The passage: The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After forty days of fasting he was hungry, and the tempter said, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered that it is written, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” The devil set him on the temple’s pinnacle and told him to throw himself down, since it is written that angels will bear him up. Jesus answered that it is also written, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” Then the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world from a high mountain and offered them if Jesus would fall down and worship him. Jesus said, “Get away, Satan! It is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” Then the devil left him, and angels came and ministered to him.
This narrative must have one of two origins: either invention, like many tales told of our Lord in the early centuries of Christianity, or our Lord himself, since by the story no one was present at his Temptation but the wild beasts.
As to invention, the story bears no sign of it. A man who could see what is embodied here would not have dared to invent such an embodiment. If you doubt this, compare it with the best of the stories resting only on the apocryphal gospels, such as the grand account of the Descent into Hell in the Gospel according to Nicodemus.
Our Lord himself. To this I will return presently.
Let us approach from another side. Think how much God must know that we do not. Think what an abyss of truth our Lord was, from whose divine darkness, through that countenance, voice and tender hands, broke every holy radiance of human meaning, and in whose understanding, imagination and heart lay all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Must he not have known and rejoiced in things no human words could tell? His human form was a veil over the face of the truth, which by dimming the glory revealed it in part; what could be conveyed had to be conveyed so, and an infinite More lay behind. And even of what could be partly revealed, could he speak to his Father and to his disciples in the same words? What he said to God on the mountain-tops may have been as far beyond his disciples as God’s voice from heaven was to the crowd, who heard only thunder.
No attempt is made to convey even the substance of the battle of those forty days. A conflict that for forty days absorbed all the human needs of The Man in the cares of the Godhead could not be put into forms we understand; in itself it could not be intelligible to us. Only at the end of the forty days does the divine event begin to dawn from the depths of eternal thought, becoming human enough to be spoken in human forms, though still only as a dark saying for those who have ears to hear and a heart to understand. The mystery is not left behind, and the speech cannot yet be clear.
Just as the approaching event comes within human ken, dimly seen from afar by his God-upheld intelligence, his humanity seizes on the Master and he is hungry. Hunger is the first sign that he has come back to us and that the strife is nearing its human result. On what a sea of endless life our poor necessities float, not the poorest of them separate from the divine! Coming out of the storms of divine thought and feeling into the shallows by the human shore, bearing the treasures won in the strife, our Lord is at once hungry; and from this moment the temptation is human and we can in some measure understand it.
But could it even then have been conveyed in intellectual forms, to those who had only vague, error-mingled notions of him? No. His inward experiences could be conveyed only in a parable, the form he chose for far plainer things; it is the first form in which truth can be embodied, and the fullest. Would he who takes the passage as simple narrative believe what it then plainly says: that a visible demon came to our Lord and, himself prince of worldly wisdom, thought that quoting Scripture like the priests would persuade a good man to tempt God, and promised power to make him abandon every claim on the human race by worshipping one he knew to be the adversary of Truth, Humanity and God? How could Satan be so foolish? Or if he could, how could such a temptation tempt our Lord, and how would victory over it be a victory for the race?
Told as a parable, it is as full of meaning as it would be bare as narrative.
Our Lord told them this parable, then, and so conveyed more of the truth about his temptation than any other form could. Yet I do not think we have it exactly as he told it. A man hears only what he can hear and in retelling tells only what he laid hold of; his effort to reproduce the impression is open to countless altering influences. That does not make the reproduction false. The mighty life-bearing worlds, needing abysses of space for their courses, dwindle to the eye into seeds of light sown on a blue plain, and the thunder of their adoration is faint in our ears; yet they are lovely, uttering speech and teaching knowledge. So this story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet hold in its mirror as much truth as we can receive, with scope for a lifetime’s discovery. The modifying influence of human channels may be essential to God’s way of revealing; we learn the laws of the heavens only by first seeing the stars from afar.
Now arises the question on whose answer the whole elucidation depends: How could the Son of God be tempted?
If anyone says he was not moved by those temptations, then they were no temptations to him and he was not tempted; his victory meant no more than that of a man who, tempted to bear false witness against his neighbour, refrains from robbing him. It would mean nothing for human need, struggle and hope, and we would have to reject the whole as crude invention, a mere stage-show, a lie for the sake of a fancied truth, a doing of evil that good might come, and not to be received as a divine message however many fragments of truth its mud might hold.
