Temptation to Genuflect-Matthew 4

Genuflect to the Devil (powerpoint). To whom will you genuflect (Mt 4:9; Gen 3:5)? Everything the devil does is to tempt us to do anything but to depend on God–on bread (Mt 4:3), not God; to be in control–even using the Bible (Mt 4:6); to genuflect to him in order to have a good life in this world [by using the means of the world] (Mt 4:8-9). At the heart of sin is the desire to be god (Gen 3:5), the desire to control, our turned-inwardness. It manifests in lust, appetite, desire (Jas 1:14; 1 Jn 2:15-17).   Some devilish deceptions (when you genuflect to the devil):

• If I believe in God/Jesus/the Bible my life should be good (or bad things shouldn’t happen).
• I should just be a nice and loving person who should not offend others.
• I should just be myself; I’m just being honest.
• I can figure out what I should do with my life.
• “I’m OK and everything is fine” and life–especially Christian life–should be easy.
• It’s OK not to tell the truth.
• Nobody can live like that (what the Bible says, especially the Sermon on the Mount).

Jesus was told by the devil he would be given power to turn stones to bread, he refused; when Jesus was offered authority over all the kingdoms of this world, he refused; when he was offered the possibility he would not die, he refused. Jesus was offered the means to feed the hungry, the authority to end war between peoples, and even the defeat of death itself. But Jesus refused. [Is it any wonder that the world was not prepared to welcome this savior? Is it any wonder that Jesus was despised and rejected?] He did so because Jesus knows God’s kingdom cannot be forced into existence with the devil’s (reasonable) means.

God subjects his Son to the devil. “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Mt 4:1). “Then” gestures to the mystery of the incarnation. The Father willingly wills the Son to be subject to time, to be subject to our flesh, to be subject to the devil. Jesus, the Son of God, is led by the Spirit into the wilderness and abandoned to the “tempter.” “Then,” therefore, anticipates the agony of the cross and the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46).

The cost of obedience. Jesus is to be subjected to Israel’s testing in the wilderness, a testing in which Israel proved her inability to live faithfully despite God’s good gifts. The Son, however, will be obedient, but with a great cost. His obedience depends on his trusting the Father’s faithfulness to Israel through the scripture. Jesus is able to resist the devil, a devil able to quote scripture, by being a superior exegete to the one who would tempt him. Jesus, the faithful interpreter of Israel’s scripture, teaches us how to read so that we might know how to resist the devil.

Jesus fasts for us. First, Jesus must fast for forty days and nights. He replicates the hunger God gave Israel in the wilderness in the hope it might learn humility. Jesus, the very embodiment of humility, accepts our humiliation and undergoes a fast for our sake. His fast is not unlike Elijah’s in 1 Kgs 19:4–9. Elijah challenged Jezebel, and his life is in danger. He escapes to the wilderness, where he is ministered to by an angel, who gives him food to sustain him for a 40-day journey to Mount Horeb. Jesus has been fed by the Father’s benediction, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” but like Israel and Elijah he must now face the one who is always threatening our ability to live by God’s good gifts—the devil.

We refuse God with the gifts he gave us. The devil, a fallen angel, is the embodiment of the mystery of disobedience. God would have us love him with the same love that gave birth to our existence. God’s love risks our disobedience in the hope that we will freely return the love he has for us. God refuses to coerce us to participate in the love that is the interdependent life of the Trinity. Yet we refuse God’s peaceable love, preferring to secure our lives by our devices, which inexorably lead to violence against ourselves and one another. Our sin drives us mad because our very ability to revolt against our Creator is dependent on the gifts we have been given by him.

