Showdown in the Desert
By Philip Yancey from his book “The Jesus I Never Knew”
Luke 4:1-14 . . . And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’ ” And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, “ ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’ ”
And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,’ and “ ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ” And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
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The gospels assert that Jesus, the Jew who grew up in rural Galilee, was none other than God’s own Son, dispatched from heaven to lead the fight against evil. With that mission in view, certain questions about Jesus’ priorities immediately come to mind. At the top of the list, natural disasters: If Jesus had the power to cure illness and raise the dead, why not tackle a few macro-problems like earthquakes and hurricanes, or perhaps the whole sinister swarm of mutating viruses that plague the earth?
Philosophers and theologians blame many of the rest of earth’s ills on the consequences of human freedom, which raises a whole new set of questions. Do we in fact enjoy too much freedom? We have the freedom to harm and kill each other, to fight global wars, to despoil our planet. We are even free to defy God, to live without restraints as though the other world did not exist. At the least, Jesus could have devised some irrefutable proof to silence all skeptics, tilting the odds decisively in God’s favor. As it is, God seems easy to ignore or deny.
Jesus’ first “official” act as an adult, when he went into the wilderness to meet the accuser face-to-face, gave him the occasion to address these problems. Satan himself tempted the Son of God to change the rules and achieve his goals by a dazzling, shortcut method. More than Jesus’ character was at stake on the sandy plains of Palestine; human history hung in the balance.
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When John Milton wrote a sequel to his epic Paradise Lost, he made the Temptation, not the crucifixion, the hinge event in Jesus’ effort to regain the world. In a garden, a man and woman had fallen for Satan’s promise of a way to rise above their assigned state. Millennia later, another representative — the Second Adam, in Paul’s phrase — faced a similar test, though curiously inverted. Can you be like God? the serpent had asked in Eden; Can you be truly human? asked the tempter in the desert.
As I read the Temptation story it occurs to me that, in the absence of eyewitnesses, all details must have come from Jesus himself. For some reason, Jesus felt obliged to disclose to his disciples this moment of struggle and personal weakness. I presume the Temptation was a genuine conflict, not a role Jesus acted out with a prearranged outcome. The same tempter who had found a fatal spot of vulnerability in Adam and Eve aimed his thrust against Jesus with deadly accuracy.
Luke sets the stage with a tone of understated drama. “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.” Like single combat warriors, two giants of the cosmos converged on a scene of desolation. One, just beginning his mission in enemy territory, arrived in a badly weakened state. The other, confident and on home turf, seized the initiative.
I puzzle over certain details of the Temptation. Satan asked Jesus to turn a stone into bread, offered him all the kingdoms of the world, and urged him to jump from a high place in order to test God’s promise of physical safety. Where is the evil in these requests? The three temptations seem like Jesus’ prerogatives, the very qualities to be expected in a Messiah. Would not Jesus go on to multiply bread for five thousand, a far more impressive display? He would also conquer death and rise again to become King of Kings. The three temptations do not seem evil in themselves — and yet clearly something pivotal happened in the desert.
The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins presents the Temptation as something of a get-acquainted session between Jesus and Satan. In the dark about the Incarnation, Satan did not know for certain whether Jesus was an ordinary man or a theophany or perhaps an angel with limited powers like himself. He challenged Jesus to perform miracles as a means of scouting his adversary’s powers. Martin Luther goes further, speculating that throughout his life Jesus “conducted himself so humbly and associated with sinful men and women, and as a consequence was not held in great esteem,” on account of which “the devil overlooked him and did not recognize him. For the devil is farsighted; he looks only for what is big and high and attaches himself to that; he does not look at that which is low down and beneath himself.”
In the gospel accounts, the single combat warriors treat each other with a kind of wary respect, like two boxers circling one another in the ring. For Jesus, the greatest strain was probably a willingness to put up with the Temptation in the first place. Why not simply destroy the tempter, saving human history from his evil plague? Jesus demurred.
For his part, Satan offered to trade away his dominion over the world in exchange for the satisfaction of prevailing over the Son of God. Although Satan posed the tests, in the end it was he who flunked them. In two tests he merely asked Jesus to prove himself; by the third he was demanding worship, something God would never accede to.
The Temptation unmasked Satan, while God remained masked. If you are God, said Satan, then dazzle me. Act like God should act. Jesus replied, Only God makes those decisions, therefore I do nothing at your command.
