Ah, the First Sunday of Lent! Ash Wednesday through the following Saturday is really just a Lenten warm-up. Each year on Lent's premiere Sunday we hear about Jesus' temptations in the desert. At least in the Synoptic Gospels, of which Matthew is one, it was to the desert he went after his baptism by John in the River Jordan.
For Matthew, the Lord's forty-day and forty-night sojourn in the wilderness is meant to be something of a recapitulation of Israel's forty years in the desert. For the first time in many years, I have decided this year to read through the Bible in a year. I don't do these things by podcast. I just pick up the "good" book and read. As of today, I have read Genesis, Job, Exodus, and the first seventeen chapters of Leviticus- I didn't start exactly on New Year's Day.
I have read the first five books of the Bible I don't know how many times. It seems to me that this narrative, which did not take the form it now has until about BC 1000, is mainly about Israel's formation as a people and their grappling with how to be a people set apart. We should be much more impressed than we are by the ethical monotheism that slowly emerges in ancient Israel. It is their worship of the God of heaven and earth that sets them apart, making them unique among the nations.
Our first reading from Genesis is remarkable, even now, for its depth of meaning. Created in the divine image and, at least initially, in the divine likeness, humanity's temptation remains the same: to rid ourselves of God and to put ourselves in God's place. This is what constitutes sin, original or unoriginal.
This temptation is often subtle. The serpent tells the woman that God doesn't want her to eat the fruit because if she does, she will be like God. Well, the truth is, she is already like God, fruit or no fruit. But likeness is not identity. Hence, to be like God is not to be God. I think, too, this temptation is about denial of reality.
Denial of reality is denial of God. At the fundamental or atomic level, there is right and wrong. Hence, you can't determine these for yourself. Attempts to do so don't so much result in divine punishment in the here and now as to merely reaping what you sow either now or later.
We are constrained by creaturely limits within the boundaries of what is real. Nonetheless, it is perhaps the most human of tendencies to push against these seeking to expand our limits. This is certainly a theological point made by the story of the Tower of Babel. The takeaway of that story is that it is possible to transgress these limits but that one does so at her/his own peril. In our day, one does not need to be religious or even to believe in God to see some of the dangers inherent in bio-technologies and the easy talk about a transhumanistic future. Most of us have seen Bladerunner.
Jesus came, as Saint Paul writes about in such detail in our second reading, to restore our likeness to God, which is lost whenever we fall for the same subtle stratagems as the first human beings in our first reading. The story of "the fall" is by no means a historical account of an actual event. To read it as such, in a flat, two-dimensional way, is to drain it of virtually all revelatory meaning.
Temptations remain the same as those outlined in Genesis and to which the Lord is subjected in our Gospel: the flesh, the world, and the devil.
Turn the stones into bread to soothe your hunger.
Throw yourself down to create a grand spectacle of angels catching you mid-fall, saving you from certain death while demonstrating God's awesome power.
Worship the devil to gain power. In reality, it isn't about worshipping Satan to achieve power, like the guitarist who meets the devil at the railroad junction outside town and sells his soul to be an axe master. Rather, seeking power for its own sake is probably the most devilish thing of all! God doesn't coerce by using divine power. Thunderbolts belong to Zeus, not to the God of Israel. Turning back to Israel as a people, I think this insight goes some distance toward explaining why God hardened Pharoah's heart even in the face of many divine manifestations.
One who is truly alive does not live by bread alone, but by the words of God.
One who truly trusts God does not tempt God. She knows how God works. It isn't divine power on demand.
One who trusts God does not use the means of coercive power to accomplish divine ends. God's kingdom will not be established by the coercive power of the state.
"So submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee" (James 4:7). Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are how, like Jesus, you can resist these perennial temptations.
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