Taken literally this surely must be the strangest petition in the Lord’s Prayer. God does not lead anyone into temptation. We read in the letter of James: “Noone when tempted should say, æI am being tempted by God’, for God cannot be tempted by evil and does not himself tempt anyone.” (James 1.13). So what did Jesus have in mind when he taught his disciples to pray: Father, lead us not into temptation.?
Some modern translations don’t mention temptation at all. Do not bring us to the time of trial, for example, captures neatly those tests of our faith that may come to us from outside ourselves û such as the loss of our employment or our health, or the death of a close friend or relative. From such evils we may well pray to be delivered. But the temptations from which we need to be delivered are more insidious than such disasters, since they may spring from within ourselves. In his book The Christlike God, John V Taylor suggests that these temptations û like those which Jesus himself faced û are related to our exercise of power.
Taylor’s analysis begins with the assertion that power is not a function limited to the obvious possessors of wealth and authority. Every parent, every teacher, every nurse in the hospital, every clerk dealing with the public, every young person toughing it out in the playground, or using their charms to wrap someone around their little finger, in short everyone participating in the politics of daily life û as we all do û is exercising power or contributing to their own or someone else’s power, whether by assertion, passivity or surrender. Somewhere down the line, even in the most small-scale sphere of work team or family life, everyone is bringing some degree of power to bear on others. And power without an antidote is pregnant with temptation, because it is so addictive and corrupting. Power gives us control. We all like that, and want more of it, and because we want more of it, we may persuade ourselves that we are acting altruistically, for the good of others, when actually our motivation is becoming at first subtly, later perhaps grossly confused or distorted by the desire to extend or preserve our own power. Lord, lead us not into temptation.
What then is the antidote? What is it that can counter the temptation inherent in our exercise of power? Taylor insists that the antidote lies not in abdication but in prayer. For true prayer is not about asking God to get things done in the way we think best. That would amount to an attempt to involve God in the power game on our side. There were several examples of true prayer in our readings tonight. Sometimes our prayer springs from our own need û as we saw in the case of the Shunemite woman, who trusted God (or Elisha as the man of God) to deal first with her poverty and then with her childlessness. Sometimes our prayer springs from recognition of the need for our power to help others, exercised in God’s name, to be directed in accordance with God’s will. Elisha looks to God for direction in the exercise of his God-given powers of provision and healing, just as Paul looks to God in his search for guidance relating to the direction and development of what we would now call his Mission Action Plan. It is in this sense that Taylor writes of prayer as æto place oneself in the silent presence of the Eternal Beyond, the God of Truth and Love, and letting the flow of communication between that and one’s truest self clarify the distorted vision, purify the motives, countervail the pressures and set one free from dependence upon any other power except the care for others which holds on, trusting, hoping and enduring, until in the long term it wins through.’ That was the quality of prayer that characterised Elisha in his dealings with the Shunemite woman and her child; it was also, it seems to me, the quality of prayer that characterised Desmond Tutu in his dealings with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Drawing on Jesus’ own experience of confronting temptation in the wilderness, Taylor identifies three kinds of power that we all exercise in some degree, and need to exercise rightly and prayerfully û the power of the provider, the power of the possessor and the power of the performer. We see and exercise the power of the provider through the welfare state as well as our charitable giving, through international aid, and perhaps most directly in our role as parents. These are good things, but they can slide over into an abuse of our power as providers if we use our giving to impose our priorities, our control. My grandfather was not ashamed to say: So long as you have your feet under my mahogany, you do as I say! But when Jesus set about feeding the 5000, he turned to those about him and said, How many loaves have you got? What mattered to him was not the self-esteem of the powerful provider, but the self-respect of those provided for.
The second kind of power Taylor identifies is that of the possessor. Possession can be good, but just below the surface of every instinct of possession lurks the predator. To take what we call a global view, and know truly how we relate to it is a Godlike grace. But when the devil gives us a global view, it is not as a beloved responsibility for which one might lay down one’s life, but as a glittering prize to be captured. The supreme military and financial strength of one nation, or the ubiquitous influence of a multinational commercial empire, or the power of the banking community to grant or withhold loans, tends almost inevitably to convince its possessors that they also have a superior wisdom and a more trustworthy stature than the rest of us. Here indeed is the source of power’s corruption. It tempts us to play God towards other people û parents towards children, great powers towards smaller states, politicians towards their electorate. At any level we can exercise the power of possessors without becoming predators only so long as we acknowledge God as the true source of all power, and ourselves, at most, as trustees of some small portion of that power, accountable to Him for our exercise of it.
And finally there is the power of the performer. Politicians have to be performers these days, but the same is true of teachers and management consultants, doctors and indeed preachers. And it doesn’t necessarily make us insincere or untrustworthy. The performer is always to some degree a miracle-worker, eliciting faith. Jesus obviously had such a power himself, and knew how to use it. Here was a performer divinely innocent of self-concern who û on the Cross – did indeed throw himself down as a challenge to the world’s values and to every distorted and devouring power, presenting to the eyes of all humanity the helpless yet invincible endurance of God’s truth and love. æThanks be to God’ we say, but that is not enough. We have our own small exercise of power, as providers, or possessors, or performers, to bring into line with his, lest we add to the corruption and the despair in the world. Lord, lead us not into temptation as we go out from this place to exercise such power as each one of us may have, humbly and prayerfully, in your name.
Handley Stevens