Friday, February 10, 2017

Temptation, passion, death, and resurrection

(Depending on the translation,) St. Luke says that, after Jesus' temptation in the desert, the devil left him "for a time," or "for a season," or "until an opportune time." (Lk 4:13) I think the vagueness is likely intentional, and a good thing. We know of at least two later times when Jesus felt tempted: before he rebuked Simon Peter, and of course in Gethsemane the night before his death as he fervently prayed (Lk 22:44) that the Father's will would be done rather than his own. (Scripture does not use the term "temptation" to describe these two incidents, so some might balk at thusly portraying them, at least without the qualification that there is no obligation to interpret them as such. Granted.)

I think we are tempted, as we die to ourselves, to want to rise in the same way that we have just allowed God to put part of us to death. Maybe this was the root of Jesus' temptations, too. He had, in a sense, put to death his heavenly glory to walk with us, and in his humanity maybe he faced a nearly constant temptation to take it back up again. In his case, what he'd given up was a good thing.

In our own lives, we're often called to give things up, some that are good along with the bad, for a variety of reasons. Each of them represents a part of dying in Christ, and each comes with a temptation to look with longing on that which the Father has asked and graced us to lay aside to do His will. Every good thing will be restored to us when we are resurrected in Christ, and every bad thing fully burned away. Meanwhile, we must enter our personal passion in the same way as Jesus, offering his prayer to the Father: not my will, but thine be done.

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