But if these were real temptations, am I not in a greater difficulty? How could the Son of God be tempted with evil, which to him must appear in its true colours of discord and deformity? And how then could he be the Son of a Father who cannot be tempted with evil?
The answer is the centre and essential germ of the whole interpretation: he was not tempted with Evil but with Good, with inferior forms of good pressing in while the higher forms held aloof, biding their time, which is God’s time. I do not believe the Son of God could be tempted with evil, but I believe he could be tempted with good, to yield to which would have been evil in him, ruin to the universe. But does not all evil come from good?
Yes, but it has come from it; it is no longer good. A good corrupted is no longer a good, and such could not tempt our Lord. Revenge may originate in a sense of justice, but it is revenge, not justice, an evil thing, for it would be fearfully unjust. The Lord could not have felt tempted to take vengeance on his enemies, but he might have felt tempted to destroy the wicked from the face of the earth, not to destroy them for ever; to that I do not think he could have felt tempted.
But the matter itself will illustrate what I mean. Let us look at the individual temptations in the parable.
The idea behind St Matthew’s arrangement seems to me superior to St Luke’s. In the two accounts the closes, each profoundly significant, are remarkably different.
Now let us follow St Matthew, and see how the devil tempted him to evil, but not with evil.
First, he was hungry, and the devil said, Make bread of this stone.
The Lord had been fasting forty days, a fast impossible except in intense mental absorption. Let no one glorify it by calling it miraculous. Such fasts are on record of holy men; and as the Lord was more of a man than his brethren, he could be withdrawn farther into his spiritual humanity from his physical nature, whose workings would be that much slower, so that his fast could outlast any other. This, I believe, was all, and it is the simplest and so the divinest way to see the fast. At the end, then, it was not hunger alone that made food tempting but the exhaustion of the whole system, which, acting on a mind already worn out by its own tension, must have so deadened it (speaking from the experience of his brethren) that for the time it could see or feel nothing of the spiritual and could only believe in the unfelt, the unseen. What a temptation! There is no sin in wishing to eat or in honestly procuring food. It rises even to an awful duty when a man knows that eating will restore the lost vision of the eternal and make him capable of hope as well as faith, gladness as well as confidence. Why then should he not eat, using the power in him? Because that power was his not to take care of himself but to work the work of him who sent him, and not even to honour his Father except as his Father chose, who is more honoured by common wonders than by miracles. It was God’s business to take care of him, and his to do what the Father told him. To make that stone bread would take the care out of the Father’s hands and turn the divinest thing in the universe into the merest commonplace of self-preservation.
In nothing was he to be beyond his brethren, save in faith. He had no refuge, any more than they, but the Father’s love and care; any other, miraculous power or what you will, would be hell to him. God is refuge. God is life. “Was he not to eat when it came in his way? And did not the bread come in his way when his power met what could be changed into it?”
Regard that word changed; the whole matter lies in it. Changed from what God had made it, into what he did not make it, because the Son was hungry and the Father would not feed him with convenient food! The Father did not give him a stone when he asked for bread; Satan brought the stone and told him to provide for himself. The Father said, That is a stone; the Son would not say, That is a loaf. No creative fiat shall contradict another; Father and Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what his Father had made one thing. [Footnote: There was no such change in feeding the multitudes; the fish and bread were fish and bread before. I think this significant for the true nature of a miracle: in these miracles, and I think in all, there was only a hastening of appearances, the doing in a day of what may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us. Hastening a process does not interfere with cause and effect or make it more miraculous. The wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the feeding of the thousands; it is easier to understand creative power going forth at once than through the countless, lovely, seemingly forsaken wonders of the corn-field. To the merely scientific man this is nonsense; the time will come, I think, when he will see in it a higher reason and loftier science, however incorrectly indicated here.]
The answer he gave the devil shows the root at once: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Yes, even by the word that made that stone that stone. It is life to him to leave a stone what the Father made a stone; it would be death to alter one word that He had spoken.
“Man shall not live by bread alone.” There are other ways to live. A man will live by the word of God: by what God says to him and means between Him and him, by the truths of being only the Father can reveal to his child, by the communion of love between them. Without bread he will die, as men say, but will not find that he dies; he will find only that the tent which hid the stars is gone and he can see the heavens, or that the earthly house melts away and he has a palace-home about him, another and loftier word of God clothing upon him. So the man lives by the word of God even in refusing bread God does not give him; instead of dying he rises into a higher life of the same kind.
