are most in need, then it is that we are the most vulnerable and that the decisive crises arise. Will I accept quick fixes and adore their Pusher, thus betraying my identity as a person begotten of God, my Creator? Or will I agree to wait in silence and privation, fasting from all the world has to offer, for the perfect length of God’s pleasure, represented by the forty days and nights that recapitulate Israel’s historical wandering in the desert?
The story of humanity’s Fall through sin is explained today in the tale of our first parents’ seduction through the temptation to become like God. Genesis shows us that God did not create the Human in a condition of alienation from itself but rather in a relationship of graciously bestowed friendship with the Creator. Harmony and not disruption is our origin. Because God creates us in the divine image, God gives us the highest of gifts, freedom—a gift that puts us squarely before the challenge of accountability: this single truth is the source both of our greatest difficulties and of our highest dignity as spiritual beings. A creature cast in unvarying moral uprightness as in a block of concrete would not be free at all. Goodness, like love, can never be the product of an automatic-response mechanism, but only the fruit of a free and personal act.
Now, this is where the plot of salvation-history thickens. God knows “in advance” that humans, enjoying such freedom of choice, will yield to the temptation to want to become like God. This foreknowledge on God’s part, far from inducing a divine mistake, is rather a measure of how highly God regards the freedom he conferred on us. Yes, God is willing to risk the defeat of his wondrous design of friendship with man. It seems that for God everything hinges on our possessing by nature the privilege of freedom of choice. The reason must be that, without such freedom, there can be no authentic, reciprocal love, which is ultimately what God is after. God does not only wish to “make us happy” in a generic and static manner; God wants for us to enjoy forever the blissful intimacy of his love, and for this a reciprocal relationship is necessary which can be entered into only through the portal of total freedom. God always bestows his love, but we must actively embrace it and live accordingly.
But God’s factual foreknowledge of humankind’s Fall is accompanied by an even deeper redemptive foreknowledge: namely, by the Father’s intention to send his Son into the world as the One who would face the very same temptation as Adam and Eve, but this time overcoming it. Today’s desert scene is, in fact, Paradise revisited: this is the scene of the unimaginable opportunity whereby the Lord Jesus undoes by his fidelity and obedience the evil that had been perpetrated there, and so re-establishes the innocence of our first condition. This is a victory that only a simultaneously divine and human Savior could accomplish for us. The decisive significance of today’s drama in the desert is that Christ does not triumph over temptation only for himself but for all humankind and each of us, for all who form his Body, so that every one of us can participate in his victory over proud rebellion and puffed-up self-aggrandizement and delusional phantasms of power and glory. Let’s be honest: We do not have to be princes, politicians or mega-CEO’s to be eminent practitioners of the dark arts of selfishness!
The Gospel today portrays Jesus’ victory as occurring after a 40-day fast, that is, at a moment when humanly speaking he is at his weakest and most vulnerable. Make no mistake about it: the temptations he undergoes are genuine temptations. They are not a show of pious make-believe enacted merely to teach us a moral lesson. Jesus may not have experienced the seduction of evil superficially, that is, as an enticement to crude sensual gratification. But surely for him it’s all the worse, because he is tested at a much deeper level of his being. He suffers temptation in its pure state as a colossal gravitational pull to disobedience against his Father’s mission. What is here dramatized is nothing less than Satan instigating Jesus by every means available to his demonic know-how to abandon his divine Filiation and instead worship the Father of lies. In his well-aimed replies to each of Satan’s enticements, Jesus uses solely the words of Scripture. In this way he shows us that only total obedience to God, total interior identification with God’s Word, can transform mere freedom of choice into perfect freedom of heart and soul. Indeed, we are most fully and gloriously ourselves only when God’s Word pervades and animates our whole being as the motivating source of all our thoughts, decisions and actions.
In today’s encounter between God’s Incarnate Wisdom and the arch-Tempter we see that Satan, for all his angelic intelligence, did not understand the divine logic of salvation: namely, that obedient weakness is transmuted into spiritual power by the alchemy of the Father’s delight in the Son’s fidelity. Only faith can understand this, because only faith can understand the paradoxes of divine love. Satan juggles rationality and irony masterfully, but he is woefully ignorant of love’s readiness to embrace weakness for the sake of the beloved. When Satan gets his sharp teeth into Jesus’ flesh, his fangs crumble like sandstone grinding against steel. Sly, relentless, elemental Temptation then becomes elemental Overthrow of the Tempter. Satan thought he was testing the weakness of a generic holy man, yet all the while the Wisdom of God was, in fact, exposing, for all to see, the ultimate impotence of the Deceiver in the face of obedient fidelity and love. Satan is wholly ignorant of the power of fidelity out of love, and this is his Achilles’ heel. Loving fidelity to our Creator and Savior is thus our own strongest weapon in any temptation.
And behold angels approached and served him: I suggest that in these last seven words of today’s gospel text we have nothing less than the surprising fulfillment, by Jesus’ heavenly Father, of precisely the three offers Satan has just made to Jesus. As temptation leaves our Lord, fulfillment approaches. Instead of his (1) eating the bread Satan tempted him to create out of stones, angels now wait on him as at the heavenly banquet, where the sole nourishment is the Word of the Father. Instead of (2) casting himself down from the temple parapet, thus coercing the Father to send protecting angels to prove his love for him, now the Father, unbidden, sends a host of angels to take up, on earth, their jubilant task of waiting upon the eternal King of heaven. And, because the Incarnate Word plainly (3) refuses obeisance to anyone but the Father, Jesus himself receives the adoring service that Satan had tried to wrest for himself from him, the humble Son.
Do we not ourselves experience—very palpably at times—God’s marvelous generosity with us when, after we have struggled to serve only him, God then overwhelms us with the very things we thought we had renounced forever, only now raised to an infinitely higher potency of truth, durability, and delight?
In conclusion then, brothers and sisters, let us embrace the freedom given us today by the power of the words of this Gospel and by the grace of this Holy Eucharist we are celebrating, and choose with a joyful heart to follow Christ more intimately step by step wherever he may lead us during this particular Lententide. And let us likewise allow Christ the freedom to fulfill our needs, desires and expectations beyond our most extravagant imaginings, for he can surely do it. Christ, I would say, is constitutionally incapable of leading us anywhere but to Paradise!