The devil is at once crafty but self-destructively mad, for the devil cannot help but be angry, recognizing as he must that he does not exist. Augustine gave classical theological expression to this understanding of sin and evil when he observed that there can be no evil where there is no good. He concludes: “If every being, insofar as it is a being, is good then when we assert that a defective thing is bad, it would seem we are saying that evil is in fact good, for any defect depends on the goodness that is always prior and therefore there is no evil apart from that which is good. In other words, nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity because every actual entity is good [omnia natura bonum est].”   It is significant, therefore, to recognize that the devil’s only viable mode of operation is to “tempt.” The devil can be only a parasite, which means that the devil is only as strong as the one he tempts. This is not to suggest, however, that the temptation of the devil is any less destructive for us. But it does mean that the temptation Jesus endures is unlike the temptation we endure, for the devil knows this is the very Son of God, who has come to reverse the history initiated by Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden and continued in the history of revolt by the people whom God loves as his own, namely, Israel.   But this time the devil will lose. Hilary observes that it is fitting that the devil will be defeated by the same humanity whose death and misfortunes he effected: “It was the devil who envied God’s gifts to humanity before the temptation of Adam, who was now unable to understand God’s being present in a human being. The Lord was therefore tempted immediately after being baptized. His temptation indicates how sinister are the devil’s attempts, especially against those who have been sanctified, for he eagerly desires victory over the saints” (quoted in Manlio 2001, 57).

The devil starts seemingly innocently. Thinking that Jesus’ fast weakened him, the devil approaches Jesus as he had Eve. Eating may be the devil’s first line of attack because eating gets to the heart of our dependency—a dependency we try to deny. He initiates a conversation with Jesus, as he had Eve, with what seems to be an innocent remark, but a remark designed to create doubt: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen 3:1). “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). The trick, of course, that Eve did not recognize is to try to answer the devil on the devil’s own terms. Bonhoeffer observes that Eve’s disobedience began as soon as she assumed that she could answer the serpent’s question on God’s behalf, for the question was designed to suggest that she and Adam could go behind the word of God and establish for themselves what the word entailed. In short, the devil’s question invited them to assume that they were equal with God. Bonhoeffer notes, therefore, that the serpent is a representative of religion because his question is “religious,” assuming that the questioner knows more about God than can be known by a creature (1962, 66–69). Legalism is the original sin.

Do what God did for Israel. The devil exists as rage, but his rage does not cloud his cleverness. He is crafty. He suggests to Jesus that, if he is the savior of Israel, he should then do what God had done for Israel in the wilderness–provide food. Jesus, who will feed thousands with a few loaves of bread and a few fish, could turn the stones into bread. But Jesus refuses, quoting Dt 8:3, which tells the story of how God had humbled Israel by letting her go hungry before sending manna. God says, I fed “you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by the very word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” God is indeed in the business of providing food, but Jesus rejects Satan’s proposal because Satan would have us believe that food and the word of God can be separated.   Christians believe that Jesus is the word that we now eat in his very body and blood in the Eucharist. But that gift, like the gift of manna to Israel, makes us vulnerable to the same temptations that the devil used to encourage Israel to abandon God’s law, to tempt Jesus, and to make the church unfaithful. The very people whom God has gifted with his body to be his witness for all people are constantly tempted to betray that which has been given them. We become, like the Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees, leaders who assume that our task is to protect “the people” from the demands of the gospel. We simply do not believe that God’s word, God’s love, can sustain us.

In “The Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky describes a confrontation between the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor and Jesus during the Inquisition. Jesus has appeared unmistakably present and recognized by the way love and power flow from him. Fearing the crowd, the cardinal orders him arrested. The cardinal comes to him in prison with the news that they, meaning the church, have finally finished the work done in Jesus’ name. The church has managed to still the desire of freedom begun in Jesus by providing the earthly bread that people desire. The cardinal observes that the promise of freedom that Jesus proclaimed is too much for people. Humans are too simple and lawless to comprehend what it might mean to live free of the fear of death. “Nothing,” observes the cardinal to the silent Jesus, “has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and our loaves cease for them. But you did not want to deprive man of freedom and rejected the offer, for what sort of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is bought by loaves of bread? You objected that man does not live by bread alone, but do you not know that in the name of this very earthly bread, the spirit of the earth will rise against you and fight with you and defeat you, and everyone will follow him exclaiming: “Who can compare to this beast, for he has given us fire from heaven!” Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? “Feed them first, then ask virtue of them!”—that is what they will write on the banner they raise against you, and by which your temple will be destroyed.” (Dostoevsky 2001, 44–45)

The cardinal has had Jesus arrested because of the cardinal’s love for humankind. According to Dostoevsky the cardinal risks his own happiness in order that people may have the illusion of security as well as the happiness that is assumed to be the product of security. The cardinal, and the church he serves, knows that peace and even death are dearer to people than confronting the choice between good and evil. The cardinal accuses Jesus of failing to love us because he refused, as he was asked to do, to come down from the cross so that we might see his power and believe. Jesus refuses to enslave us by a miracle, which means that he wants us to love him for the love he is. But that seems to ask too much of us, so the church has given those they serve bread. “And everyone will be happy, all the millions of creatures, except for the hundred thousand of those who govern them. For only we, we who keep the mystery, only we shall be unhappy” (2001, 51).

