The Greatest Temptation!

"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil." Matthew 4:1

What is the greatest and biggest temptation for the Christian? We face temptation every day and feel temptation’s pressure in a million little ways chipping away at us?  Is there even such a thing as a greatest and biggest temptation?

It took me a long time to really make any real sense out of this temptation story. After all, what is so bad about the specific temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness?    

·        The devil tempted Jesus to turn stones to bread, and later on Jesus did something very much like that when he multiplied the five loaves and two fishes and fed the 5000! That kind of power could come in handy in a world filled with so much hungry and starvation would it not?

·        The devil tempted Jesus to do miracles, and he went on to performed all sorts of miracles: turned water into wine; healed the sick; gave sight to the blind; made the lame to walk; deaf to hear, calmed the stormy seas and raised the dead!  

·        The devil tempted him to rule the world with the power of a king or a Caesar. That was  something that many people in Israel at that time were expecting of their Messiah: to destroy the Roman oppressors and the enemies of Israel; to usher in the kingdom of God fully and completely and then rule the entire political world; a world transformed into the kingdom of God with Jerusalem as the center.

Actually, all three of these temptations were the same temptation with three faces. It was the temptation to be any other kind of Messiah but a crucified messiah; to be the messiah without a cross. It is the greatest and biggest temptation.

The devil tempted Jesus first to be a bread messiah, and it seems as if the world could use a bread messiah. The world is a hungry and filled with suffering.  But the quantity of bread isn’t the problem – it’s a distribution and injustice problem caused by human greed and indifference.  God knows, and so does Satan that if the world is to be truly saved, a messiah turning stones to bread cannot save the world. 

Jesus faced the temptation to be the miracle messiah; performing astounding tricks and simplistically solving everybody's problems upon request.  But God knows and so does Satan that if the world is to be saved, a messiah performing tricks upon request won’t do it, because the requests would most likely be tainted by human self-indulgence.   

Jesus faced the temptation to be a political messiah; to establish, by force, God's rule on this earth; to be the head of a political party (as some have tried to make him).  But God knows and so does Satan that politics cannot and does not have the power to save the world. Several years ago Tony Campolo, sociologist and Christian preacher, wrote a book entitled Jesus is Not a Republican or a Democrat, a book in which he made sure he offended everyone by arguing that a political movement cannot embody the spirit of Jesus and kingdom of God. His point, simplistically stated, was exactly this: politics does not have the power to save the world.  It is too easily corrupted by the lust for power.

God knows and so does Satan that what the world really needs is crucified Messiah: a Messiah who can forgive sins and transform lives from the inside out; a Messiah who would bring into the world a kind and quality of love that we humans, on our own, give up on so easily; a Messiah who would take into his own sweet flesh all the hatred and death of humankind, and give nothing back but excessive love and authentic life.  God knows that's the only thing that can save the world.

Satan also knows that's the only that that can saved the world and defeat him, and that's why Satan gave it his best shot to talk Jesus into being some other kind of messiah; and that's why Satan stills tries to convince us to be Christians without the cross!  Satan will do everything in his power (pull out every stop, resort to any dirty trick of deception) to get you to let go of your hold on the cross and leave it behind, forgotten, in the dust.

The greatest temptation that the Christian faces is to live without the cross - to not take it up - to lay it down and leave it behind! That's exactly and precisely how Satan exerts his clever and evil power upon us.  Remember the time when Jesus explained to his disciples that he had to go to Jerusalem and die.  Simon Peter would have stopped him blocking his path.  Jesus looked at Peter and said what I am sure were among the hardest words Jesus ever had to speak, “Get out of my way, Satan,” he said to Peter.  Satan can rear his ugly head at any time, in any place, in any person with this greatest of all temptations to take Jesus off the cross and cause us to leave the cross behind.

The Christian who lives without the cross is the Christian who revels in the idea that he is living on a morally higher plane than most others and is blind to the continuing existence of sin in his own life, especially the sin of self-righteousness; failing to see that in every moment of every day, with every breath we take we are all in need of the forgiveness and grace of God.

The Christian who lives without the cross is the Christian who continues to hang onto the values of self-indulgence, and not only hangs on to them, but distorts faith to justify materialistic indulgence, refusing to see the value of sharing to the point of sacrifice; not trusting the voice of Jesus when he says that it's in "giving yourself away lavishly that you experience the greatest filling."

The Christian who lives without the cross can be relatively indifferent and unmoved by suffering and injustice in the world; because the cross is the fullest expression of God’s solidarity with the suffering and oppressed of the earth.

The Christian who lives without the cross lives in fear and anxiety of things like failure and death, not really trusting the death and resurrection of Jesus is a power that can take effect in your life; and that no matter what the ending might be: end of a job, end of a relationship, or end of your life, God has the power to raise you up to a new beginning!

French philosopher, Rene Girard says that the story of Jesus cuts against the grain of every heroic story of its time. He says that the myths from Babylon, Greece and the surrounding cultures of Jesus' time celebrated strong heroes, not weak victims. In contrast to every other hero from every other culture, Jesus took the side of the underdog: the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the marginalized. He was born in poverty and disgrace, spent his infancy as a refugee, lived in a minority race under a harsh regime, and died as a prisoner, unjustly accused.

Jesus admired people like the Roman soldier who cared for his dying slave; a dishonest tax collector who gave away his fortune to the poor; a member of a minority race who stopped to help a man accosted by thieves; a sinner who prayed a simple "help" prayer; a shamed woman who reached out in desperation to touch his clothing; a beggar who ate crumbs from a rich man's table. He disapproved of religious professionals who refused to help the wounded for fear of soiling themselves; a proud clergyman who looked down on sinners; the rich who offered only crumbs that “trickled down” from their tables; a responsible son who shunned his prodigal brother; the rich and powerful who lived on the backs of the poor.

When Jesus died dishonorably as an innocent victim, it introduced what one of Girard's disciples called, "the most sweeping historical revolution in the history of the world." Nowhere but in the Bible will you find an ancient story of an innocent, yet heroic victim dragged to his death.

The apostle Paul makes a sweeping claim about Jesus in Colossians: "And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross." Yes, a public spectacle it was when Jesus exposed as false the very powers and authorities that we take such pride in. The most refined religion of Jesus' day accused an innocent man; and the most renowned justice system in the world at that time carried out the sentence.

In Jesus, God took the world by surprise, and two thousand years later the reverberations have not stopped. In a culture that glorifies success, wealth and power and is largely deaf to suffering, we desperately need the cross to remind us that at the center of the Christian faith hangs an unsuccessful, suffering Christ, dying in shame.

Satan would have us forget the cross; Satan would have you forget and dismiss the cross, lay it down, leave it far behind, for you see, the kind of love expressed on the cross of Jesus Christ is the only thing Satan can not defeat or corrupt – the only thing that can save the world.

The greatest temptation that we will ever face is to live as Christians without the cross. It's a temptation that presses in upon us all the time. As God gave Jesus the strength to resist the temptation to be a cross-less messiah, I pray God will give us the strength to "take up our cross and follow."