“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came…” (St. Matthew 4:1-3).
The Gospel appointed for the first Sunday in Lent stands out as one of the most important passages for understanding the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is here in the pitiless plains of the wilderness that Jesus suffers and perseveres against evil to reverse the great curse established by our forefather in the garden. It is here that evil’s seemingly unstoppable winning streak against mankind is halted, and it is here that we finally see the first great crack in the edifice of pain and misery that steals our friends and loved ones from us through disease and death. Good intentioned people often diligently scour the Book of Revelation in search of clues that point toward the end of the world; they worry and agonize about who and what will be involved in the great end times battle of Armageddon. While that battle gets all the attention, it is the battle we witness today that determines the outcome of that final battle and the outcome of all the little skirmishes we face every day through which we fight the Devil and all those who serve him.
What do we imagine when we picture Jesus in our mind’s eye? How do we conceive of the King of Kings when we visualize him in flesh and blood so very far removed from our beautiful stained glass and spotless statuary. In today’s reading, our great champion, the victor over death itself, must have looked, not to mention smelled, pretty terrible after wandering in the wilderness for forty days. One imagines that he would have looked more like a homeless beggar than a king. In this moment of His greatest weakness, Jesus is confronted by the personal manifestation of evil in the world: the great corruptor of the good creation, whose dark and nefarious influence stands beside every injustice and horror we have ever experienced. The one who nods approvingly for every heart he can darken or soul he can purchase with the paltry and temporary pleasures of our age. What kind of evil hatred must exist within a creature to rejoice when he sees a young woman crying after her first love breaks her heart or enjoy seeing a poor and mentally disturbed man die in his own filth on an uncaring street or convince a father to use his strength and intellect to badger his girlfriend into murdering their unborn child. These scenes, and the millions more that happen every day, are the sharp end of the evil one’s influence in our lives. It is this fallen angel: Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebulb, the Lord of the Flies, and the Prince of the Damned who sauntered out to meet one more human to corrupt and destroy in the wilderness.
And yet, Jesus of Nazareth is not just a man: He is God incarnate. The stakes could not be higher as Satan finally has a chance to attack and corrupt not just a man made in the image of God, but a member of the Godhead Himself. Of course, some of us may be asking the question, “What would have happened if Jesus had followed the footsteps of all the men who had come before Him and given in to Satan’s diabolical logic?” Most likely, the very fabric of the universe would have ripped itself apart as any conflict between the three persons of the Blessed Trinity can only end in a collapse of the providential order that keeps the universe intact. Which raises the question, “Did the Devil know that victory in the wilderness would mean the end of creation?” Distressingly, it is entirely possible that the end of everything was exactly the Devil’s goal. What better way to get His sad and petulant revenge against his Creator then by destroying the creation God made and loved. For our part, we must always remember that evil, and our participation in evil through sin, is always suicidal, for when we sin, we destroy ourselves by declaring war against God, and we encourage others—by our example—to join in the Devil’s desperate and suicidal combat.
Why then does Jesus endanger the world by submitting Himself to this combat on Satan’s terms in the very place that Satan’s original act of treachery first corrupted? We can never forget that the wilderness was the area in which Adam was banished after he succumbed to Satan’s first temptation of man: the temptation to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, to renounce God and to attempt to be his own god, to renounce the protection of the Almighty for the false freedom that seeks evil and dominance over our fellow man. Sadly, Adam had every advantage against the tempting song of the evil one: he lived in a perfect garden that provided for all of his needs, he had a helper/ally in Eve, and he suffered none of the decaying effects of the fall; however, Adam still failed to protect the garden from the evil influence of Satan. Jesus enters this combat with none of those advantages: He is starving, He is alone, and He stands in a world maimed and assaulted by the sins of mankind, so very far removed from the perfect world which He and the other persons of the Blessed Trinity created. Jesus Christ, the second Adam, must enter the hostile wilderness to undo the damage done by the first Adam; Jesus’ earthly ministry begins here because the reversal of the fall begins here.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to go through all the many victories that Satan wracked up in the time between the Fall of Adam and the Victory of Jesus. A large portion of the Old Testament is a grim catalogue of mankind’s failure to defeat Lucifer as he moves from pliable soul to pliable soul. His tools of fear and lust and hate had been honed over many generations and here is where he planned to take his victory bow. That being the case, we cannot underestimate the importance of the victory Jesus wins in the desert of human failure.
