The Temptation Of Christ In Context

First Sunday of Lent

The two most important questions of life are these: How can I deal with my sins and responsibility for them? The second is: How can I, when I die, know eternal happiness? The Church offers us three critical readings from Scripture to help us with these questions, but there is a problem. The readings are snippets that are parts of whole stories, and the big story is a few thousand years long, from the call of Abraham to the establishment of churches centered on Jesus Christ.

One of my business partners, a non-denominational Christian, once threw this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans at me. “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” If you look at that statement uncritically, thinking that those words represent the essence of the salvation story, you might make a fatal mistake. It sounds like doing two things is all that’s necessary to get to heaven, whatever else you might make of your life. That is, frankly, the error of presumption.

Paul is writing in the context of trying to explain how it is that the Jewish people, who were called by God His special people, who were promised an Anointed, a Messiah, had rejected Jesus, the true Messiah. This was a source of constant anguish for Paul, himself a Jew and a Pharisee before his conversion to Christ. Earlier he had written that if only they would be saved and in Christ, he himself would wish to be separated from Christ, his true love and savior.

In Paul’s theology, there were two kinds of Jews—those who had the right Jewish DNA, and those who were “children of the promise.” The promise is the promise of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who is the “righteousness of God.” To be righteous, it was not enough to be circumcised and have the right DNA and obey the other six-hundred plus requirements laid down by the Pharisees. In fact, doing that can get in the way of salvation. The proper way into the righteousness of God is through Jesus Christ, “the end of the law for the justification of everyone who has faith.” Thus it is necessary to believe in one’s heart that God raised Jesus, and to confess with one’s mouth that Jesus is Lord, a statement that is prima facie treason in the Roman empire. It is necessary but may not be sufficient. In both beginning and ending of the letter to the Romans, we learn that Paul’s mission is to bring about “the obedience of faith.” We must obey Christ’s twin command to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves, even to death. Living and dying in love is what we should expect to do if we want to end our earthly life in the embrace of the Trinity.

Now the first reading, from Deuteronomy, and the Gospel might seem more fitting in this context. The “wandering Aramean” who went down to Egypt was the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the first Israelites who followed the one God. The Lord God heard their cry and rescued the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. He brought them into Palestine, the land of milk and honey, and those who worked the land then brought their first fruits to offer to their God in thanksgiving for all those blessings. Those Israelites who accepted Jesus, the Messiah, as the culmination of God’s gifts to Israel, and came into His Church, were what was called the “New Israel,” along with the non-Jews who believed in the Resurrected Jesus, their Messiah as well.

This sinless Jesus had been baptized by John in the Jordan, not to take away His sin, but to change the nature of Baptism so that because of His passion, death, and resurrection He might bring us into His own mystical body, the Church, at our baptism. This first contest with Satan, these three temptations, had certainly brought down many fake Messiahs, so Satan was certain he could dispose of this one, either with earthly pleasures, or worldly power, or fame in the eyes of humans. The old worm even quoted Scripture to bolster his temptation. But Jesus lashed out with more fitting Scriptures, culminating in the one that drove the old serpent away: “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” He stayed away until the last contest in the Garden of Olives, on the eve of Christ’s suffering and death. Jesus won that one too.

Have we ever been tempted? I know I have, and a lot of the time it’s a temptation to enjoy something I shouldn’t, or do something wonderful so people would acclaim me, or take up some kind of worldly power position. But such things can turn us away from our true calling, our true love, Jesus Christ. As Thomas Aquinas tells us, it was becoming that Christ should be tempted so that we might be strengthened against temptations, to warn us that nobody, however holy, should think himself safe from temptation, and to show us how to overcome temptation from the devil with confidence in God’s mercy. (ST Q. 41 Art 1 Pt III) Temptations are not sin, unless we respond positively to them. A resisted temptation is, in fact, an occasion of grace, for all who have faith in Christ, and act on that blessed faith.