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“I can resist everything,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “except temptation.” It’s a good line – snappy, memorable, though possibly a bit over-used. But I think I prefer the variation on the idea which Wilde uses in “Dorian Grey”, where the cynical, hedonistic Lord Henry advises the naïve protagonist: "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."
It’s a very comfortable bit of advice, in a way, though I’m not sure that it’s one you’d want to follow –Dorian Grey came to a rather unpleasant end. But there’s a good bit of psychological insight in there. There are certainly times when I’ve done things that I probably shouldn’t have, just because I couldn’t stand thinking about it all the time. It’s certainly amazing how much more you think about things when you know you can’t have them. To take a trivial example, I know I thought more about chocolate in the times when I’ve given it up for Lent than I normally would!
And one aspect of temptation is getting so obsessed with something that we can’t see how to do without it. It just feels too difficult to go without, or stop doing what we were doing, or start doing something we know should, but – well, we haven’t got the energy, or the time, or the guts. Or the imagination.
Because while, unlike Lord Henry, I don’t believe that it’s impossible to resist temptation, I do acknowledge that it can be very uncomfortable to do so. It often means taking the hard road, not the easy one, and who wants to do that? Of course, we have to remember that there are also temptations to do what you think is the hard, right, thing because it makes us look admirable, even if it hurts others or ourselves. But there, resisting it involves admitting things that we may not very much like about ourselves. And often that’s the hardest thing of all.
The Old Testament and the Gospel for today both gave us two contrasting stories about temptation – very appropriately, for the start of Lent. The woman and the man, Adam and Eve, seem to espouse the Lord Henry model of temptation – the narrative gives no indication that they even tried to resist. And it’s a very human story. If someone tells me they know a secret, I want to know. Humans are incurably curious creatures, and in many ways it’s one of the better things about us as a species. It’s given us creativity, scholarship, learning – and indeed, just about everything we take for granted in life came about through people wondering what would happen if they tried something new. I do wonder how someone came up with the idea of cooking, for instance...
But there’s a darker side to curiosity. It can be about trying to achieve power over other people, about looking for ways of controlling them – about finding a way to ‘play God’ in fact.
The Gospel story, by contrast, shows us Jesus, who apparently has no difficulty in resisting the devil’s temptations. The three temptations aren’t chosen at random. The stakes get gradually higher, but there’s a common thread; and it gets back to this idea of temptation as being closely linked to taking the easy way out.
The first temptation looks fairly straightforward. Jesus is hungry – unsurprisingly, after forty days of fasting – and the devil tempts him to turn the stones into bread. The temptation is to use his power, the power of God within him, for his own benefit; but this is not how God’s power and love works – it is always directed outwards for the good of others. Divine miracles are not cheap party tricks.
The second temptation is perhaps a more insidious one. You could read it in more than one way. Jesus throwing himself down from the Temple and being caught by angels would be a very spectacular way of demonstrating his power and identity as the Son of God. Surely, you might think, that would be a pretty unarguable way of getting people to believe in him? However, once again – and however much we might sometimes wish that wasn’t the case – ‘forcing’ us to believe is not how God works.
Or there’s another possibility. The temptation might be playing on Jesus’ self-doubt. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down…” There are temptations that prey on our own self-doubts; we find ourselves doing selfish, cruel, or just plain stupid things in a desperate attempt to shore up our own identities, our own self-image, our relationships with others. You can see it on the school playground, how children join in with bullying because they don’t want to end up as victims. But Jesus knows who he is, and he knows that his identity is his relationship to the Father. The Son of God is who he is, and he remains true to that relationship by not testing it. He doesn’t need to demand that the Father prove he loves him; he will not put God to the test.
And then we come to the final temptation: to bow down and worship the devil, in exchange for “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them”. Such a little act, it might seem, and after all, Jesus would make a better king than Caesar, wouldn’t he? But it’s a temptation and a cheat – by achieving power by this quick and easy method, Jesus would have turned his back on the Father – and on who he himself is. It’s the same temptation as Adam and Eve faced – to grab power and overlordship. Now, no-one is very likely to offer any of us world domination, in return for a minor spot of blasphemy. But it is quite likely that we will be faced with the choice between being true to ourselves, to the people God made us to be, and – well, something easy and attractive. It might be a job, a position of power or influence. It might be power over something else, or impressing someone you want to like you. It might be the temptation to do something bad so that good might come of it – after all, who could doubt that Jesus would be a better king than Caesar? But Jesus’ example shows us that there are no short cuts, only the hard road to the cross.
But the Cross is also the way to the garden and the empty tomb, the way to resurrection and new life which redeems all the struggles and labours, and that thought ought to comfort us. And then, too, we can find comfort in Paul’s words in the Epistle: Christ shares our humanity and identifies with our weakness and sin, so that we die with him and rise with him, redeemed and set free.
And if nothing else – for we know there’s likely to come a time when we found the temptation impossible to resist – we can perhaps remember Lord Henry’s views on the subject of temptation after all. For if we have yielded to the temptation, then we may also realize that, after all, it was not satisfying. It loses its power, at least for a time – and so, we can realize that we can return in penitence to Christ, for God is the only one who can truly satisfy our desires. Not an easy satisfaction, but the real ones never are.
