This Gospel we have just heard is framed as it were by spiritual powers, one positive and light, the other negative and dark. At the end we are told that Satan departs after tempting Christ in three ways, yet already preparing to return to the attack, while at the beginning we are told that our Lord has left the Jordan after His Baptism ‘full of the Holy Spirit and has been driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tried by the devil’.
Let us think first of the Holy Spirit’s role in what we have just heard. We are taught that we should always seek to avoid temptation whenever we can, certainly not to seek it out, for fear that the devil will overpower us. After all, he is much more powerful and intelligent than we are, and he knows exactly how to confuse us, or to beguile us into thinking what is evil will actually be for our good or our pleasure. We might therefore assume that our Lord is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness only because, being God, He will obviously outsmart the devil; but this cannot be enough. The devil does not definitely know that Jesus is God. All he can tell is that Jesus is a man, although an exceptionally good one. We might think also that the devil only tempts wicked persons, or uses easy ways to tempt those who are struggling. Surely the devil can’t tempt a completely good man? But this is exactly what we hear happening in this Gospel passage. We must also remember that the devil is as determined as he is subtle. He does not give up easily. Ever since he conquered Adam and Eve, it has been his strategy to employ different kinds of temptations for different kinds of people. The devil concentrates all his efforts into looking for different ways of tempting a good man. But we must not forget that it is the Holy Spirit who has set this scene up in the wilderness. The Spirit positively wants the Temptations to take place. In order to understand why this is so, let us remind ourselves of what exactly the Temptations are.
The first temptation of our Lord is straightforward. Our Lord is hungry, enough perhaps to make him look at hunger in a new way, not only for himself, but for all mankind as well. The devil also knows that if our Lord has power to change stone into bread, he, the devil, will know it is not by his own satanic power that Jesus will do this, but by the power of God. On the other hand, our Lord also knows that if he gives in to this temptation, the temptation to do away with hunger and famine at a stroke, and for all time, then he will actually cause mankind to lose something precious: they will lose the need for faith. This was the temptation of the 5,000 who were miraculously fed. ‘Sir, give us this bread always!’ they said to him when they saw the miracle he had worked with five loaves and two fish. But what good did it do them? This is what our Lord saw ahead, and so he quotes a different passage of scripture to the devil, ‘man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’. Hence of course those words we will hear at Communion today, reminding us that the heavenly bread we receive at Mass is not ordinary bread, the sort which will only satisfy our hunger for a short time, but rather this bread is the Word made flesh, who has made Himself into our lasting, spiritual nourishment.
So the devil proceeds to his second temptation. If our Lord cannot be made to do something to address His bodily needs, why not see if He will be drawn to power and to glory? Hence the vision of all the kingdoms of the world, all of them in Satan’s power. Satan is the one who rules the way things are done in this world: lust for power, desire for domination, compromise of the truth, fear of being marginalized or ridiculed, denial of God’s law and rule. The devil promises that he will give all of this over to Jesus, for him to do what he will with it, on one condition: Jesus must worship Satan. But of course to do that would be to become enslaved to Satan anyway, so there would be no victory in that, no sense in trying to control the world while it still lies ultimately in the power of the devil.
It is then that the devil makes his last and most subtle test of our Lord’s resolve and understanding. We note that it is in St Luke’s account that the second and third temptations are the other way around from St Matthew’s account. It is here in St Luke that the third temptation begins with something very significant: having failed to tempt our Lord in those other ways, the devil now quotes Holy Scripture to justify his temptation. ‘Throw yourself down from the Temple as a magnificent gesture of your trust in God’s protection, and a sign to people that you are specially guarded and guided by God’. He supports this with a quotation from psalm 90: ‘He will put his angels in charge over you to guard you’ and ‘they will hold you up on their hands lest you hurt your foot against a stone.’ How ingenious! To use God’s word to justify a temptation! St Luke has seen that this is the most subtle of all the temptations on account of its appeal to Sacred Scripture, and this is surely why he has put this one last of the three. The devil says: You have God’s word for it, the assurance of Scripture itself, therefore it cannot be wrong to do what I am suggesting to you!
But our Lord parries this thrust from the devil with a reply also drawn from Scripture: ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’ What this exchange shows is that you cannot simply use Scripture to justify any action, unless it is guided by Christ and the Holy Spirit. One passage of Scripture taken out of context, may easily be contradicted by another. Hence St Peter tells us that the interpretation of Scriptural prophecy is never a matter for a human person, because no true prophecy ever came from a human person’s initiative. The only way we can guarantee that an interpretation of Scripture is the correct one, is by ensuring that it is Christ’s own, and that is guaranteed in His Body the Church, to whom He has given His own authority to interpret Scripture and use it as a proper guide. Without that guide, even Scripture could lead us astray.
This is why the Church has always taken a measured view of the availability of the scriptures to the faithful. It is not true to say that the Church ever in the past actively prevented the faithful from ever knowing the Scriptures, nor that the Church was frightened that free access to the word of God would somehow damage its power and prestige; this was the devil’s lie, and the protestant reformers fell for it, and have deceived many by means of it. For the truth is that the Church has always recognised that Scripture needs to be handled with great care, and that its true meaning can only be made clear by reference to Christ’s and the Spirit’s guidance. Otherwise, there is always the danger that the devil can twist Scripture to his own purposes, to deceive many.
Today’s liturgy reminds us of this in an arresting way. The introit and the responsorial psalm were both taken from psalm 90, the psalm quoted in today’s Gospel. But who quoted it there? The devil! So we now hear these texts from psalm 90 not as Satan used them, to deceive, but interpreted to us by Christ in his mystical Body, in the Mass. That psalm is here given its true Christological explanation. The introit takes God’s own words from the psalm: ‘He shall call upon me and I shall hear him’; it is the Lord God who speaks, and it continues, ‘I will deliver him and give him glory.’ God delivered Jesus from the temptations and gave him the glory of the resurrection that comes from his faithfulness to death for our salvation. As we set out on our Lenten path, we acknowledge with joy that although we undertake this hazardous journey, tested by the devil’s subtle temptations, we are always heard by God and are supported by his power when we cry out to Him in prayer in our need. Finally, we are reminded that the devil still did not give up after three times failing to make our Lord fall. St Luke tells us that he would return to tempt him at the appointed time. This will be Gethsemane, the last and most devastating of all the temptations our Lord had to grapple with, but that is for another day.
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