I have been speaking of the consciousness of existence, not of that higher spiritual life on which all other life depends, and which cannot exist for a moment except from the heart of God. A man who tries to live by bread and not by the word from that heart may think he lives, but he begins to die or is dead. Our Lord says in effect, “I can do without the life that comes of bread; without the life that comes of my Father’s word I die indeed.” So he does not think twice. That God’s will be done is all his care; that done, all will be right with him, whether he thinks of himself or not. The Father does not forget the child so busy trusting him that he does not even pray for himself.
In the higher aspect of this first temptation, that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under conditions of physical well-being that depend on food, the answer is the same: a man lives not by his feelings any more than by bread, but by the Truth, the Word, the Will, the uttered Being of God.
I am ashamed to be forced to write what is only milk for babes. What I must say is that by the Word of God I do not mean The Bible. The Bible is a Word of God, the chief of his written words, because it tells us of The Word, the Christ; but everything God has done and given man to know is a word of his, a will of his, and as such a necessity to man: receiving it is his life. Since God’s utterances are a whole, the smallest is essential. But by the word of the God who is God because he speaks to men, I must understand in the deepest sense every revelation of Himself in the heart and consciousness of man, so that the man knows God is there, nay, here. Even Christ is not The Word of God in the deepest sense to a man until he is this Revelation to him, until the Spirit that is the meaning in the Word has come to him, until the speech is not a sound as of thunder but the voice of words; for a word is more than an utterance, it is a sound to be understood. No word is fully a Word of God until it is a Word to man, until he recognizes God in it; that is what it is spoken for. God’s words, like the sands and stars, cannot be numbered, but the end of each is to reveal God. Nor can a man know any of them is God’s word except as it comes thus to him. It is to him that it may be in him, and till it is in him he cannot know it was to him. God must be God in man before man can know that he is God, or that he has rightly received any word of his. [Footnote: No doubt the humble spirit will receive the testimony of everyone he reveres and look in the direction indicated for a word from the Father; but till he receives it in his heart he cannot know what the word spoken of is.]
If we live by any will of God, any truth in him, we live by it tenfold when it becomes a word to us; his will becomes ours, and so we live by God. But once the word is understood, a man must live by faith in what God is, not by his feelings even about God. When he can no longer feel the truth he does not therefore die. He lives because God is true, and knows he lives because, having once understood the word, he knows God is truth. He believes in the God of former vision, and lives by that word when all is dark.
The Enemy’s second attempt: “If God is to be so trusted, try him. I would like to see the result. Show yourself his darling. Here is the word for it: angels will have charge of you; not a stone shall hurt you. Take him at his word. Throw yourself down and strike the conviction into me that you are the Son of God. For you know you do not look like what you say you are.”
Again the Lord meets him with a written word, not as a logical proof to confute Satan, but as giving even Satan the reason for his conduct. Satan quotes Scripture as verbal authority; our Lord answers with a Scripture by whose truth he regulates his conduct.
This answer holds the same principle as the first: to the Son of God the will of God is Life. It was a temptation to show the powers of the world that he was the Son of God, above the laws of Nature as the Eternal Son, and so stop the raging of the heathen. It would be but to show them the truth. But he was the Son: what was his Father’s will? That was not the divine way of convincing the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. If the Father told him to cast himself down, the pinnacle would point bare to the sky; if the devil threw him down, let God send angels or, if better, let him be dashed to pieces. He will never forestall the divine will. The Father shall order what comes next; the Son will obey. In the path of his work he will turn aside for no stone, and there let angels bear him if need be; but he will not choose the path because there is a stone in it. He will not choose at all. He will go where the Spirit leads.