The devil is not without resources. Failing to tempt Jesus to turn stones into bread, he tempts Jesus again. He, rather than the Spirit, leads Jesus to the holy city, to the pinnacle of the temple, tempting him to test the Father by throwing himself down by quoting scripture: “for it is written” in Ps 91:11–12 that God “will command his angels concerning you, / . . . so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” Jesus counters by quoting Dt 6:16, stating that the Lord is not to be tested as Israel tested the Lord at Massah. Again, Jesus teaches us how to read scripture by refusing to “go behind the text” to discover what God must have “really meant.” When you are in a struggle with the devil, it is unwise to look for “the meaning” of the text.

In this 2nd temptation the devil tries to force God’s hand, to make God rule as we desire to be ruled. Jesus will come to Jerusalem, he will cleanse the temple, but he will do so as the humble one riding on a donkey (Mt 21:4–5). But the devil wants Jesus to seize the temple by force. The devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple to tempt Jesus to act as the priest of priests. Jesus is offered a heroic role, to take his life in his own hands, to be in control of his destiny, to force God’s kingdom into reality by making a sacrifice that God cannot refuse. But this contrasts starkly with the man who will die on a cross subject to the will of others. In Jesus’s refusal to act on his own we see that it is not his will but the Father’s that is accomplished through Jesus’s life and death. The resurrection is not an event that renders Jesus’s faithfulness unnecessary; rather it is a confirmation of his obedience to the Father’s love manifest in his refusal to accept the devil’s offer of power.

Jesus’s response to the devil, his use of scripture, makes clear that Jesus is at once prophet, priest, and king. To be king of Israel, to be the true judge of Israel, requires the knowledge of the law acquired by having the law read every day of the king’s life (Dt 17:19). In contrast to Herod, Jesus rules through justice and thus becomes the king for whom Israel has longed.   The devil’s 3rd temptation makes explicit what has been at stake in the first 2 temptations: the connection between worship and politics. The devil takes Jesus to a high mountain, offering him all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus will but worship him. At stake is the 1st and 2nd commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them” (Exo 20:3–5). The devil understands, as is seldom acknowledged particularly in our day, that politics is about worship and sacrifice.

Jesus refuses to worship the devil and thus becomes the alternative to the world’s politics based on sacrifices to false gods. Again he resists the devil by quoting Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God, / and serve only him” (Mt 4:10, quoting Dt 6:13). The politics that Jesus represents has always been present in the 1st and 2nd commandments. Jesus is the faithful incarnation of the right worship of the Father. By rejecting the devil Jesus calls into the world a people who, as Augustine suggests, can never obey the justice the world offers as an alternative to the justice found in the sacrifice of the Son. Yet too often the very people called into existence by Jesus, that is, the church, have betrayed Jesus’s sacrifice by trying to rule using the means of power that the devil offered to Jesus.

Thus the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that for a long time—8 centuries—“the church has not been with you but with him,” i.e., with the devil. For 8 centuries the church accepted what Jesus rejected: “We took Rome and the sword of Caesar from him [the devil], and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, the only rulers, though we have not yet succeeded in bringing our cause to its full conclusion” (Dostoevsky 2001, 49). But that is Jesus’ fault for rejecting the last gift. Had Jesus accepted the third counsel of that mighty spirit, he could have furnished what all people seek on earth, that is: “Someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill—for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of men. . . . Great conquerors, Tamerlanes and Genghis Khans, swept over the earth like a whirlwind, yearning to conquer the cosmos, but they, too, expressed, albeit unconsciously, the same great need of mankind for universal and general union. Had you accepted the world and Caesar’s purple, you would have founded a universal kingdom and granted universal peace. For who shall possess mankind if not those who possess their conscience and give them their bread? And so we took Caesar’s sword, and in taking it, of course, we rejected you and followed him.” (Dostoevsky 2001, 49)

The cardinal finally falls silent. His captive has said nothing in his defense. He has listened intently and calmly, offering no counterarguments. The cardinal wished him to say something but he remained silent. But suddenly the captive silently approaches the aged cardinal and gently kisses him on “his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips.” That is Jesus’s only response to the old cardinal, but the cardinal is shaken. The cardinal walks to the door, opens it, and says, “‘Go and do not come again . . . do not come at all . . . never, never!’ And he lets him out into the dark squares of the city. The prisoner goes away” (2001, 54).

The devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God’s hand to rescue us, we want peace—and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bread, he is our salvation, and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness to the kingdom that is God’s patience. The Father will have the kingdom present one small act at a time. That is what it means for us to be an apocalyptic people, that is, a people who believe that Jesus’s refusal to accept the devil’s terms for the world’s salvation has made it possible for a people to exist that offers an alternative time to a world that believes we have no time to be just.  

The devil’s temptations are meant to force Jesus to acknowledge that our world is determined by death. Death creates a world of scarcity—a world without enough food, power, or life itself. But Jesus resists the devil because he is God’s abundance. Jesus brings a kingdom that is not a zero-sum game. There is enough food, power, and life because the kingdom has come, making possible a people who have the time to feed their neighbors. Fear creates scarcity, but Jesus has made it possible for us to live in trust. “Do not be afraid,” the angel tells Mary Magdalene and Mary at the tomb (Mt 28:4). By resisting the devil’s temptations Jesus has made it possible for us to live without fear.

“Then the devil left him.” “Then” remains ominous, but at least we have now seen what the struggle will entail. The devil leaves him, and Jesus is ministered to by angels (Mt 4:11)—but the devil is certainly not gone. John the Baptist is arrested (Mt 4:12). The struggle has only begun. Some may find Jesus’s reaction to John’s arrest strange—he withdraws to Galilee. He escapes from Judea and the power of Archelaus. Jesus does not seek a direct confrontation with the powers, rather he begins to preach, declaring as John had, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 4:17). Yet unlike John, Jesus proclaims the nearness of the kingdom in “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Jesus goes to Galilee to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that a light will dawn in the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali (Mt 4:14-16; Isa 9:1). Isaiah identifies that light with the child on whose shoulders will rest all authority (Isa 9:6–7).

Repentance requires discipleship. David’s kingdom is now present in Jesus. Jesus now proclaims the advent of the kingdom in Galilee to the Gentiles—a remarkable development, but one that Israel itself anticipated, as we see from the prophet Isaiah. It is a kingdom that requires repentance (Mt 4:17), which requires a training called discipleship. So we should not be surprised that Jesus now calls his first disciples. He does not call his disciples from the powerful or the elites, but rather he calls fishermen, promising to make them fish for people.

Transformation needed to follow Jesus as his disciples. When Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, James and John, they are working. Yet in both instances they immediately leave their nets and follow him (Mt 4:18-22). James and John even leave their father—a leaving signaling the sacrifices that the disciples will have to undergo in order to recognize who it is they follow, for the kingdom born in this man, the kingdom of David, requires a transformation that all his disciples must undergo. The new David is not one whose purple is immediately evident, but rather his power can be found only in his crucifixion. It will take new eyes and ears to see and hear the truth proclaimed through the cross.

Disciples vs. the crowds. Throughout the gospel Matthew is unsparing in his description of the incomprehension of the disciples, but they do follow Jesus. This contrasts the disciples with the crowds that are attracted to Jesus. Jesus goes throughout Galilee teaching in the synagogues, proclaiming the good news, and curing those afflicted with diseases, demons, epileptics, and paralytics. Great crowds follow him as he draws people to him from the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and even from beyond the Jordan (Mt 4:23-25). Those in the crowds will often be in awe of Jesus, they will express amazement at his teaching, but at the end of the day they will shout, “Let him be crucified!” (Mt 27:22–23).

We are still in the early stages of Matthew’s story, but we are already beginning to see what is required if we are to be followers rather than admirers of Jesus.

Reference:

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006. Reviews.
2. Why did Jesus have to die? (Lent 2006) Stanley Hauerwas.