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In Wim Wender’s elegant films about angels (Wings of Desire; Faraway, So Close), celestial beings discuss together in childlike wonder what it must be like to drink coffee and digest food, to experience warmth and pain, to sense a skeleton moving as you walk, to feel the touch of another human being, to say “Ah!” and “Oh!” because not everything is known in advance, to live by minutes and hours and thus to encounter now instead of just forever. At the age of thirty or so, when Jesus first squared off with Satan in the desert, he had realized all those “advantages” of being human. He lived comfortably inside his suit of skin.
As I look back on the three temptations, I see that Satan proposed an enticing improvement. He tempted Jesus toward the good parts of being human without the bad: to savor the taste of bread without being subject to the fixed rules of hunger and of agriculture, to confront risk with no real danger, to enjoy fame and power without the prospect of painful rejection—in short, to wear a crown but not a cross. (The temptation that Jesus resisted, many of us, his followers, still long for.)
Apocryphal gospels, judged spurious by the church, suggest what it might have looked like had Jesus succumbed to Satan’s temptations. These fantastic accounts show the child Jesus making clay sparrows that he could bring to life with a puff of breath, and dropping dried fish into water to see them miraculously start swimming. He turned his playmates into goats to teach them a lesson, and made people go blind or deaf just for the thrill of healing them. The apocryphal gospels are the second-century counterparts to modern comic books about Superboy and Batgirl. Their value lies mainly in the contrast they form with the actual Gospels, which reveal a Messiah who did not use miraculous powers to benefit himself. Beginning with the Temptation, Jesus showed a reluctance to bend the rules on earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge, while filming a documentary in Israel, found himself musing on the Temptation:
Curiously enough, just at the right moment to begin filming, when the shadows were long enough and the light not too weak, I happened to notice near by a whole expanse of stones, all identical, and looking uncommonly like loaves well baked and brown. How easy for Jesus to have turned these stone loaves into edible ones, as, later, he would turn water into wine at a wedding feast! And, after all, why not? The Roman authorities distributed free bread to promote Caesar’s kingdom, and Jesus could do the same to promote his. . . .
Jesus had but to give a nod of agreement and he could have constructed Christendom, not on four shaky Gospels and a defeated man nailed on a Cross, but on a basis of sound socioeconomic planning and principles. . . . Every utopia could have been brought to pass, every hope have been realized and every dream been made to come true. What a benefactor, then, Jesus would have been. Acclaimed, equally, in the London School of Economics and the Harvard Business School; a statue in Parliament Square, and an even bigger one on Capitol Hill and in the Red Square. . . . Instead, he turned the offer down on the ground that only God should be worshipped.
As Muggeridge sees it, the Temptation revolved around the question uppermost in the minds of Jesus’ countrymen: What should the Messiah look like? A People’s Messiah who could turn stones into bread to feed the multitudes? A Torah Messiah, standing tall at the lofty pinnacle of the temple? A King Messiah, ruling over not just Israel but all the kingdoms of earth? In short, Satan was offering Jesus the chance to be the thundering Messiah we think we want. Certainly, I recognize in Muggeridge’s description the Messiah I think I want.
We want anything but a Suffering Messiah — and so did Jesus, at one level. Satan hit closest to home with his suggestion that Jesus throw himself from a high place to test God’s care. That temptation would surface again. Once, in a flash of anger Jesus gave Peter a strong rebuke. “Out of my sight, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” Peter had recoiled at Jesus’ prediction of suffering and death —“Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” — and that instinctively protective reaction had hit a nerve. In Peter’s words, Jesus heard again the allure of Satan tempting him toward an easier way.
Nailed to the cross, Jesus would hear the last temptation repeated as a taunt. A criminal scoffed, “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us.” Spectators took up the cry: “Let him come down from the cross, and we will believe in him. . . . Let God rescue him now if he wants him.” But there was no rescue, no miracle, no easy, painless path. For Jesus to save others, quite simply, he could not save himself. That fact, he must have known as he faced Satan in the desert.
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My own temptations tend to involve common vices such as lust and greed. As I reflect on Jesus’ temptations, though, I realize they centered on his reason for coming to earth, his “style” of working. Satan was, in effect, dangling before Jesus a speeded-up way of accomplishing his mission. He could win over the crowds by creating food on demand and then take control of the kingdoms of the world, all the while protecting himself from danger. “Why move thy feet so slow to what is best?” Satan jeered in Milton’s version.
