I’ve just finished reading Ian Callinan’s novel, The Russian Master. You have to take your hat off to a former High Court Judge who is also a lover of art and a novelist of substance. And this is a rattling tale set in the international art scene, moving between Australia, London and Russia, with a side journey to an Indian ashram and enough intrigue and romance to pass more than an hour or two in pleasant reading. In the course of the novel, one of the characters talks unkindly of Somerset Maugham’s extensive collection of art. Maugham is described in the words of Oscar Wilde as a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The price of everything and the value of nothing.
Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons tells the story of Thomas More’s battle with Henry VIII over the king’s wish to divorce his aging wife Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, the sister of his former mistress. Rather than betray his conscience before God More finds himself on trial for his life. Despite the best endeavours of the prosecution, nothing can be found against him. Enter Richard Rich, an ambitious young man whom More had once helped, but who now had become spy to his prosecutor Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell. In order to secure More’s conviction and death Rich gives perjured testimony. After he has made his damning witness, More is given a moment to speak. He leans from the dock and stares at a chain of office hanging round Rich’s neck. It’s the Red Dragon, the seal of the Attorney General of Wales and his reward for perjury. More quotes Jesus: ‘Ah Rich, it profits a man nothing to give his life for the world. … But for Wales?’
This distinction lies at the heart of the temptations of Jesus as Luke describes them – which are the epitome of the confusion of price and value. And every day we can see this confusion acted out. The highest human qualities, freedom, truth, generosity, justice, kindness, faith, love, are traded away for that which seems superficially more immediately attractive- power, possessions, acclamation, sex, or whatever. And only later do we realise the cost.
According to today’s Gospel the immediate consequence of Jesus’ baptism was his journey into the desert, led by the Spirit. I am told by those who have visited the Holy Land that even today much of the countryside is desert. A harsh and hostile landscape where it is still easy to become disoriented - lost. And in the heat and the isolation death by thirst and starvation is an all too present reality. If you are like me, you have not experienced anything like this.
But we too live in a certain kind of wilderness. The internet, the TV, the shopping Malls and department stores. Places of abundance, but wildernesses all the same. Place which promise so much yet deliver so little. Places of isolation, of confusion, of false hopes and pipe dreams. The places of our temptation.
Professor Darrell Jodock notes that in our day the word "temptation" has been trivialized. He traces the root of this trivialisation to the Enlightenment optimism for human potential, and the individualism which flows from it. Autonomous human self is pictured as knowing what is good and true, and having the freedom to put into practice what is right. Under this view, individuals are, he says, like marbles with extendible hooks. They are whole and complete in themselves but may on occasion choose to link up with other individuals. Added to this view of selfhood is an understanding of morality, and indeed religion, as fulfilled essentially by obeying ethical principles.
These assumptions trivialize sin, making it merely a wrong act, the result of an error in judgment made by a self that is otherwise free, competent and autonomous. A temptation then becomes any enticement to make an error in judgment and to act in a way that violates an ethical principle.
But that’s not the way that Luke describes temptation. For Luke, the temptations of Jesus are temptations to distort our own selfhood. For the biblical view of self is not of autonomous individual, but of self in relationship. We are formed and defined by our relationships – every deformed relationship warps the self; every broken relationship diminishes the self. This is the view of self described famously by the metaphysical poet John Donne:
No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
Understood thus, sin ceases to be understood as an error in judgment or an act that violates an ethical principle. It is rather the fundamental malformation out of which such errors or acts arise. Luke’s Jesus was not tempted to bad acts. Rather he was tempted to misconstrue the very nature of his relationship to God. And had he succumbed, not only would his relationship to God have been fundamentally changed, so would his relationship to humanity. His very mission of salvation was at risk here.
Lent provides us with the opportunity to reflect again on those temptations in front of us which have the capacity to distort our relationship with God and with each other.
Let’s take a moment to look at each of the temptations experienced by Jesus. As we do so, let’s note the significant fact, first of all, that Jesus was tempted at all. We can easily gloss over the humanity of Jesus, and fixate on the divinity. But it’s this very humanity of which connects him to us. We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15).
In every sense, the temptations of Jesus are ours as well. The first temptation - commanding stones to become bread is when we unpack it, the temptation to make things other than they are to fulfil our wants and our needs. Stones are stones, and bread is bread. There are plenty of modern examples of this: the lack of care with which we retreat the environment; the inhumanity of factory farming. Most obviously we see it in the treating of people as sexual objects. This objectification robs people of their humanity and deforms relationships. And we face this temptation every time we turn on the TV or go to a movie or surf the net.
The lure of worldly power is the second temptation. Of course there are moments when we’d all like to run the world – knowing we could do a better job than those who are currently running the show. But there’s more to this temptation that that childish fantasy. At its heart, it has to do with exercising control or power. Much of modern success and motivation is based on how to get others to do what we want them to do. Manipulation to will. This again is dehumanising and destructive of relationship.
The third temptation involves being protected from suffering and harm. Of course we human beings don’t want to suffer – pain can be described as the quintessence of evil. But suffering need not always be destructive – it can be redemptive. In God and Human Suffering, Douglas John Hall distinguishes between integrative suffering and destructive suffering. The latter destroys life, the former serves it, because integrative suffering opens the possibility, of deeper faith and a fuller expression of our creatureliness.
It’s not for nothing that Jesus sets his face to journey to Jerusalem and embraces his destiny, rejection, misunderstanding, betrayal torture and death on a cross. Jesus’ journey to the cross offers us a stark reminder that life for us is unlikely to be soft or quiet. We’re always faced with contradiction and suffering. But as the suffering of Christ was the necessary precondition to resurrection so our suffering can be redemptive.
The antidote that Jesus used in resisting temptation was a profound understanding of scripture. In each of his answers he appeals to a passage from the Hebrew Bible. But this is not just proof-texting. Our gospel passage tells us that Stan is capable of proof texting as well. It was Jesus living faith and absolute trust in his heavenly father which enabled him to see through worldly temptation and hold fast to his mission. And it will be a living faith which provides our security – nourished by word and sacrament, lied out in practical discipleship, breathed through by prayer.
We begin our Lenten journey painfully aware that we are frail creatures in the hands of our creator. Dust we are and unto dust we shall return. My prayer is that in our Lenten journey we are again confronted by the enormity of God’s grace, and the boundless nature of God’s love.
Amen