To understand this great triumph in the wilderness better, we must move ahead in the historical account of Jesus’ life and ministry. St. Matthew writes:
Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. (St. Matthew 12:29-32)
Satan is the strong man, and by freeing people from demonic influence, Jesus is plundering Satan’s goods. Jesus has bound the strong man in the wilderness and that victory is being celebrated by the royal pardons Jesus is dispensing upon those enslaved by demons. In Christ’s ministry, we are witnessing a true Jubilee year as slave after slave is set free. Through this lens, we can even better understand what Jesus means by “the blasphemy against the Spirit,” for it is one thing to speak ill of some man who stands before you, but it is another thing to call the Spirit, who only works in concert with the other members of the Trinity, whose power stands behind the healings and miracles, to call Him a devil—which was the horrible blasphemy of which the Pharisees were guilty—is a terrible thing indeed, for it cuts off one’s only avenue of salvation. Backing the wrong side in a war has horrible consequences, and make no mistake, we are everyday engaged in the only war that really matters: the war between God and the Devil, the war between good and evil.
It is a fascinating feature of our time, an age in which we are constantly bombarded by information, that we are more and more called upon to “pick sides” in every squabble that comes our way. The ubiquity of social media and niche information sources increases the tension within our society for each and every one of us to declare our allegiance to the right side of history—defined by whomever happens to be yelling at us in the moment. Political ideology is often the dividing line, but other pressures exist as well. One can get into an argument over everything from vaccines to vegetarianism, capital punishment to capital gains taxes with equal vigor and, usually, the same result. No one’s mind is changed, and the whole exercise leaves both sides with their guard up. The tragedy of focusing on all these many hot-button issues, some big and some small, is that we use precious moments and relational capital to fight for things that simply do not matter when compared to the real war that is going on in our world.
I bring this modern plight up because Jesus is engaged in destroying a similar problem in the 1st century. His original audience was waiting for a warrior messiah-king to smash Rome and bring back the mythical good old days, and because of this myopic focus, they failed to see that the great enemy was not the Romans or the Seleucids or the Persians or the Babylonians, but the enemy who had taken up residence in their hearts and minds, whose will they slavishly obeyed every day, and by whose influence they were planning to engage in a suicidal rebellion against the Roman Empire. Satan was and is the enemy, but we, like the Jews before us, too often focus on the symptoms of the disease rather than the cause. Yes, world hunger is a terrible thing, but one more government agency will not be enough to stop it because it will not solve the problem of human greed and selfishness. See, the War on Poverty—a war that at 25 trillion dollars has cost over three times as much as every war America has fought since the Revolution combined. Yes, Islamic terrorism is a terrible thing, but bombing one more village or appeasing people who hate us will not actually solve anything without evangelizing them to the peace only found in Jesus Christ. After all, America has been actively warring against Islamic aggression since I was in the 8th grade, and the Western world has been at it for another 1,000 years before that. Even closer to home, we are afflicted by broken families, suicides and drug overdoses, but we won’t fix the moral and ethical breakdown of our time with more marches with obscenity filled signs or even the right name on a ballot. We are failing as a society because we are failing to even name our true enemy.
We as Christians must do better. We must stop being ashamed about bringing up God when we talk with our neighbors and enemies because Jesus Christ is not one solution among many; He is the only solution. Either we are with Him or we are against Him. Either we cling to His sacrifice and resurrection as our only hope, or we cling to modern superstitions and temporary pleasures to numb our dread. Either we live as new men and women remade by the love of Christ or we die as the ancients did worshipping ourselves and our creations. We must join our Savior in His war against the Devil, and especially in this time of Lent, we should ask ourselves what we are doing to combat Satan. Are we engaging in prayer and fasting and alms giving or have we convinced ourselves that these things don’t matter? Do we truly believe that our daily work in the world as the Body of Christ matters more than anything else we do, or do we think the corrupted weaponry of the world will be our salvation? Do we carry the cross high above our heads as we march into the soul testing skirmishes of our daily lives, or do we run from these battles—comforted by the cowardice of all those around us. For, if we are doing nothing in this great war, then we are the greatest of cowards because at least the coward who runs from every other earthly battle, leaving his friends to die, has the excuse that he doesn’t know how the battle will end; we who live in the light of Christ’s victory in the desert, on the cross, and in the empty tomb have no such excuse. Let us then go forth and be the people that Christ’s victory has made, for, in Christ, our victory is secure and our hope is never failing.