St. John makes no mention of the post-baptismal temptations of Christ. St. Mark offers a brief mention of the event: “At once the Spirit drove him out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him (1:12-13).” St. Matthew and St. Luke both record the familiar triple wasteland encounters between Christ and Satan, although not in the same order. St. Luke’s version which will be heard at Mass this Sunday lists the incidents with the bread, the worship of Satan and the lurch off the Temple in that order; St. Matthew reverses the adulation of Satan and the Temple jump which is certainly the sequence most often followed by preachers and in catechisms.
Jesus is understandably hungry after a forty day fast and he is urged by Satan to take things into his own hands and transform stones into bread. The temptation here is insufficient trust in God, a loss of faith in God’s Providence. Certainly, the Father will provide for his Son. To act prematurely is an insult to God’s Fatherhood.
Jesus’ Messiahship is [has?] gradually become known throughout Judea and Galilee. Certainly the Father would not allow any harm to come to his Divine Son, so Jesus is next bid to test God’s Fatherhood. Satan urges Jesus to throw himself down from the Temple height knowing full well that the Father would come to his Son’s rescue. The temptation here is to trust in God too much. With God as his Father, Jesus could clearly take zany risks with no thought for his own harm. In this instance, to act presumptuously is an insult to God’s Fatherhood.
And then there is the ultimate affront to the Fatherhood of God: the worship of Satan. “Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” This third temptation would reject the very paternity, in fact, the very Person of God the Father. God’s supreme Fatherhood, which from the very first day of creation until the final moments of the Apocalypse, will have generated, sustained, and developed all creation, would be ignored, denied and, even worse, transferred onto a rebellious and disreputable creature: the devil himself. Could there be a worse attack on the very person and nature of God?
The faithful should be aware that while Jesus certainly resists the triple temptations from Satan he powerfully asserts his fidelity to his Father with three Scriptural quotations, all from the Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Old Testament, which largely records Jewish history from the insights of the Northern Kingdom, Israel. The exodus from Egypt, the covenant at Mt. Sinai, and the forty year wilderness wanderings with all the trials and tribulations those episodes occasioned but with the assurance of eventual success as Moses stands on Mt. Nebo gazing across the Jordan at Jericho and the Promised Land. [Is this a sentence or a fragment?]
Ancient Jewish fidelity in the Sinai Desert led happily to the Promise [Promised] Land. Christ’s fidelity in the Judean desert led happily to the Gospel message and its fulfilment in his Resurrection, Ascension and sending of the Spirit. Now the challenge is handed over to the Christian believing community, the Church, demanding fidelity in today’s temptations just as fidelity was demanded of the ancient Jews and of the Messiah Christ.
St. Paul this Sunday in the second reading from Romans states the perennial Christian challenge: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. For the Scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” The modern believer, like the ancient Jews and like the tempted Christ, must persevere in fidelity to the Divine Father’s eternal plan and not succumb to the stumbling blocks Satan and his evil devices will certainly provide.
