Personally, I have always found the Gospel’s accounts of Jesus’ temptation incredibly bland, even silly. Reading them, I have been troubled by a sense of “Is this really all there was to it?” At best, it seemed to me Jesus was engaged in a kind of supernatural war game, where though from a certain distance the action looked and sounded real enough, no one was in any real danger. It was no more than a simulation.
Yoder’s Reading of the Temptations
John Howard Yoder’s all-too-brief reading of the temptations helped me see this story differently.[1] He argued that “all the options laid before Jesus by the tempter are ways of being king” and that each temptation presented Jesus with an alternative means to realize his kingdom, a way other than the via crucis.
First, Jesus faces the “economic option.” Yoder argues that we should not see this as a temptation for Jesus to satisfy his own hunger. Instead, he suggests that Jesus perceived the opportunity to provide a banquet that would attract followers to him. “Feed the crowds and you shall be king.”[2]
Second, Jesus faces the “socio-political option.” Here Yoder discerns a temptation to “the idolatrous character of political power hunger and nationalism.”[3] He notes that the Tempter entices Jesus to follow the words of promise spoken over him in baptism (Psalm 2.7 via Luke 3.22) and to go on to possess the promise’s reward: “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession” (Ps 2.8).
Third, Jesus faces the “religious option.” Yoder acknowledges that two possibilities present themselves to the reader; Jesus could be tempted to fall outside the Temple wall or to leap down into the Temple court itself. Following Hyldahl, Yoder understands that being thrown down to one’s death in the Kidron valley from a high tower in the temple wall was the prescribed penalty for blasphemy. Given that, Jesus might be undergoing temptation to prove to himself that he is not blaspheming when he thinks himself Israel’s messiah/king. He is been enticed to an ordeal, a triall to end all trials, so to speak.
If we go with the second option – that Jesus is leaping down into the Temple court – then Yoder contends we are to see this as a temptation for Jesus to prove himself to Israel as the final “religious reformer,” evoking allusions to Malachi’s promise of the redeemer who would come “suddenly to the temple” (Mal 3.1-3).
Problems with Yoder’s Reading
As I have already said, this reading of the temptation story opened my eyes to what I should not have missed in any case. If I do not hold to Yoder’s reading it is not because I do not find it compelling. I think it makes good sense, and does justice to what must have been a near catastrophic event in Jesus’ life. In the final analysis, I have three basic problems with Yoder’s reading:
First, I think he too-neatly separates between the so-called “economic” and “socio-political” and “religious” options. I think all of these dimensions are present in each temptation, so that we can talk about all of them as simultaneously socioeconomic and religio-political temptations. The extent and use of power, which is what politics is about, is necessarily always bound up with religion, economics, and socio-cultural standards and norms. Besides, human experience is made irreducibly complex and intricate by the gift/burden of rationality. So our reading of the temptations must not too neatly separate these realities from one another.
Second, I think Yoder fails to show that Jesus is Israel’s king, and, as such, her representative. [4] Jesus goes to face Israel’s temptations for her, much as David fought Goliath in stead of his people.
Third, I think Yoder does not give sufficient attention to Jesus’ use of Scripture in responding to the temptations; (admittedly, Yoder only brushes the surface of these tests, as they are not the main focus of his work in The Politics of Jesus.)
The Temptations of Israel’s King
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.Luke tells us Jesus left the Jordan and journeyed into the wilderness, which means he was reversing the path Israel had trekked in the beginning after they had come out of Egypt. And Jesus goes into that desert as Israel’s representative, to do for her what she could not do for herself, and, therefore, could not do for the world. I think Jesus did this intentionally, not so much to prove to himself that he was Messiah as to begin the work of Messiah as he understood it. He goes into the wilderness to face his first ordeal.
The work of Messiah, Jesus had come to understand, was to accomplish for Israel her calling, which was to be a light to the world, a nation of priests bearing witness to YWHY as the one God, as the Creator and Redeemer of all. Jesus went to the wilderness to fight for his people, as David had gone done to face Goliath. Many in Israel had expected, not entirely wrongly, that the Messiah’s work would involve warfare, as it had done with the Maccabees, for instance. And Jesus certainly understands himself as a warrior. But he goes to fight a different enemy than what his contemporaries expected. He goes to begin the fight against evil itself, against the Satan.
Having chosen this battle, then, retracing Israel’s steps to do in the wilderness what they, as his subjects, had not done, Jesus comes to face “the Satan.”
The Satan is a real adversary, to be sure, but we need not think of a pitchfork wielding, bifurcated-tailed creature with crimson scales and sulfurous aura! Instead, this struggle in the wilderness – which, I’m arguing, really did take place (even if not in exactly this way) – is a struggle within the mind of Jesus. Jesus is facing down the alternative ways of being messiah which he had internalized over the course of his life.
Where, besides here in the wilderness, does Jesus face the Satan? In Caesarea Philippi, where Peter confesses him as “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But Peter does not know what he is saying. What he meant when he said Christ (and Son of the living God is a synthetic parallel) is not what Jesus meant when he applied the term to himself. Instead, Jesus discerns in Peter’s messianic idea the work of the enemy. Peter’s way, the way of the sword, was a deviation from Abba’s will and so Jesus rejects it as devilish.
In summary, then. The temptations – really, we have here one temptation in a series or cluster of forms – are experienced by Jesus as real alternatives to the way he has perceived, by faith in prayer and the reading of the Torah, laid out for him by Abba’s will. He has to decide here in the wilderness, in much the same way that he’ll have to decide later in in the garden, against what he might want in favor of what the Father requires.
Jesus wins, but it could have been otherwise. We shouldn’t miss this point: Jesus temptation is a real ordeal, it involves genuine risk. As we know from the Gethsemene scene, Jesus’ will is not automatically or involuntarily identical with the Father’s. Here, as Israel’s king, Jesus does for her – and therefore for the world – what had to be done. He really does it, and does not merely seem to do it. As I understand it, this makes all the difference in the world, if not eternity.
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[1] John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 24-27.
[2] Yoder, 26.
[3] ibid
[4] N. T. Wright, e.g. in his The Climax of the Covenant, demonstrates convincingly that this emphasis on Messiah as Israel’s representative is at the heart of Jewish messianic thought, and, therefore, also at the heart of Jesus’ self-understanding the church’s reflection on him as her Lord.
