Three Temptations

The twentieth century Swedish New Testament scholar, Birger Gerhardsson, had a high view of the development and transmission of the gospel accounts in the early church. For Gerhardsson, this was primarily an oral phenomenon. People told stories about Jesus, and as the first Christians meditated on the character of Jesus, on the shape of his ministry, and the significance of his death and resurrection, a number of traditions began to take shape. In this way, Gerhardsson accounts for the rather different accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus, which we find in the four gospels of the New Testament. For Gerhardsson, it is all about orality and the oral tradition, presenting a sharp contrast with the various documentary hypotheses, which are used to explain the discrepancies between the gospels.

Matthew’s account of the temptation of Jesus, which we have heard today, held a particular fascination for Gerhardsson. Matthew, of course, speaks to a Jewish Christian community, who wanted to assert that Jesus was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. Indeed, in chapter 5, Jesus says ‘I did not come to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfil it.’ And when we look at the gospel reading today, we see that Jesus quotes three passages of scripture in response to his tempter. They are all quotations from the Book of Deuteronomy. 

The story of the temptation in the wilderness is significant for Matthew because it forms a meditation on the story of Israel, which is formed in large part by a prayerful meditation on the Book of Deuteronomy, Chapters 6 – 8. Just as the baptism of Jesus recorded immediately before this story corresponds to Israel’s passing through the waters of the Red Sea at the Exodus, so Jesus identifies completely with the plight of Israel as he spends 40 days and nights in the wilderness just as Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness.

Gerhardsson, comparing the much more succinct account of the temptation in Mark’s earlier account, describes this much longer story in Matthew as a form of midrash. Gerhardsson describes midrash as a creative form of interpretation, which was pioneered by the rabbis. Normally composed out of already existing material, like the three quotations from Deuteronomy, the rabbis would draw on this raw material for something new to evolve. Midrash may start from the sacred text. It may be no more than a phrase or a single word. But its meaning is extended and its implications drawn out so that new and fresh ideas begin to emerge. This is a creative interpretation, which perhaps over the centuries has in turn provoked a series of creative interpretations.

So as we enter the season of Lent, we can read the story of the temptations of Jesus as a means of reflecting on the temptations which we ourselves sometimes endure, and which we seek to avoid. Early and medieval commentaries on this passage often reflect on the temptations of gluttony, vanity, and avarice. And we can certainly see how the temptation to turn stones into bread might provoke some reflection on the temptation of gluttony. But there is perhaps more here than meets the eye. When we look at these temptations, while each may illuminate a characteristic of the human condition, and our vulnerability to particular sins, the character of Matthew’s description of these three incidents is not as straightforward as we might at first believe. Consider the first temptation. However hungry I am, turning stones into bread is perhaps not the first option that springs to mind when I am starving – unless of course I am so hungry that I begin hallucinating. There may be a way in which these three temptations serve to help us identify aspects of the human condition, but there is a sort of distancing from the human condition that is also going on. By and large, human beings don’t often turn stones into bread. That is not their perennial temptation – although if the recent General Synod is anything to go by, there is some evidence to suggest that they are rather more adept at turning bread into stones. 

So another creative interpretation is to suggest that the point of this story is to teach us something about the identity of Jesus Christ. There has been that moment of revelation at the point of his baptism, and so this story begins to provide an explanation of what it means to recognize Jesus as the Son of God. This dramatic contest between Christ and the devil serves to emphasise the divinity of Christ. In the ancient church, at precisely the time that people were arguing over what it meant to talk about both the divinity and the humanity of Jesus Christ, people loved to use this story as a little case study. By virtue of his humanity, Jesus suffers temptation, but by virtue of his divinity, he will never succumb. So the story becomes an exploration of a series of Christological questions about the identity of Jesus. 

But I suspect that both these interpretations have missed something. We need to go a bit deeper into this text… Ancient commentators may have used this text as a form of moral exhortation to avoid the sins of gluttony, vanity and avarice. They may have used the story to think about the divinity and humanity of Christ. But we need to remember that this story takes it bearings from the great narrative trajectory of the Old Testament, and the story of the Exodus, Israel’s foundational narrative. We need to go back to the story of Exodus to get to grips with Matthew’s account of the temptations of Jesus. 

Matthew records that Jesus is hungry, and of course we know that the Israelites experienced hunger in the wilderness. God rained down manna and quail upon the people, but even though plentiful supplies of food appeared like the dew every morning, the people could not quite bring themselves to believe in the promise of such abundance. They tried to gather more than they could eat, so that the food rotted away. It is a story which arises out of our insecurity, our inability to trust in the grace of God. The first temptation reminds us of that failure of trust. Perhaps at the heart of Lent is an invitation to renew our faith in a God who is always gracious and generous. Perhaps we need to renew our confidence in the possibility of grace and generosity. Instead of worrying about scarcity, we might find in our hearts the confidence to believe in God’s abundance and the promise of God’s kingdom. 

The second temptation speaks of Jesus standing on the pinnacle of the temple. Matthew’s story may be curiously confected, but the final quotation used by Jesus from the Book of Deuteronomy is rather telling: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’… If you read on in the Book of Deuteronomy, it says ‘as you tested him at Massah’. The word ‘Massah’ means ‘testing’ and this refers to another story in the Book of Exodus. In Chapter 17, the Israelites are still wandering through the wilderness and they begin to despair. They quarrel with Moses. This time they are not hungry. They are thirsty. And there is no water. The people complain. They grumble, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’ In their despair, they become incapable of hope. In a world where hope seems to be in short supply, perhaps this Lent we may need to recover the discipline and virtue of hope.

Finally, we come to the third temptation. What the devil offers is a vision of uncontrolled and unlimited power. It speaks of the desire to dominate and rule, to exercise power in a way which is unaccountable and unchallenged. Jesus’ response draws again on the language and imagery of Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy 6, which follows immediately after the Shema: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength’ (Deuteronomy 6.4), the writer goes on to lament the distraction of riches and the temptation to follow other Gods. Hence, the brusque dismissal of the devil’s idolatry. But of course, such idolatry reflects a failure to heed the words of the Shema, and to truly love God. Perhaps this Lent, we need to think about our capacity to love both God and our neighbours as ourselves.

So there are three temptations in this story. And yet in every one we find a hint of the great theological virtues: faith, hope and love. Lent is not a time to play a little charade pretending that it is wicked to be you, or a time to make yourselves uncomfortable in some fiddling but irritating way. We give up chocolate or booze or sugar in our tea, pretending that by making ourselves feel rather guilty and miserable, we will become exemplars of moral virtue. Well, good luck with that.

If that is all that Lent is about, then we have completely missed the point. Lent is a season when we prepare for the mystery of Easter, we are invited to go deeper into the mystery of our faith, to rediscover our capacity to hope, to go deeper into our hearts to learn again what it means to love. The temptations teach us that we need not be overwhelmed by the power of sin because in this story Jesus is teaching us with these three simple quotations from the book of Deuteronomy what it means to trust again, to hope again, and to love again.