A MESSAGE FOR QUADRAGESIMA SUNDAY
The story of our Lord’s temptation by Satan is well
known to us, and we are sometimes tempted, yes “tempted,” ourselves into thinking that because Christ was the Son
of God, he had some kind of magical power that prevented him from falling into
sin. Certainly, there is a mystery
here—he was a man like us, and like us in all
things except sin. And yet he was tempted to sin. The answer to this paradox lies in the two
meanings of the word “tempt.”. I can tempt you to commit a sin, without your
having the slightest inclination to do so, in other words without your being
actually tempted.
The devil tempted Christ. All three temptations were whispered into his
ear by Satan. But never for a moment did
our Lord contemplate falling into sin.
First, the devil makes the mistake of appealing to Christ’s
fallen nature. And of course, Christ did
not have a fallen nature. He was the Son
of God, like us in all things except sin, and that includes original sin. Satan saw that our Lord was hungry and
tempted him to change a rock into bread.
Christ was indeed hungry and was tempted externally by this attack of
the devil. But inwardly of course he had
no desire to offend his heavenly Father over a loaf of bread. So Satan’s first attempt failed.
Satan probably figured that a man with this kind of
willpower might be tempted by having even more power, so he took our Lord to a
place where he could display for him a great vista over the world, promising
him power and riches. But our Lord was
not tempted by the world any more than by his hunger. Christ was already King, but in that very
special way that, as he would tell Pontius Pilate later, is not of this world.
Satan’s appeals to human nature and worldly success had
not worked. The third temptation of
Christ was no less than to worship the devil himself. This was Satan’s best shot, and it did no
better than the others. There was no way
that Christ would betray his heavenly Father, not for any creature, no matter
how closely its angelic form resembled that of its divine Creator.
Satan tempted Christ, and yet Christ was never
remotely “tempted” in the sense of toying with the idea of offending his
Father. To think about the temptation in
the sense of weighing up whether he was going to commit the sin or not, this
would already have been a sin, or at least a serious imperfection. And that would be literally “unthinkable” for
the Son of God. They were external
temptations—tempting things that actually had no effect on Christ’s divine and
perfect will.
As we strive ourselves this Lent to be perfect, we
have here the perfect example of how to behave perfectly when we are
tempted. By not allowing our will to
even begin to enter the decision-making process of whether to commit the sin or
not, we are following Christ’s example.
This is what we must aim for, as the devil places before us those
delectable pleasures of the world that so attract our fallen nature. As our divine Saviour would remind us during
his Agony in the Garden, it is a question of “not my will, but thine be done.”
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