Progressive reflections on the lectionary #56

Monday 3rd March 2025

Luke 4: 1-13 Lent begins with a retelling of the old temptation story

I’ll begin with a confession - it’s good for the soul after all. I have a ‘go-to’ interpretation of this passage (the story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert), which forms my immediate response to hearing it. If I had no time for thought or reading, I would regurgitate that same response immediately on being presented with this particular story. So let me start there, then, with my standard spiel…

The story presents Jesus as subject to three particular ‘temptations’ or ‘tests’. The first is to do with resources: ‘turn these stones into bread’. The second test is concerned with power: ‘worship me and these kingdoms are yours.’ The third test, in Luke’s story (Matthew has the same story but a different order of tests) has to do with relationships: ‘throw yourself from the pinnacle and rely on God to save you.’ Of course, there’s also a fourth, unwritten test here - will Jesus remain in the wilderness to face down these temptations? Or will he walk away, and get going in his ministry without working through these issues?

That’s my initial, quick, read of this story: a psycho-spiritual one, effectively. These are, I suggest, the temptations we are all subject to. The temptation to abuse resources, power, or relationships, and the temptation to run from our own failings. I would then go on to point out that the ‘evangelical counsels’ of the monastics addressed these squarely: poverty (resources), chastity (relationships) and obedience (power), with the added vow of stability for those concerned with ‘running away’. I’ve used this approach many times, in print as well as in person, and I think it has mileage.

It doesn’t, though, address other questions about the passage that we might like it to. Questions like: “what, exactly, is this passage? Where does it come from? Why is it in each of the three synoptics in different form?”

The thing is that the deeper one goes into those sort of questions, the more philosophical, and historical, one has to get, and there is only so much appetite for such exploration, so one has to choose carefully.

My sense is that the best readings of this passage emphasise the Jewishness of it, and suggests that there would have been a first century Jewish tradition that formed a source for each of these stories - that’s something of a challenge for (some) Christian readers, I think. It sits well, though, in the Jewish tradition of divine testing of the righteous - the best known, and most recognisable, story from that tradition being Job, of course.

In both this story and that of Job we have the figure of the tester/accuser. In Job the Satan is clearly working for God, not against, part of the divine court. That is his role in the Hebrew Scriptures, and it carries on here as he seems to fulfil a similar function in the testing of Jesus. His job is not the spreading of malevolence as it becomes in dualistic Christian literature, but of testing the righteous man to see how far that righteousness extends. Our focus, when reading Job, tends towards the issue of theodicy (why do bad things happen?) but that can lead to ignoring the fact that this is a classic Jewish story of testing.

Numerous other examples exist, of course, across the ‘range’ of the patriarchs. Abraham is told to sacrifice his son; Joseph, Moses and David are also subject to various tests; and in the deuterocanonical books it’s arguably even clearer. In the book of Tobit the righteous man endures various trials, including blindness and financial hardship and despite his suffering remains faithful to God. Likewise in the book of Judith the pious widow must exhibit enduring faith and courage in order to defeat the enemy.

If you feel like going in this direction, then an interesting (and short) passage to use would be the prayer of Azariah (aka Abednego) and the song of the Jews, which is one of the non-canonical ‘additions to Daniel’. One might well draw some neat comparisons there between the testing of Jesus in the wilderness, and the testing of the Jews in the furnace. In both cases it is steadfastness that results in deliverance from trial. In my experience people like hearing stories and passages that are unfamiliar to them! Essentially the point is that this testing of Jesus sits within the Jewish tradition of testing stories.

Of course, that leaves one with lots of other questions to explore, which go beyond the remit of this particular passage. In particular it leaves us with questions concerning the Jewishness of Jesus, the reception of Jesus by the Jewish communities of the time and so on. For the purpose of clarity, my basic position is that Jesus remained within the Jewish tradition for his whole life - and that his status as ‘Messiah’ was neither blasphemous to the Jews of the first century, nor even problematic to most of them. Resistance against him came because of his opposition to Rome and the collaborating powers within first century Israel. (Not the pharisees, for the record, in fact there’s a fairly reasonable argument to be made that Jesus was a pharisee). But, you know what I said about choosing carefully? This is a question for another time.

Lastly then, I think we might want to acknowledge that there is, within these testing stories, a sense of individuals standing as a proxies for the wider ‘people of God’. In the Hebrew Scriptures this amounts to Israel (latterly reduced to Judah, Benjamin and the Levites aka ‘the Jews’), but of course in Christian tradition this is expanded to encompass ‘the Church’ in its catholic/universal sense.

The question then becomes something like ‘how do the people respond to ‘testing’ circumstances?’ How do we respond to difficulties and challenges? How do we respond to the temptations of abusing resources, relationships and power? Not well, if the history books are any sort of judge. This becomes, then, a challenge that comes back around to the initial reading. How can we, as (a) people, respond well to testing circumstances? Are we sufficiently committed to the principles of our faith to come through the furnace/wilderness unscathed? Or will we sell out the moment we realise that we can get power over others? After millennia of reiteration, it is a question that remains very apposite.

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