I first found this insight in the writings of Dostoevsky, who made the Temptation scene the centerpiece of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The agnostic brother, Ivan Karamazov, writes a poem called “The Grand Inquisitor” set in sixteenth-century Seville at the height of the Inquisition. In the poem, a disguised Jesus visits the city at a time when heretics are daily being burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor, a cardinal, “an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes,” recognizes Jesus and has him thrown into prison. There, the two visit in a scene intentionally reminiscent of the Temptation in the desert.
The Inquisitor has an accusation to make: by turning down the three temptations, Jesus forfeited the three greatest powers at his disposal, “miracle, mystery, and authority.” He should have followed Satan’s advice and performed the miracles on demand in order to increase his fame among the people. He should have welcomed the offer of authority and power. Did Jesus not realize that people want more than anything else to worship what is established beyond dispute? “Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom, you increased it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings forever. You desired man’s free love, that he should follow you freely, enticed and taken captive by you.”
By resisting Satan’s temptations to override human freedom, the Inquisitor maintains, Jesus made himself far too easy to reject. He surrendered his greatest advantage: the power to compel belief. Fortunately, continues the sly Inquisitor, the church recognized the error and corrected it, and has been relying on miracle, mystery, and authority ever since. For this reason, the Inquisitor must execute Jesus one more time, lest he hinder the church’s work.
The scene from Karamazov has added poignancy because at the time of its composition, communist revolutionaries were organizing themselves in Russia. As Dostoevsky noted, they too would borrow techniques from the church. They promised to turn stones into bread and to guarantee safety and security for all citizens in exchange for one simple thing: their freedom. Communism would become the new church in Russia, one likewise founded on miracle, mystery, and authority.
More than a century after Dostoevsky wrote this chilling dialogue about power and freedom, I had the opportunity to visit his homeland and observe in person the results of seven decades of Communist rule. I went in November of 1991, when the Soviet empire was crumbling, Mikhail Gorbachev was giving way to Boris Yeltsin, and the entire nation was trying to rediscover itself. The iron grasp of power had loosened, and people were now reveling in the freedom to say whatever they wished.
I remember vividly a meeting with the editors of Pravda, formerly the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Pravda as much as any institution had slavishly served the Communist “church.” Now, though, Pravda’s circulation was falling dramatically (from eleven million to 700,000) in concert with communism’s fall from grace. The editors of Pravda seemed earnest, sincere, searching—and shaken to the core. So shaken that they were now asking advice from emissaries of a religion their founder had scorned as “the opiate of the people.”
The editors remarked wistfully that Christianity and communism have many of the same ideals: equality, sharing, justice, and racial harmony. Yet they had to admit the Marxist pursuit of that vision had produced the worst nightmares the world has ever seen. Why?
“We don’t know how to motivate people to show compassion,” said the editor-in-chief. “We tried raising money for the children of Chernobyl, but the average Russian citizen would rather spend his money on drink. How do you reform and motivate people? How do you get them to be good?”
Seventy-four years of communism had proved beyond all doubt that goodness could not be legislated from the Kremlin and enforced at the point of a gun. In a heavy irony, attempts to compel morality tend to produce defiant subjects and tyrannical rulers who lose their moral core. I came away from Russia with the strong sense that we Christians would do well to relearn the basic lesson of the Temptation. Goodness cannot be imposed externally, from the top down; it must grow internally, from the bottom up.
The Temptation in the desert reveals a profound difference between God’s power and Satan’s power. Satan has the power to coerce, to dazzle, to force obedience, to destroy. Humans have learned much from that power, and governments draw deeply from its reservoir. With a bullwhip or a billy club or an AK – 47, human beings can force other human beings to do just about anything they want. Satan’s power is external and coercive.
God’s power, in contrast, is internal and noncoercive. “You would not enslave man by a miracle, but craved faith given freely, not based on miracle,” said the Inquisitor to Jesus in Dostoevsky’s novel. Such power may seem at times like weakness. In its commitment to transform gently from the inside out and in its relentless dependence on human choice, God’s power may resemble a kind of abdication. As every parent and every lover knows, love can be rendered powerless if the beloved chooses to spurn it.
“God is not a Nazi,” said Thomas Merton. Indeed God is not. The Master of the universe would become its victim, powerless before a squad of soldiers in a garden. God made himself weak for one purpose: to let human beings choose freely for themselves what to do with him.
