The second* temptation of Jesus is this:
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you’, and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Matthew 4:5-7).
* The order of the temptations is different in Matthew and Luke.
On the one hand, the devil is tempting Jesus to endanger himself, thus daring God to intervene to save him, thus proving his Messiahship. But why go all the way to the Temple for that? The same point would be made were Jesus to jump off a readily available cliff in the wilderness. But the Temple was a highly visible, busy, public place in the middle of a city. Were God to intervene miraculously on his behalf, it would have been a spectacle that would amaze and convince many onlookers.
That is why I suggest that this temptation is really about fame, reputation, and popularity. I extend it to relationships generally. It concerns what we do to get attention, make a name for ourselves, win people over, to attract and impress. It is not unlike a mating dance; something we do to attract another. It has to do with getting the appreciation and love from others we feel we need.
The three vows of traditional monasticism — poverty, chastity, and obedience — may inform us here. I contend that they are based on these three temptations. Poverty means having no money. Obedience means we relinquish power. And between them, chastity means a shutting down, or redirecting, of our desire for physical and emotional gain and acquisition. We let go of that need, transforming it so that we are not shaping our whole life with strategies to get affection, admiration, adulation, and acclaim. We stop trying to earn love by means of entertainment or service.
Jesus frames it in terms of tempting God. He rejects the temptation to be tempting. He refuses to win loyalty from others by acting in an alluring or calculating way. He refuses the transactional ways we devise to get love, like when we take risks, daring the other to reject us, or when we provide some kind of service expecting to be owed.
We see this repeatedly in his ministry when the Lord appears to do and say intentionally unpopular things. He largely refuses to accept grandiose titles for himself. The miracles he does are generally private matters in small groups with individuals; sometimes he doesn’t even want all the disciples present. It’s like he does everything he can to avoid the limelight. Of course, he becomes wildly famous anyway, but that is not his intention. He criticizes the practice of doing anything for show. He doesn’t go around explicitly proclaiming his own divinity or messiahship. In John 6 he infamously preaches such a bizarre sermon that a mob that had been ready to make him king walks away in disappointment.
What people will do to get love is endless. They will threaten to destroy or harm themselves, conversely they will dedicate their whole lives to producing a timeless monument in art, or sports, or science, or politics. We will often do whatever it takes to acquire, to extract from another — a parent, a lover, a friend — the attention and affection we need.
Jesus is saying something very radical here. Just as we have to detach from our pursuit of wealth and power, here he insists that we have to avoid dedicating our lives to acquiring the benefits of relationships. This doesn’t mean we do completely without. Jesus did not starve himself. Neither did he decline to wield power and influence. And he certainly engaged in personal relationships. This is not about the self-punishing deprivation of extreme asceticism.
In Psalm 119:36, we read “Turn my heart to your decrees, and not to selfish gain.” So it is a matter of where our hearts are focused, what we have dedicated our lives to, what we “seek first.” Jesus wants us to have and receive what we need. God provides. We give thanks. But we are not to orient ourselves to acquiring, gaining, getting, and receiving, but to God’s law. We are not to put ourselves and our feeling, needs, and desires at the center of our world. We are to put God at the center of our world. If we orient ourselves to God’s law, Jesus is saying we will then receive what we need.
If we sacrifice the feeding of our egos and follow not our own wants but the commandments of Jesus, we will be provided for. This makes no sense to us if we continue to think of ourselves as isolated, independent individuals. But the relinquishing of our desire for acclaim, affection, attention, adulation, attractiveness, and love, means that we think of ourselves instead as members of integrated communities.
Richard Rohr somewhere explains monastic celibacy as love focused not just on one person, but expanded to embrace the whole world. Not everyone is called to that, of course. But all disciples are called to have “the mind of Christ,” which means to understand themselves as one with all. He is our True Self, our Essence. In him, the truly human One, we identify with all people, and that becomes our frame of reference.
What we get, then, we get not as individuals but as participants in communities. Our concern is therefore not for our own personal, private well-being, but for that of the communities of which we are a part. What we need then comes to us in and through those communities.
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