Be Tempted! Series

I appreciate that in Jesus’ case the temptation is framed in terms of His being able to expect angels to lift Him up if He does jump off a cliff, so that He won’t actually get hurt but frankly I don’t think that’s all that different from what goes through the mind of everyone who has struggled with the temptation to jump.

It’s always about taking the ’easy way out’, and that is exactly how it is put to Jesus too - ’Take the easy way down. God will take care of you!’

At any rate, my point is that with this and the previous two temptations, what we are dealing with is not outside our normal realm of human experience at all. On the contrary, Jesus is tempted just as we are tempted. Both in form and in content Jesus is travelling the well-worn path that we all have trodden.

There is nothing particularly unique about the kinds of things Jesus is tempted with nor the context in which these temptations take place. So what is it then that makes these temptation narratives so unique and so worthy of mention in Luke’s Gospel?

I’m guessing that most of you have already answered this question in your minds - namely, that what is unique in Jesus’ wilderness temptations is that He actually overcomes temptation whereas we regularly do not. Jesus overcomes temptation, beats the Devil at his game, and shows us that sin and human weakness do not have the final say in the way the world is going. But ... I’m not sure that’s really the answer either?

Well … it has to be a part of the answer, I suppose. Certainly the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews rejoiced in the fact that "we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." (Hebrews 4:15)

Even so, I wonder if it’s ever really that easy to make a clear distinction between temptation and sin.

There’s one particularly lovely boy in our Youth Centre who told me that he gave up his job as a security guard at a local fashion outlet because he found he couldn’t stop starting at the patrons. He told me that he’d been brought up to believe that ’if you look once, that’s okay but if you look twice …’

Now the obvious response to that is to say, "well bother, you were tempted but you didn’t do anything about it. Congratulations!" But from this guy’s point of view the being tempted was itself a sin of sorts, and who am I to try to correct him on that when Jesus Himself did say that those who commit adultery in their hearts (ie. are tempted even if they don’t do anything about it) are just as wicked as those who give in to temptation!

Now I’m not suggesting that there aren’t some useful distinctions to make between sin and temptation and self-control and human weakness but I’m convinced that it is all rather complex, just as I’m convinced that Jesus’ superiority over human weakness is not the only reason (or even the chief reason) that these wilderness temptations are given such priority of place in the New Testament.

Indeed, I believe the reason that the Gospel writers were so keen to portray Jesus as being tempted in their narratives was not because there was anything particularly unique or special about the Jesus temptations, about their context or even Jesus’ response to them, but rather what made this experience so special was that it was in fact so ordinary.