Temptation Transcended: Part One: Stone, Bread and Flesh

Between his baptism and the commencement of his ministry, Jesus Christ spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, and was subject to temptation.

The number 40 is significant: 40 were the number of days that Moses spent in the cloud on Mount Sinai, receiving the Law, before God sent him down to the children of Israel with the two tables of stone inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 24.18); 40 were the number of years that Moses and the children of Israel themselves spent in the desert, before the children of Israel - but not Moses - were permitted to enter the promised land (Numbers 32.13).

In considering the temptations set before Jesus, Matthew and Luke look back to Moses the first, and greatest, of the Jewish prophets. Moses it was who freed the Jews from their bondage in Egypt; who led the people through the desert; who received and bore witness to the Law on their behalf; and who finally conducted them to the land which they had been promised by God. Jesus, too, would liberate those who believed in him; would lead them through a hostile world; would give them a code to live by; and would bring them in due course to a promised land of their own.

The temptations are put to Jesus by a being whom the Evangelists designate ho peirazwn, or ho diabolos. Ho diabolos, is soon recognised in the somewhat disordered dress of garbled Greek. He is the devil - his name, in Greek, means the prosecutor, the accuser, or the slanderer. Ho peirazwn, is less readily indentifiable, but his name, also from Greek, means the tempter, the one who puts to the test. In finally dismissing him, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6.16 - ouk ekpeiraseis kurion ton theon sou - 'thou shalt not put the Lord they God to the test.'

Those looking back to Moses, will be struck by the end of the verse from Deuternomy that Our Lord quotes. This refers to the way in which the children of Israel are said to have 'put God to the test at Massah' when, you will remember, they insolently demanded water from Moses, and therefore from God, without trusting that God would, in any event, provide for them: Moses struck the rock, and 'water came forth that the people might drink.' (Exodus 17.6): The moment was a significant one, though, and Moses named the place Massah because the word derives from the Hebrew verb, nissà, - which means 'to test.'

Those looking forward to Jesus' future will remember the Lord's prayer, and 'lead us not into temptation', or 'put us not to the test' - mh eisenegkhs hmas eis peirasmon' (Matt.6.13). The repeated suggestions during the passion, that Jesus should prove his divinity by working a sign, or by saving himself, is an index of the godless balsphemy such 'putting to the test' involved (see Matt.27.39-43; Luke 23.39-37). And yet, when the side of Jesus was pierced to see whether he still lived, or had died, 'blood and water came forth' - the symbols of the life of the world, and the life of the body, and, in the case of blood, the symbol of sacrifice (John 19.35).

The substance of the first temptation, when Ho peirazwn proposed that Our Lord satsfy his hunger by turning stone into bread, resembles, in its nature, the exercise of the kind of power that it was granted Moses to exercise at Massah. It was, of course, a concern for bread had led to the enslavement of the Hebrews. The sons of Jacob left Canaan in search of bread, they found it in Egypt, and their descendants degenerated into the slaves of Pharoah. Liberated from their bondage, the children of Israel complained to Moses 'If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our full of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger' (Exodus 16.3). It was in response to this complant that God provided the children of Israel with manna in the desert. .

Our Lord himself did not deny or minimise the importance of bread: the first petition in the prayer which he taught us, is, after all, that God should give us, each day, our daily bread.
And in meeting the physical needs of others than himself, the Saviour was ready, unsolicited, to provide for thousands by miraculous means (Matt.16.9). The Lord was to transcend even that miracle, when, as he had promised (John 6.27), he broke the bread, and blessed it, and gave it to his disciples, saying 'This is my body, which will be given up for you.'

In the gospel of John, the Jews ask for a sign 'so that we may see it and believe in you.' (John 6.30, 6.58). They go on to say, 'Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He' (referring to Moses) 'gave them bread from heaven to eat.' But Jesus interrupts and says 'It was not Moses who gave you the bread fom Heaven, but it is my father who gives you the true bread from heaven... I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna of the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.' (John.6.31-32, 48-51).

When, in his response to the devil, Jesus says that 'Man does not live by bread alone' he is, as often, quoting scripture (in this case Deuteronomy 8.3).

In the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy Moses reminds the children of Israel of their 40 years in the wilderness. 'God,' he says, 'humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of Lord... Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child, so the Lord your God disciplines you... When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them...then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery... and fed you in wilderness... to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself 'My power and the might of my own hand gained me this wealth.'

Here then is the eternal promise, and the eternal temptation which God has renewed in the even more astonishing promises made through him; in transforming bread into his body, and in sacrificing that body for our salvation, Jesus did something that so transcended the suggestion made by the devil that it makes it the temptation look almost ridiculous in comparison.

When Moses came down from Sinai with the two stone tablets of the law, he was to find that the people had made idols for themselves, and had sat down to to eat and drink, and had risen up to revel (Exodus 32.6). What, in the context of Deuteronomy 8, would Jesus have thought of the world that his choseb people had made of the land that had been promised them through Moses? What does he think today of what, with full knowledge of Him, we have made of a world which faith in Him seemed once to have transformed?