Jesus Is Tempted
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The Three Temptations of Christ
"Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil."
Matthew 4:1The Gospel of Matthew tells us explicitly that Jesus went to the desert to undergo temptation to sin. But before the tempations take place, something else happens:
"He fasted for forty days and forty nights..."
Matthew 4: 2
The Lenten fast that take place on Ash Wednesday (and later, Good Friday) is not just an emulation of Jesus fasting in the desert - it's an actual, powerfully efficacious way to combat spiritual weakness and bolster our defenses against sin and temptation. Later, Jesus would re-emphasize this, telling his disciples that certain, fortified sins (and demons) can only be overcome through "prayer and fasting" (Mk 9:29).
Every Friday during Lent, we practice a minor "fast" by eliminating meat from our diet. In fact, the Church never removed the obligation to abstain from eating meat every Friday throughout the whole year. Canon Law only removed the pain of being in a state of mortal sin if you did not observe it. We're still called to abstain as we do during Lent.
The First Temptation
The first question someone might ask is "Why? Why would the Devil bother to tempt the Son of God, Who cannot sin?"
The answer is in the very first word of the verse above: "IF"
The Devil doesn't know Jesus is the Son of God. He has an inkling that Jesus of Nazareth is not like everyone else, but to what extent, he's not sure, and he's using these temptations to find out the answer. His intelligence is off the charts, so he's homing in on the possiblity He is the Son of God, even though there's a contradiction to his mind. Lucifer, recall, begain his existence in front of God; he doesn't expect God's only Son incarnate to be anything less than glorious and of high esteem. The fellow in front of him is hungry, poor, and of anonymous origin compared to the bright lights of Jerusalem. It's not adding up, and he's going to lay traps to get to the truth.
“If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.”
Matthew 4:3
On the surface, we see that Lucifer is going right at the most basic of human weaknesses: hunger. He's ready to exploit our frailities - he never lets an opportunity go to waste - so the first temptation does two things:
1) Exploits the appeal of food to a man who hasn't eaten for 40 days, so that ...
2) He can get Jesus to perform a true miracle, which would reveal His identity.
That's pretty sneaky, and smart. But Our Lord won't take the bait:
“It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”
Matthew 4:4
In fact, all of Jesus' answers will comprise quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures; even the Devil knows what's written down. The Lord's response reveals to us the following:
1) Man's nourishment has a spiritual dimension that outweighs the physical (which is the whole point of fasting)
2) Jesus is the Bread come down from heaven; Jesus is the Word that comes forth from the mouth of God. Turning a stone into bread is an infinitely smaller miracle than the one standing right in front of Lucifer, showing the fatal flaw of sin that clouds the intellect.
3) Lucifer knows the Israelites want and expect a populist Messiah that will provide all their physical needs - particularly food, given the recent history of famines in that day and age. Jesus, simply put, isn't that kind of Messiah.
The Second Temptation
Lucifer has already tested the waters, and found that Jesus isn't going to perform any parlor tricks to give away his identity. Perhaps he's clued in, or perhaps he's even more confused. Certainly the God that rained down manna from heaven would provide real bread to the people of Israel, and yet, this "one" waxes on about the word of God, instead! And so Jesus allows another test. This time, the Devil is going for something more "straightforward", and this time, he's going to use Scripture to try and force Jesus' hand.
"Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written:‘He will command his angels concerning you’
and ‘with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.’
Matthew 4:5-6
Jesus, indeed, is the Temple, and the Temple upon which they are standing, is not to be saved. Both "Temples" will be torn down: Jesus, via demand of the Israelites, and Herod's Temple, via destruction by the Romans. In neither circumstance will angels come to save the Temple. In only one case are we promised that the Temple will rebuilt "in three days": the Body of Christ. Without knowing that Jesus is God, the Devil is previewing for us the very words of the Pharisees hurled at Jesus on the Cross: "Save yourself."
Jesus will not save Himself, nor will He be tempted to save Himself.
Jesus answered him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’”
Matthew 4:7
The Third Temptation"Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence..."
Matthew 4:8
There are a few interesting strategies in play with the third temptation.
First, we know that throughout Scripture, mountains play an overt role as the backdrop of scenes where God, in some way, reveals Himself to others. To be high on a mountain is to be "close" to God, and literally so, according to ancient beliefs. So the stakes are clearly ratcheted up, and Lucifer is really going to put the Savior's feet to the fire, to see if He'll break.
