The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Most of the stories in the stories in the Gospel must come, at whatever remove and modified by whatever literary or popular tradition, from eye witness accounts of what Jesus did and said. A few stories may be pure fabrication, or heavy elaboration, reflecting what people later thought ought to have happened, or been said. A third class of stories are those that, if factually true, can only be based on what Jesus himself said; no one else (apart from the devil) was present at the Temptation, nor during the Agony in the Garden. I prefer to think Jesus was himself the source of the stories as the temptations-in all their oddity (and I’ll come on to that) -suggest to me the struggle of a man working out how he is to approach an enormous undertaking.
That it should be framed as a temptation, however, is surely a literary device alluding to the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. That was the founding story of mankind. Before eating the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve had been immortal and unchanging- just what human beings are not. By exercising their choice they incur suffering but also become capable through labour and ingenuity of such joys as children, Chardin, Chartres, and Chateauneuf des Papes.
 The test for Jesus at the start of his ministry is not so different; he will choose a way of huge sacrifice but huge rewards too that arise from that suffering. But while the consequence of Adam and Eve’s choice is to realise their humanity (which may be why they notice that they are naked), the ultimate consequence of Jesus’ choice is to give us a share in eternal life and his divinity. This is done through exercising human feelings, with, it’s true, some divine magic too, but always I think governed or motivated by humanity.
Looking at the temptations which Satan puts Jesus through, I’m struck by how different they are from the temptations that most of us undergo. No mention of sex or money, envy or irritability. Also, we are not usually tempted by the impossible, and most of Jesus’ temptations are impossible for us; we can’t turn stones to bread or jump harmlessly from tall buildings and only very few of us even aspire to be world leaders.
Further, except as distractions or deflexions from his true destiny none of the temptations is to do anything really wicked. Feeding the hungry doesn’t seem wicked at all and turning stones into bread is, in a manner of speaking, what farmers do the world over. A ministry based on mere sensation would be likely to be a shallow affair, but startling tricks would not be wrong in themselves. And again, the assumption of secular power is not intrinsically wicked, although it clearly would be if in service of Satan. The temptations Jesus rejects are one’s which would make his ministry easier but which would miss the more mysterious and harsher point of God’s intervention as a man. They foreshadow in this way that second more urgent temptation in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus was again alone without witnesses. Again he chooses the way of unspeakable pain, rejecting the sensational use of divine power.
And yet it’s strange that having rejected magic, sensation and power, he comes quite close to using, at least the first two, in his ministry. He does not turn stones into bread, but he does miraculously multiply loaves and fishes to feed five thousand people. He doesn’t leap from the top of the Temple, but it is by calming storms and healings sensational enough to draw huge crowds of people that he is believed to be a great prophet. These miracles do, however, always have a more spiritual significance, whether from their context or for the individual concerned; the five thousand are hungry for the word as much as for physical food and they are fed both. Even so, despite their spiritual dimension of the miracles, Jesus is often misunderstood; after feeding the five thousand Jesus has to vanish to escape being crowned as a king. Similarly he frequently begs the healed not to tell others about their experience. All this seems to vindicate the decisions made earlier as Satan tempts Jesus.
 The rejection of temporal power is apparently less ambiguous; the clearest statement is at his arrest just after that agonised moment in the garden, when he says that he could call on regiments of angels to save him if he wished. A little later, before Pilate, he appears (not unequivocally) to deny any earthly kingship. Jesus clearly does not seek any sort of earthly power or authority, but the Gospel is equally clearly interested in social and economic reforms which seldom happen without political intervention, and I’m quite sure that the Kingdom of Heaven is not just a metaphor for a spiritual state somewhere or sometime or other.
So there is something of a paradox; the temptations which he undergoes at the end of the 40 days are a struggle to define his ministry and seem to suggest that he will not simply meet human hunger, at least, not with bread alone; that he will eschew sensational magic and that he will abjure any temporal power. But the story of his ministry contains elements of him giving way to, all these temptations.
The simplest answer to this paradox would be that the stories about Jesus and the Gospel writers themselves, were indeed confused and one might go so far along this route, as to suggest that the story of the Temptation and perhaps the Agony in the Garden too, are made up to explain what the Gospel writers and their predecessors thought was happening (or ought to have happened). I admit that seems quite likely, but I think it’s instructive, and even inspiring, to treat the story as genuine and that the reason we know about it is because Jesus chose to tell his disciples to explain his own struggle.
As I have suggested, the idea of temptation and choice, from Adam and Eve onwards, emphasises humanity and the essence of the choice before Jesus at the end of the 40 days was whether to be subject to human emotion and suffering, or whether to appear as God. He chooses the human way and it is through being a human that he shows us what God is like, and, by example, that we may attain divinity by expressing fully our humanity.
The miracles and the magic which he does perform are always a humane response of compassion or understanding usually for another individual’s predicament. And usually, at the centre of each miracle or wonderful act, there is a choice; “What do you want?” or “Do you want to be healed?” There is always a spiritual aspect, but the essential expression which brings about the miracle is the human exercise of choice. The spiritual change in the person healed and the healing process are the result of a human emotional transaction.
What these stories seem to be telling us is that something about the power of our humanity; the ability to choose does in a sense, as the serpent old Eve, make us like Gods. Jesus exercises his human capacity for choice in order to bring salvation and in a small way echoing or reflecting that momentous choice, we can choose to accept the grace and salvation offered to us.  Resisting temptation is perhaps not so much avoiding the threat of sin as accepting the possibility of true, eternal, life brought about by action in this earthly life. It is through the full development of our humanity that we may release our divine potential. Amen.