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Søren Kierkegaard wrote about God’s light touch: “Omnipotence which can lay its hand so heavily upon the world can also make its touch so light that the creature receives independence.” Sometimes, I concede, I wish that God used a heavier touch. My faith suffers from too much freedom, too many temptations to disbelieve. At times I want God to overwhelm me, to overcome my doubts with certainty, to give final proofs of his existence and his concern.
I want God to take a more active role in human affairs as well. If God had merely reached down and flicked Saddam Hussein off the throne, how many lives would have been saved in the Gulf War? If God had done the same with Hitler, how many Jews would have been spared? Why must God “sit on his hands”?
I want God to take a more active role in my personal history too. I want quick and spectacular answers to my prayers, healing for my diseases, protection and safety for my loved ones. I want a God without ambiguity, one to whom I can point for the sake of my doubting friends.
When I think these thoughts, I recognize in myself a thin, hollow echo of the challenge that Satan hurled at Jesus two thousand years ago. God resists those temptations now as Jesus resisted them on earth, settling instead for a slower, gentler way. In George MacDonald’s words,
Instead of crushing the power of evil by divine force; instead of compelling justice and destroying the wicked; instead of making peace on earth by the rule of a perfect prince; instead of gathering the children of Jerusalem under His wings whether they would or not, and saving them from the horrors that anguished His prophetic soul—He let evil work its will while it lived; He contented Himself with the slow unencouraging ways of help essential; making men good; casting out, not merely controlling Satan. . . . To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. . . . He resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cried, in the scene MacDonald alludes to, “how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” The disciples had proposed that Jesus call down fire on unrepentant cities; in contrast, Jesus uttered a cry of helplessness, an astonishing “if only” from the lips of the Son of God. He would not force himself on those who were not willing.
The more I get to know Jesus, the more impressed I am by what Ivan Karamazov called “the miracle of restraint.” The miracles Satan suggested, the signs and wonders the Pharisees demanded, the final proofs I yearn for — these would offer no serious obstacle to an omnipotent God. More amazing is his refusal to perform and to overwhelm. God’s terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though he did not exist, to spit in his face, to crucify him. All this Jesus must have known as he faced down the tempter in the desert, focusing his mighty power on the energy of restraint.
I believe God insists on such restraint because no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason he created us. “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself,” Jesus said. In case we miss the point John adds, “He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.” God’s nature is self-giving; he bases his appeal on sacrificial love.
I remember one afternoon in Chicago sitting in an outdoor restaurant listening to a broken man relate the story of his prodigal son. Jake, the son, could not keep a job. He wasted all his money on drugs and alcohol. He rarely called home, and brought little joy and much grief to both parents. Jake’s father described to me his feeling of helplessness in words not unlike those Jesus used about Jerusalem. “If only I could bring him back, and shelter him and try to show how much I love him,” he said. He paused to gain control of his voice, then added, “The strange thing is, even though he rejects me, Jake’s love means more to me than that of my other three, responsible children. Odd, isn’t it? That’s how love is.”
I sense in that final four-word sentence more insight into the mystery of God’s restraint than I have found in any book of theodicy. Why does God content himself with the slow, unencouraging way of making righteousness grow rather than avenging it? That’s how love is. Love has its own power, the only power ultimately capable of conquering the human heart.
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Though rebuffed in all three temptations, Satan may well have departed from the confrontation wearing a smirk. Jesus’ steadfast refusal to play by Satan’s rules meant that Satan himself could continue playing by those rules. He still had the kingdoms of the world at his disposal, after all, and now he had learned a lesson about God’s restraint. Restraint by God creates opportunity for those opposed to God.
Other skirmishes would come, of course. Jesus would forcibly cast out demons, but the Spirit he replaced them with was far less possessive and depended always on the will of the one possessed. Occasions for mischief abounded: Jesus admitted as much in his analogy of the kingdom of God growing up in the midst of evil, like wheat among the weeds.
From Satan’s perspective, the Temptation offered a new lease on life. The kids from Lord of the Flies could roam the island awhile longer, apparently free of adult authority. Furthermore, God could be blamed for what went wrong. If God insisted on sitting on his hands while devilment like the Crusades and the Holocaust went on, why not blame the Parent, not the kids?
