Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil. For forty days and forty nights he fasted and became very hungry.
During that time the devil[a] came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.”
But Jesus told him, “No! The Scriptures say,
‘People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city, Jerusalem, to the highest point of the Temple, and said, “If you are the Son of God, jump off! For the Scriptures say, ‘He will order his angels to protect you. And they will hold you up with their hands so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.’”
Jesus responded, “The Scriptures also say, ‘You must not test the Lord your God.’”
Next the devil took him to the peak of a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. “I will give it all to you,” he said, “if you will kneel down and worship me.”
“Get out of here, Satan,” Jesus told him. “For the Scriptures say,
‘You must worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’” And the devil left him until another time, and angels came and took care of Jesus.
Matthew 4: 1-11, Luke 4: 13.
Jesus was God. Jesus was also a human being, with all the weaknesses of character, all the hungers, desires and needs, that human beings experience.
Jesus’ humanity was an open door for temptation to walk through.
Satan has an easy time with us. Our desires and needs, our many hungers, leave us sieve-like and defenseless against the onslaught of temptations. Our big brains and ability to dissimulate and lie to ourselves render us even more vulnerable. They allow us to convince ourselves that the evil we do is good, necessary if we are to achieve good.
This ability to think ourselves out of our own well-deserved guilt is what enabled the Chief priest of 33 AD, along with his priest buddies, to “reason” themselves into thinking that murdering an innocent man was a good and right thing to do.
The fact that they were murdering God made flesh was beyond their reckoning. Jesus prayed for them on the day they murdered Him, “they know not what they do” because it was true. They didn’t know He was God.
But they knew enough. They may not have known that they were trumping up false charges to put the God they claimed to worship to death, but they did know that they were lying and scheming to enact a judicial murder of an innocent man.
They convinced themselves that what they were doing was necessary and good because they also convinced themselves that political pragmatism required it. “Better that one man should die than the whole nation,” they said to each other.
This was based on another lie they told themselves, which was that they were doing this murder to prevent civil uprising and Roman retaliation. In truth, these priests were political operatives of the Romans. They bartered the leadership position their priesthood gave them to obtain a cushy deal with the Romans for themselves. They murdered Jesus to protect their good deal. They lied about Him to get it done.
But their first and worst lies were the self-serving, self-excusing, self-forgiving lies they told themselves.
By the time these priests decided to murder Our Lord, Satan didn’t have to tempt them. They took care of that themselves. But Satan did have to tempt Jesus. The devil attempted to walk through the wholly human door of Jesus’ human appetites.
First, he tried the simple ploy he used in the Garden. “Turn these stones to bread and eat.”
That’s such a simple thing to use to tempt a ravenously hungry, thirsty man. It’s as easy and obvious as taking a bite out of an apple.
“You’re God. Don’t stand there starving. Just turn these rocks into loaves of bread. What’s the harm in that?”
What if Jesus had said “yes”?
Our Passover Lamb would have been sacrificed for a loaf of bread. We would die in our sins, with no hope of redemption. Our eternity hung in the balance of Jesus’ answer.
Instead of answering Satan directly, Jesus quoted Scripture. “People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Jesus quoted Scripture, and Satan had no answer.
We are tempted by Satan in much the same way he tempted Jesus. The difference is that, no matter who we are, we are doomed to accept at least some of these temptations and fall face first into sin.
One of the most unfortunate things in Catholic culture is the pretense that Holy Orders somehow or other protects a man from these trips and falls into sin. I think that the real truth is that satan tempts them hard because he can use their sins to drive many other people away from Christ.
Instead of engaging in a sort of quasi worship of our priests, we — and they — need to accept the fact that they are in fact and in truth just human beings, and that because of the self-deifying things they’ve taught us about themselves, we’ve been bamboozled into taking them and their ideas a lot more seriously than we should.
I’m thinking in particular about the bad habit that Catholics have of taking their clergy’s demands for obedience seriously when they fall in areas totally outside the clergy’s area of expertise. The Church has made a fool of itself many times throughout its long history by attempting to extend its rule into areas of science and politics. Galileo comes to mind, as do the Spanish Inquisition, 2,000 years of support for legalized misogyny, and the rise of Adolph Hitler.
Satan tempted our clergy the same way that he tempted Our Lord. The difference being that the clergy says “yes” to all of it. They want the kingdoms of the world, they want money, power and adulation. They will sell their priestly heritage for this bowl of political soup just about any time the deal is offered to them.
The antidote for the grave sin of handing your soul over to power, money and hubris is simple.
Take your soul back and give it to Jesus.
Be like Christ when He was tempted. Rely, not on your human pride and arrogance, but on God.
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