First Sunday of Lent (A): Matthew 4:1-11
We usually think of this Gospel story as an account of the temptations that Jesus faced while he was fasting in the wilderness: three ways in which Satan tries to drive a wedge between Jesus and the Father and pull him away from his mission. That is true, as far as it goes. But it misses the bigger picture – a picture which may seem puzzling, even troubling to us at first glance. But it is by taking in the bigger picture that we get a glimpse of how this Gospel story shines a bright light on a very important aspect of our own following of Christ.
We catch this bigger picture in the very first line: “At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil” (Matthew 4:1). The word that is translated “tempted” is better translated “tested”. Although the devil may be doing the tempting, this is something that follows the Holy Spirit’s lead. In other words, this is part of the Father’s will. We can go further, and say that the Father is hereby testing Jesus in the wilderness.
The theme of God testing individuals, or Israel as a whole, runs through the Old Testament. Our first reading is an account of how Adam and Eve are tested by God. The serpent speaks to Eve, but, as we learn later, Adam is with her throughout. Both are tested. God tests Abraham by challenging him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. After God leads his people out of Egypt and into the wilderness of Sinai, we are told in Deuteronomy that God tests his people on three separate occasions, which are exact parallels to the testing of Jesus in our Gospel reading. God puts Job to the test in what seems to us to be a particularly brutal, almost incomprehensible, kind of way. We also see passages in the New Testament (Hebrews, for example) which pick up on this theme of testing and apply it to Christians.
Here, an obvious question arises: why would the Father need to test his own Son? Why would God need to test anyone, for that matter? Doesn’t God already know our hearts? If God already knows us, then this testing is done, not for God’s benefit, but for ours. This testing, since it is from God, must be ultimately for our own good.
How can this be?
God has created us with free will. Though our wills are damaged by what we call original sin, God intends them to be free. God respects our freedom. Moreover, God wants us to make as free a choice as possible for him. This, too, is for our good. The freer our choice for God is, the more we will be engaged in that choice and the more committed we will be to God. This, too, is part of our nature as created by God. God has created us with a certain nature and a certain vocation. However, he wants our consent to it. He wants us to welcome it and thus commit ourselves to it. God doesn’t want pre-programmed robots. He wants free beings, who alone can give and receive love.
However, for our choice to be free, there must be a viable alternative. There must be something else we could have chosen. Otherwise, we have no choice at all. Therefore, God takes what – from a merely human point of view – we could call a breathtaking risk: he deliberately leads us into situations where we have a clear choice. He allows us to be tested and even tempted, in order to clear the way for us to make a freer choice for him and a deeper commitment to him. Sometimes, in doing so, God will take away from us something that he used to give us, something we used to rely on as a sign of God’s presence and love in our lives. Not because God hates us; rather, because God doesn’t want to put a thumb on the scales, so to speak. He wants our choice to be more and more free. He wants our choice to come from deeper and deeper within our hearts.
Jesus himself would face that same test – on the cross. He would be deprived of most of his disciples, of any respect or dignity, and even a human sense of the Father’s own presence. He would be deprived of his human life itself. All of this allowed Jesus to make of that moment on the cross the sign of his total self-gift to the Father in the Spirit, and to offer this same self-gift to all who believe.
This helps us to understand some other testings we have read about. Job is brutally deprived of family, wealth, and health. His friends keep telling him that he must have deserved all this, or it would not have happened. They fail to support him. His wife says “Curse God and die”. Everything that an Israelite would have seen as a blessing from God – as a sign of God’s favor – was taken from him. Even when God speaks to Job, he doesn’t offer Job words of consolation. This is Job’s final test. God challenges Job by essentially telling him that his world and his idea of God are too small. Job hears and makes a complete act of trust in God – remarkable given all he has endured. Therefore God calls Job “my servant”.
Think of the dark nights that many saints endured. Just one example: St. Therese of Lisieux faced not only a serious physical illness. She entered a time of darkness where she did not feel the presence or consolation of God. This was her ultimate test. Could she make a free act of faith and love, with no apparent rewards whatsoever? She embraced the darkness as the way God chose for her to be close to him and share in the cross. She, like many before and since, passed the test.
God also tests us. Not because God doesn’t know us, but in order for us to choose him with greater freedom, greater commitment, and greater love. He allows us to be tempted so that we might make a truly free choice for him. But what if we stumble and fail from time to time? God does not abandon us. Sometimes, our failures become part of God’s teaching process. They reveal to us our weakness, vulnerability, and need for God’s grace and love. They reveal to us that we are not yet as free as we would like to think we are. They reveal to us how a choice against God only leads us into slavery to something else – no matter how attractive the temptation may have looked at first. They encourage us to ask God to free us from this slavery just as he freed the Israelites from Egypt, for it is only by saying yes to God that we become truly free, truly ourselves.
God’s testings are ultimately an act of love for us and a testimony to God’s respect for our human freedom. God wants our “I do” to be truly free, truly a gift. And he will literally go through hell or high water to help us do just that, for choosing God – in response to his grace – is our salvation.