This throws light on our Lord’s saying that with faith and no doubt we could tell a mountain to be cast into the sea and it would be done. Good people, John Bunyan among them, have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God on the strength of it, as Satan did with the Psalm; happily the assurance they called faith generally failed them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it, or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge because God wills, neither pressing into the hidden future nor careless of knowledge that opens the path of action. Its noblest exercise is to act without certainty of the result when the duty is certain, or even when a course seems very probably duty. [Footnote: In the latter case a man may be mistaken and his work burned, but by that very fire he will be saved. Nothing saves a man more than the burning of his work, except doing work that can stand the fire.] To put God to the question in any way other than “What wilt thou have me to do?” is an attempt to compel God to declare himself or hasten his work. This probably was the sin of Judas. It is presumption like making a stone into bread: forcing God to act where he has created no need, or making a case in which he will seem to have forfeited his word if he does not act. The man acts in God’s face to see what he will do, instead of from within by the divine will. Man’s first business is “What does God want me to do?” not “What will God do if I do so and so?” To tempt a human parent so would be impertinence; to tempt God so is the same vice at its highest, the fruit of a state of mind worse than all the so-called cardinal sins, spiritual pride, which attributes God’s love not to man’s being and need but to some excellence in the individual that makes the Father love him better than his fellows and smile at his faults. Not thus did the Son of God regard his relation to his Father. The faith that removes mountains is confidence in God that comes from seeking nothing but his will. A man so faithful would die of hunger sooner than say to the stone, Be bread, and take the scoffs of the unbelieving without reply sooner than say to the mountain, Be thou cast into the sea, even if he knew it would be torn up at the word, unless he first knew God would have it so.
And so I come to how this could be a real temptation to the Son of Man. It would be good to confound his adversaries and force on them the conviction that he was the God-supported messenger he declared himself. Why should he have Adversaries a moment longer, standing between him and the willing hearts that would believe if they could? The answer was plain to our Lord and is plain now: it was not the way of the Father’s will. It would not fit the gradual development of life and history by which the Father breeds free, God-loving wills. It would be violent and theatrical, poor in nature and result, not God-like. His history as Son of Man shall be The Man’s history; shall it begin with an exception? Yet it might well tempt one who longed to do all he could for men. He was the Son of God: why should the sons of God not know it?
This temptation was an epitome and type of those to come, against which for forty days he had been making himself strong, revolving truth beyond our reach. We shall understand it better by looking at his life. As he refused to make stones bread, he never worked a miracle to help himself; as he refused to cast himself from the temple to convince Satan, he steadily refused the sign the human Satans demanded, though they offered conviction as a bribe. How easy it seems it would have been to confound them and strengthen his followers! But such conviction would stand in the way of a better conviction in his disciples and do his adversaries only harm. Neither could truly be convinced by a show; it could only prove his power. It might prove the presence of a God, but would it prove that God, or bring him nearer to those who could not see him in the face of his Son? To say Thou art God without knowing what the Thou means is of no use; God is a name only unless we know God. Our Lord did not care to be acknowledged so.
On the same principle he would not do, where unbelief prevailed, the very miracles that partly revealed his character to those who had faith. He often avoided cities and crowds and declined mighty works because of unbelief. Apart from the loving help they gave the distressed, revealing him as Redeemer from evil, I doubt he would have worked a single miracle, or expected much from them for onlookers. A mere marvel is soon forgotten, and long before that many have begun to doubt the senses that brought it. Inward sight alone convinces of truth, never signs and wonders, which can convey only a probability that he who shows them knows what he speaks of. The vision of the truth itself, beyond signs and wonders, is the power of God, is salvation. This vision was in the Lord’s face and form to the pure in heart, but not in his signs to those who sought them. Yet it is easy to see how the temptation might for a moment work on a mind that longed to begin its labours with the credentials of its truth. How the true heart longs to be received by its brethren and known in its truth! But no. The truth must show itself in God’s time, in and by the labour. The kingdom must come in God’s holy human way: not by a stroke of grandeur but by years of love, centuries of seeming bafflement, aeons of labour. The Lord will be bound by the changeless laws which are the harmony of the Father’s being and utterance. He will be, not seem; he will be, and thereby, not therefore, seem. Yet even on him the idea of asserting the truth in holy power must have dawned in grandeur. The thought was good; to yield to it would have been the loss of the world, nay, worse: the God of obedience fallen from his throne, and all is blackness.
But let us not forget that the whole is a faint parable, faint beside the grandeur of the reality, as the ring and the shoes are poor types (yet how dear!) of the Father’s absolute love for his prodigal children.
Now the third temptation. The first was to help himself in his need; the second, perhaps, to assert the Father; the third, to deliver his brethren.
To deliver them in the way of men, still from the outside. Indeed the whole Temptation may be seen as the contest of the seen and the unseen, the outer and inner, the likely and the true, the show and the reality. And as in the others, the evil in this last lay in its being a temptation to save his brethren instead of doing the Will of his Father.