Second, we know that, for the average Israelite, the only kingdoms they have known belong to the Persians or the Babylonians or the Greeks or the Romans. For generations come and gone, they have been subjects, not citizens. Even with the largely laissez-faire attitude of Rome toward their Judean outpost, the Jewish people are not their own, toiling under the thumb of an emperor hundreds of miles away, whose image they only know by the coins they must conduct business with. Psychologically, then, the idea of independence from Rome - to be a self-governed and sovereign kingdom (like David's) - is an offer no average Judean could refuse.
Third, in the verse above, the Devil has clearly set himself up as the ape of God. God was the first Creator, sure, "but look at the magnificence of what I've done. Do you see how very good it is? The glorious armies, the mercantile, the people streaming in from all corners of the globe? Forget restoring the Davidic Kingdom, how would you like to be in possession of all of these kingdoms?
Lucifer, like the people who would crucify Our Lord, were not expecting a spiritual Messiah, but one who would embody, literally, the Return of the King. If this Jesus were he, the Devil reasoned, he will surely take the offer, for the very reasonable price of "prostrating and worshiping me."
At this, Jesus said to him, “Get away, Satan! It is written:
‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship
and him alone shall you serve.’”
Matthew 4:10
Conclusion
It's easy to reacquaint ourselves with the Temptations in the Desert every year, without realizing how important they are to the story of Christ's mission on earth, from the beginnin of his ministry up to the Paschal Sacrifice. Jesus entered the desert and underwent the temptations to "lay the groundwork", as it were, by first reversing the act of Adam turning away from God and toward the serpent, which necessitated His incarnation in the first place. Adam and Eve were tempted once. Here, Jesus is tempted three times, not for some magical reason, but because, in Biblical convention, "three" is a number that denotes "completeness", and something repeated three times indicates "maximum intensity" or "maximum effect". Therefore, Jesus is tempted three times to show that He has comprehensively addressed the first movement of Adam and Eve's will toward the Devil, and by using Scripture for each retort, demonstrates His fidelity to the will of His Father.
This is far from the end of Jesus' mission, however, because the consequence of Adam's sin is still in effect: the infinite separation between man and his Creator, and his concurrent captivity by the Devil. There is nothing that a mere, finite human being can do to repair the infinite harm of Original Sin. And that's why Lucifer's epic miscalculation of what kind of Messiah was being sent to save Israel turned out to be his undoing. We might even reason that since the Devil fled from Our Lord after the third temptation, he figured out that Jesus was, indeed, the Messiah. But he still didn't know what kind of Messiah He was. He didn't realize that this Jesus of Nazareth was not just a holy prophet or a king-in-waiting: He was the Son of God, God Himself.
For a while, he hedged his bets. This wasn't the end of the temptations, either. We know what happened later in the same Gospel of Matthew, when he let Simon Peter do his dirty work:
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”
He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”Matthew 16:21-23
Jesus was tempted by Lucifer until the very end. Matthew, among the Gospel writers, was very careful to point out this relationship between the Adam that fell to temptation, and the New Adam, Who would not.
Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads
and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, if you are the Son of God, [and] come down from the cross!”
Likewise the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him and said,
“He saved others; he cannot save himself. So he is the king of Israel! Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.
He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”Matthew 27:40-43
Disclaimer: This is just my own personal speculations, but I wonder often if this was the moment the Devil, in abject horror, realized his fatal mistake and actually wanted to stop the proceedings. Because, it seems like the Devil was all good with receiving the soul of this "earthly" Messiah - the supposed embodiment of the nation of Israel - God's Chosen People - in redemption for all the virtuous dead, and the virtuous dead to come. The Devil must have relished the thought of not only frustrating God's plan, but assuming total and unending power over God's Kingdom on earth (the ersatz Davidic Kingdom).
But there was one thing he didn't count on: The man taken down from the Cross on that Passover was no mere man. He was the God-Man, whose soul the devil could never take possession of. By letting Jesus go to the Cross - by letting him trade His life for those who went before - the devil paved the way to his own defeat. The sin of Adam was vanquished, the dead rose up from their graves, and Jesus Himself would place the chains on the Fallen Angel who thought all of creation was suddenly his.
From that time forward, the Devil has ached to strip as many souls as possible from the hand of Christ, and his demons (who are not chained) continue to tempt us to this day. The temptations in the desert, and Jesus' fidelity to the Word of His Father, are a reminder that our freedom from slavery to sin was paid with a heavy cost, under human suffering to the most extreme degree. Jesus wants every Lenten observance to be one in which we draw closer to His own desert experience, strengthening our souls for the moment when our lives will be asked of us, that we may not be added to the Enemy's collection of faithless, unrepentant sinners who reside now forever in his terrible domain.
