2 Corinthians 6: 1 – 10; Matthew 4: 1 – 11
Quite recently in church we’ve had that lovely hymn by Cardinal Newman Praise to the Holiest in the Height. The second verse goes as follows:
O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
a second Adam to the fight
and to the rescue came.
The New Testament often sees Christ as a ‘second Adam’; the parallel between the two is perhaps particularly apparent in the account of Jesus’ temptation. Adam and Eve were also tempted. Jesus’ temptation occurs in the barren wilderness, whereas Adam and Eve are tempted amongst the luxuriant growth of the Garden of Eden. Jesus is tempted to make bread out of a stone to satisfy his hunger. Adam and Eve, surrounded by food, are tempted by the one fruit which they have been commanded not to eat. Jesus is tempted three times, but does not succumb, whereas Adam and Eve are caught at the first temptation. Jesus shows unwavering loyalty and obedience to His Heavenly Father. Adam and Eve do not.
In both accounts the insinuation made by Satan is that God is not trustworthy. That what God says is not true. “You shall not surely die” if you eat the fruit, says the snake to Eve. And when Jesus is tempted Satan says “If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” Throw yourself off the pinnacle of the Temple. Test your own powers, and God’s care for you. Prove that you are who you think you are. The third temptation is the most crass of all. Perhaps Satan is getting desperate! He promises the whole world to Jesus in return for His worship – when the world of course belongs to God alone. It isn’t Satan’s to give. In each case Jesus responds by quoting Scripture, placing Himself under its authority and in obedience to His heavenly Father. If He feels hungry and alone after his forty days in the wilderness, His needs for physical sustenance and spiritual assurance will be met by His Father alone.
When I was a student in Oxford, I knew a nun called Sister Benedicta, Sister Ben, as we called her. Her order had as its motto the phrase “having nothing, yet possessing all things” which appears in our first reading. The nuns literally possessed nothing. Sister Ben once told me about how, when you possess nothing even having your own particular stub of a pencil in your pocket took on a particular significance. You wanted that pencil, because it was yours – and woe betide anyone who walked off with it!
Our possessions – almost anything it seems – can be so important because they help us to forget our insufficiency. Augustine, who spent his youth trying to satisfy his cravings, made a very famous diagnosis of the human condition, writing in his Confessions “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.” The advertisers are always trying to persuade us otherwise. In particular, these days, they would like us to think that owning a particular brand of, say car or computer or sunglasses will guarantee the desirable lifestyle they depict. They know only too well how to play on our restlessness. Centuries later, Blaise Pascal expressed the same idea in these words:
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in humanity a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This we try in vain to fill with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensee 10.148.
As we set out on this Lent, let us remember that only God can fill our emptiness. Jesus knew this, and He resolutely refused to allow anything else to take the place of God. Even in moments of temptation, of suffering as at Gethsemane and when He felt abandoned by His Father on the Cross, He remained steadfastly obedient. That obedience rescues us from all our failures and restores us to relationship with our Creator. As our hymn puts it:
O generous love! that he who smote
in man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo.
Amen