In the Our Father, we say ‘Lead us not into temptation’, and clearly the prayer is needed because in today’s Gospel, on the Sunday of Temptations, we find the Spirit leading no less a person than the Son of God himself into the desert precisely in order to be tempted. And there is something very strange here.
What is strange is this. As fallen human beings, we are morally imperfect and can grow in the virtues through struggling with temptations – so long as they’re not too overwhelming. But according to the Our Father, we should ask to be spared temptation. By contrast: as God made man, our Lord is morally perfect and thus incapable of moral growth except in the sense of moving from one indescribably exalted condition of perfection to another as changing situations in his life demanded. But in today’s Gospel he is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness so as to face temptation. So what on earth is going on?
To understand what is happening on the First Sunday of Lent we have to think in terms not so much of individuals as of humanity at large. In the episode of the Temptations, Jesus took up the task of purifying the corporate imagination of his people, the Old Testament People of God which was the bearer of the divine plan for humanity as a whole: a corporate imagination crucial, then, for the whole of our race. So Jesus didn’t face his own demons, his own evil thoughts, and that for a very simple reason. As the All- holy One he didn’t have any. As the All-holy One, he couldn’t have any, not any that were personal to himself. Instead, he faced the evil thoughts that had haunted his people, corporately, ever since their own desert wanderings as described in the opening books of Scripture and so often referred back to by the prophets.
The Gospels according to St Matthew and St Luke tell us what those temptations were. There was, first of all, the materialism which led people to sell out the spiritual vision given them. Then, secondly, there was the love of power which made Israel want to be a nation like other nations and dominate the rest. Thirdly, there was the doubt which, when cultivated, bred mistrust of the goodness of God. In his encounter with Satan, our Lord exorcises these internal images as each temptation is presented to him. The encounter was real enough, but it took the form of acts of fantasy.
Eventually, Jesus will have to do more than this. Though Satan is frustrated in the events narrated today, he will return. Today, on the Sunday of the Temptations, Jesus as the New Israel – indeed the New Adam, all humanity’s Representative – conquers the corrupt imagination of the human race. On Good Friday, he will do much more than that. On the Cross, once Satan has led Judas to betray him into the hands of wicked men, the Messiah will struggle with the actual realities our own disordered thoughts image: the diabolic power of sin and the cosmic power of death. That is why in Lent the real magnet that draws us on toward a change of life is the Paschal Mystery. The real magnet is Easter.
Meanwhile, we ask not to be led into temptation, that is: into the ‘Trial of the Messiah’ in the moment of its maximum intensity. In other words: we ask that in our lives we may never know anything like – anything remotely like – the accumulated weight of evil that he, the Word incarnate, was called to know the ‘sin of the world’, to know it above all on the Cross. When in the Lord’s Prayer we say ‘Lead us not into temptation’, we are asking that our tasks in this world will not be beyond us, and that the power of the Saviour will strengthen us in all our trials (whatever these may be) and above all in the hour of our death.