It occurs to me that by turning down the temptations in the desert, Jesus put God’s own reputation at risk. God has promised to restore earth to perfection one day, but what about the meantime? The swamp of human history, the brutality even of church history, the apocalypse to come — are all these worth the divine restraint? To put it bluntly, is human freedom worth the cost?
No one who lives in the midst of the restoration process, not at its end, can answer that question fairly. All I can do is recall that Jesus, a single combat warrior facing Evil head-on with the power to destroy it, chose a different way. For him, preserving the free will of a notoriously flawed species seemed worth the cost. The choice could not have been easy, for it involved his own pain as well as his followers’.
As I survey the rest of Jesus’ life, I see that the pattern of restraint established in the desert persisted throughout his life. I never sense Jesus twisting a person’s arm. Rather, he stated the consequences of a choice, then threw the decision back to the other party. He answered a wealthy man’s question with uncompromising words and then let him walk away. Mark pointedly adds this comment: “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” Jesus had a realistic view of how the world would respond to him: “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.”
We sometimes use the term “savior complex” to describe an unhealthy syndrome of obsession over curing others’ problems. The true Savior, however, seemed remarkably free of such a complex. He had no compulsion to convert the entire world in his lifetime or to cure people who were not ready to be cured. In Milton’s words, Jesus “held it more humane, more heavenly first / By winning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make persuasion do the work of fear.”
In short, Jesus showed an incredible respect for human freedom. When Satan asked for the chance to test Peter and sift him as wheat, even then Jesus did not refuse the request. His response: “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail.” When the crowds turned away and many disciples deserted him, Jesus said to the Twelve, almost plaintively, “You do not want to leave too, do you?” As his life moved toward doom in Jerusalem, he exposed Judas but did not try to prevent his evil deed—that, too, a consequence of restraint.
“Take up your cross and follow me,” Jesus said, in the least manipulative invitation that has ever been given.
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This quality of restraint in Jesus — one could almost call it a divine shyness — took me by surprise. I realized, as I absorbed the story of Jesus in the Gospels, that I had expected from him the same qualities I had met in the southern fundamentalist church of my childhood. There, I often felt the victim of emotional pressures. Doctrine was dished out in a “Believe and don’t ask questions!” style. Wielding the power of miracle, mystery, and authority, the church left no place for doubt. I also learned manipulative techniques for “soul-winning,” some of which involved misrepresenting myself to the person I was talking to. Yet now I am unable to find any of these qualities in the life of Jesus.
If I read church history correctly, many other followers of Jesus have yielded to the very temptations he resisted. Dostoevsky shrewdly replayed the Temptation scene in the torture cell of the Grand Inquisitor. How could a church founded by the One who withstood the Temptation carry out an Inquisition of forced belief that lasted half a millennium? Meanwhile, in a milder Protestant version in the city of Geneva, officials were making attendance at church compulsory and refusal to take the Eucharist a crime. Heretics there, too, were burned at the stake.
To its shame, Christian history reveals unrelieved attempts to improve on the way of Christ. Sometimes the church joins hands with a government that offers a shortcut path to power. “The worship of success is generally the form of idol worship which the devil cultivates most assiduously,” wrote Helmut Thielicke about the German church’s early infatuation with Adolf Hitler. “We could observe in the first years after 1933 the almost suggestive compulsion that emanates from great successes and how, under the influence of these successes, men, even Christians, stopped asking in whose name and at what price. . . .”
Sometimes the church grows its own mini-Hitlers, men with names like Jim Jones and David Koresh, who understand all too well the power represented in miracle, mystery, and authority. And sometimes the church simply borrows the tools of manipulation perfected by politicians, salesmen, and advertising copywriters.
I am quick to diagnose these flaws. Yet when I turn from church history and examine myself, I find that I too am vulnerable to the Temptation. I lack the willpower to resist shortcut solutions to human needs. I lack the patience to allow God to work in a slow, “gentlemanly” way. I want to seize control myself, to compel others to help accomplish the causes I believe in. I am willing to trade away certain freedoms for the guarantee of safety and protection. I am willing to trade away even more for the chance to realize my ambitions.
When I feel those temptations rising within me, I return to the story of Jesus and Satan in the desert. Jesus’ resistance against Satan’s temptations preserved for me the very freedom I exercise when I face my own temptations. I pray for the same trust and patience that Jesus showed. And I rejoice that, as Hebrews said, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet without sin. . . . Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”