The season of Lent is modeled on Christ’s retreat to the wilderness,
after his baptism by John and before the start of this three year ministry. In
this Year A of the three year Lectionary cycle, Matthew tells the story in much
the same way that Luke does in Year B.
It is given a distinctive slant, though, by the lessons that accompany
it. The Old Testament passage from Genesis, and the Epistle from Paul’s letter
to the Romans, make the connection with the Garden of Eden and Adam’s original
sin as plain as it can be. To understand the wilderness episode, they say, we
must see Christ’s resisting temptation against the background of Adam and Eve’s
yielding to it. What they originally put wrong, Christ finally put right.
The line of interpretation is clear enough, but its contemporary
meaning is not so easy to grasp. How are we to understand references to Satan,
and the doctrine of original sin? Can we believe in a Devil anymore? And
mustn’t we reject the sheer injustice that seems to underlie the idea that the
sins of generations long since dead can be visited on innocent descendents?
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| Chagall Adam and Eve |
These are important questions. The scientific world view within which
we operate today is radically different to the mindset of the Gospel authors.
Yet if there is this gap, there is common ground too. Human nature and
experience remain for us pretty much the same as they were in Biblical times.
Hope and despair, honesty and deceitfulness, innocence and wickedness, sickness
and health, calamity and blessing -- these make up the fabric of our lives as
much as theirs. To believe in the Bible as Revelation, is to believe that it
still speaks profoundly to the human condition.
So what on this occasion does it have to say? Temptation is a
perpetual human hazard. Most of us are not positively inclined to cruelty or
injustice. Our failings arise from a sort of weakness – the tendency to avert
our eyes from wrongdoing by re-describing it in more acceptable, and even
attractive terms. It was thus that the serpent spoke to the archetypes ‘Adam’
and ‘Eve’. The Satanic voice is the opposite of Conscience, and can speak to
Man and Woman still, always in alluring whispers that suggest ‘this really is
for the best’. It is this voice that Jesus heard deep within himself in his
isolation – a fact that shows him to be Human. At the same time, he could see
that temptation invites us to do something deeply idolatrous -- put God’s patience and justice to the test. That is what
showed him to be Divine.
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