Tempted

Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days of prayer and fasting. There he was tempted by the devil. Three temptations were presented. To me, it seems like the first one would have been the hardest. You haven’t eaten anything for forty days, you’re beyond hungry. You are literally starving. The devil says, “Here, take this bread.” And still Jesus says, “No thank you.” 

I guess if he could pass up that temptation he could do just about anything. The next two items the devil dangled before him were heady things – power and glory, indomitability. But I don’t even know how anyone could get their head around such ideas when they had not eaten for forty days. 

That first one, though…I don’t know if I could have resisted the temptation to eat. If I were starving. But it was necessary for Jesus to resist, because the devil did not have his best interests at heart. The devil did not want Jesus to succeed, did not want the world to be saved, so he tried to lure Jesus toward failure. That is pretty serious stuff.

The problem with temptation is that we often don’t know it when we see it. If the devil came to us wearing the classic red devil costume, then it would be easy. But everyone knows the devil comes in disguise. A temptation is a temptation because it looks so good – how could it be bad?

Right?

And so we joke about it. We talk about “guilty pleasures,” those little things we would like to be too sophisticated, too smart, too disciplined to enjoy. Like Twinkies, perhaps. But we are not … and so we do, and there you have it.

Our favorite weapon against temptation might be to mock it. When we resort to mocking, we feel smarter, wittier. We think we are stripping these temptations of any power they might have over us. But is that really true? Or are we just forfeiting our own agency in making distinctions between the good and the … not so good? 

Seriously, a sweet little bonbon is probably not a serious temptation. Perhaps of more concern would be the cheap family-size pack of chicken breasts, if you know anything about the conditions in which those chickens were raised. The layers of wrong that all come together in this particular issue are more than I can say here. (You can google factory farm chickens.) Still, it’s hard to resist cheap chicken.

When you think about it, temptation actually is pretty serious.

Photo: Dessert. I ate the whole thing.