Could it be other than a temptation to think he might lay a righteous grasp on the reins of government, leap into the chariot of power and ride forth conquering and to conquer? Glad visions rose before him: the prisoner breaking jubilant from the cell of injustice; the widow lifting her bowed head before the devouring Pharisee; weeping children shouting at the sound of the chariot wheels, before which oppression and wrong withered, and behind which the fir-tree sprang instead of the thorn, the myrtle instead of the brier. What glowing dreams of holy vengeance and human blessedness, all from his hand, would crowd such a brain, not like the castles in the air of an aspiring youth, who builds at random because he cannot make them real, but consistent and grand because he knew them within his reach. Could he not mould the people at his will, and, transfigured in snowy garments, call aloud in Jerusalem, “Behold your King”? His nation’s fierce warriors would start at the sound, and the nation would rush to a grand, holy war (not a crusade; we should not have had that word) against the tyrants of the race who trod on their brethren and would not let them even look to the heavens. Ah! but when were his garments white as snow? Not when he looked to such a conquest, but when, on a mount like this, he spoke of the decease he should accomplish at Jerusalem! Why should this be “the sad end of the war”? “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.” Not even your own visions of love and truth, O Saviour of the world, shall guide you to your goal, but the will of your Father in heaven.
But how would he, thus conquering, be a servant of Satan? How would this be a falling down and worshipping (acknowledging the worth of) the lord of misrule and its pain?
I will not inquire whether such an enterprise could be accomplished without the worship of Satan, without the trickery, double-dealing, tact, flattery and finesse of every ambitious leader and self-serving conqueror; on any supposition of our Lord leading his country’s armies these are impossible, and such a career cannot be imagined for him. But I ask whether to know better and not do so well is not serving Satan; whether to lead men on in God’s name toward the best when the end is not the best is not serving Satan; whether to flatter their pride by making them conquerors of their nation’s enemies instead of their own evils is not serving Satan. To desert the mission of the God who knew men could not be set free that way, and sent him to be a man, a true man, the one man among them, so that his life might become theirs and they be as free in prison or on the cross as on a hillside or a throne; to give men over instead to the lie that anything other than spirit and truth is the worship of the Father, anything other than love the fulfilling of the law, anything other than the offering of their best selves the service of God, anything other than obedient harmony with the primal love, truth and law, freedom: would that not have been to fall down and worship the devil? Not all the sovereignty of God, as the theologians call it, delegated to the Son, could have wrought the kingdom of heaven in one corner of the earth. Nothing but the Son’s obedience unto death, the absolute doing of God’s will because it was the truth, could redeem the prisoner, the widow, the orphan; and it would redeem them by redeeming also the conquest-ridden conqueror, the stripe-giving jailer, the unjust judge, the devouring Pharisee himself with his insatiable moth-eaten heart. The earth should be free because Love was stronger than Death. So fierceness and wrong and hypocrisy and God-service should play out their weary play. He would not pluck the branches of the tree but lay the axe to its root. It would take time, but the tree would be dead at last and cast into the lake of fire; his Father had time to spare. It would take courage, strength, self-denial and endurance; his Father could give him all. It would cost pain of body and mind, agony and torture; he was ready to take it on himself. It would cost him many hopeless sights: tears he must not wipe, sighs he must not turn to laughter, the dead he must let lie, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing comfort, his brothers and sisters crying like children over broken toys while he does not mend them; he must go on to the grave and they not know that thus he was setting all things right for them. His work must be one with, and complete, God’s Creation and History. The disappointment and sorrow and fear he could and would bear. The will of God should be done. Man should be free, not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him: the divine idea set free in the divine bosom, the man on earth seeing his angel face to face, growing into the likeness of the divine thought, free not in his own fancy but in the absolute divine fact of being. The great, beautiful and perfect will of God must be done.
“Away, Satan! For it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”
When Peter tried to stop him as he set his face steadily to meet death at Jerusalem, he gave Peter the same kind of answer, calling him Satan too.
“Then the devil left him, and angels came and ministered to him.”
So says St Matthew. They brought him the food he had waited for, walking in the strength of the word. He would have died if it had not come now.
“And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season,” says St Luke.
Then Satan ventured once more. When?
Was it then, in the agony of the last faint, when the Lord cried out, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” when, having done the great work and laid it aside clean and pure as the linen cloth ready to enfold him, another cloud than that on the mount overshadowed his soul, and out of it came a voiceless persuasion that after all was done God did not care for his work or for him?
Even in those words the adversary was foiled, and for ever. For when he seemed to be forsaken, his cry was still, My God! my God!