Risky Love: On Temptation, Love, And Control-Freakishness

For about the five-million-and seventh time, I am counting Weight Watcher points and weighing in weekly. My first week back on the program was highly successful, but then came Labor Day weekend and the end of summer festivities. Wine, dip, ice cream. How could I not partake? I tried to be diligent in my tracking, and today, I tell myself, is a new, well-structured day.

Still, temptation abounds.

Especially because stress. Stress about work, about my daughter heading off to middle school, about did my son’s school get the FM system for his hearing aid all worked out? Stress about all the things I’ve gotten myself into that I now need to deal with. Stress about aging parents, expenses, life. Sometimes I just want God to come down and sweep it all away, show me all his God-ness once and for all and make it all easy.

I’ve been reading — randomly, intermittently — Phillip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, and just finished the chapter on the temptation of Jesus. And once again I am convicted: I want, as Yancey says, the crown but not the cross (pg 72). Sigh.

I’ve always wondered about the temptation of Jesus. Back when I was in college, I remember all the controversy around The Last Temptation of Christ, because in the movie, there is a scene in which Jesus imagines having sex. I think there are those of us who would love to wash out Jesus’ humanity and leave him only God. But that defeats the entire purpose, and if that were the case, we wouldn’t need the temptation.

In fact, that’s the whole point of the temptation, right? It’s the dance between Jesus’ humanity and his divinity, the first round of this epic fight that ends with an opened tomb.

The temptation of Jesus has cosmic consequences, surely. It was an other-worldly battle; a game of spiritual warfare in the angelic realms, in the ethereal places we don’t see with our physical eyes, and it probably has ramifications that far exceed our understanding, as long as we are bound by this physical world. But does it have real-life consequences for us mere only-mortals, here in the physical world?

I’m learning about capital-T theology, and getting whiffs of the differing schools of thought, and I know that there are some who don’t really believe in a personal God — a God who is intimately involved in our individual daily lives. I disagree. And maybe this is simply what I want, but yes — I want a God who cares about me. Who notices me. Who loves me.

That’s probably very American of me. I recognize this.

But I can’t help it. I want to hang with God, and I want a God who wants to hang out with me. I think Jesus is exactly that kind of God. It’s why I’m so mad in love with him.

But once you’re in it, loving Jesus isn’t an easy kind of love. Loving Jesus is a letting go kind of love, and that’s the hardest kind of love, trust me.

We humans, we want to love like bear hugs, like safety leashes and big, huge nets that hang beneath. We want to love only when we will be loved back, we want to love a love that makes big, roomy space for our own anger, egos, belief systems.

But this is not the way Jesus loved us. The love that Jesus loves us with is not a safe kind of love. In fact, his love for us proved fatal for him.

Because he gives us free will, and doesn’t prove himself to be God over and over again, bashing us over the head with his Godness, he loves a risky kind of love. A love that’s prone to rejection. Distortion. Dysfunction.

We can take the open, free-willed love he gives us and make a fuck-all mess of it, can’t we? We can give in to the temptation to get firmly situated in our own “rightness” instead of free-falling into that wide open surrendered kind of love — the kind where the only safety net is in the God who may or may not give two shits about you. We tend to want to be right instead of righteous, we humans, and when we think we’re right, we want others to participate in our own brand of rightness, lest we call them unrighteous. As Yancey says on page 74, “…people want more than anything else to worship what is established beyond dispute.”

The worship of a God who preaches to love enemies and speaks through a spirit, albeit a holy one, is not beyond dispute. This kind of worship, this kind of love gets tricky.

It might be the kind of love where you think one day you’ll never doubt and the next you wonder why you ever believed.

It might be the kind of love where you friends mock you, your family chastises you, your boss gaslights you.

It might be the kind of love where you have to move forward with plans with out being 100% certain, or without knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will all be okay in the end, or without having every detail planned out with your utmost control freakishness.

Takes one to know one.

It’s interesting to note that the temptations of Christ came down to dependence vs independence, trust vs test, and self-autonomy vs authority. Will we satiate our own hunger with the things of the world, or will we depend on God to fill us up? Will we trust that God will care for us in our bold moves and our timid ones, or will we constantly test him to see if he will love us anyway? And will we hoard our personal power to have authority in our lives — to chase after the things we want — or will we lay down our lives as a sacrifice, and follow his call, wherever, indeed, that might take us?

In my moments of raw honesty, I have to say that I’ve fallen prey to the temptations that the devil laid before Jesus.

God, fill my belly! Give me everything I want! I’ve pouted.

God, promise me everything will be okay! I can’t take not knowing what my next step should be! Show me the way! I’ve screamed.

JESUS, WHY DON’T YOU JUST PROVE IT?

I’ve been snarky.

And Jesus loves me enough to just sit there, and wait, to make room for the love dawning — slowly — in my heart. He risks me. He takes a chance on me. He knows I might run. He knows I might take this beautiful love and twist it into a noose to put around someone else’s neck, so that they look bad and I look good.

But if I just surrender to his love, something new happens. I get bigger inside somehow. I start seeing more clearly — people, the world, truth. And it’s so not what I thought.

So I sit here, and I count my points, and I resist the flavorful temptations that are flung at me from spaces far and wide. I don’t bite back. I actively choose love and forgiveness when I’d rather verbally eviscerate and hold tight to a grudge. I make room in my theology and politics and sociology for difference, for world views, for types of love.

And when I do that, I discover, strangely enough, that there’s also room for me.