The enemy is awaiting that moment at which the imperious need to survive, to which our mortal body is subjected, offers no way out: the banal desire to eat has turned into a matter of life or death.
But, because Jesus is profoundly engrossed in His search for God, the enemy will camouflage his temptation by placing it within the framework of the sublime spiritual experience that the Nazarene has gone through on occasion of His baptism:
Are you sure you heard correctly? What was the voice from heaven saying? Did it not say: “This is my beloved son?” Then, if you really are the Son of God, your Father will not allow you to die from hunger. Draw upon your divine power: the Creator of the universe can make bread even from these stones. You say that you want to be treated like any other human? All men have the right to eat when they suffer from hunger. Further, they have an obligation to do so without reaching these absurd extremes in which you placed yourself endangering your life.
Jesus knows that His destiny, and perhaps more than that, hangs in the balance of a correct decision. He also knows that upon accepting to become a man He has assumed sharing even the ultimate consequences of the vulnerable human condition.14 When we, mortals, are hungry and know that we run the risk of dying from starvation, we eat; and, if unable to feed ourselves, we faint. For that reason, when we desperately lack food, we seek it, we purchase it at whatever cost, we beg for it, we steal it . . . but we can not make bread from stones. Human beings have unavoidable limitations and Jesus has decided to live within the same limits that constrain us.
That is why, His first temptation in this desert, although it implies resorting to the power of God outside of the divine design, has the same essence as many of the temptations suffered by any common mortal, yesterday, today, and always:
You know that you should not. But if you desire it so much, do it.15
The tempter has been very cunning. He has limited himself to introducing an enormous temptation in a tiny wedge, through the word “if . . .” There is room for tremendous doubt in that conditional, minute particle: “If you were really a Son of God, he would not allow you to die like that . . .”
But Jesus replies to one word of doubt with two words of faith:
It is written: “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” 16
Jesus thus puts the word of God above the voice of His own desires.
It is as though he were saying: “God would not approve my cowardice. He has made it very clear. Human beings are not mere animals. Of course our bodies inexorably need food, but our spirits also need, in order not to be mistaken, to listen to God and pay heed to him. Divine revelation exists for that purpose: to nourish ourselves with it. If I can trust His word, I should not doubt that He can get me out of this predicament without Me having to cheat at all.”
In the face of this first failure, the tempter becomes emboldened. But in his own audacity he has shown his true colors. The perfidious peiradson, already identified as “the devil,” prepares his second assault. Now he also positions himself in the religious field, barging into the dominions of his coveted victim.
Because Jesus trusts God so much that he blindly clings to the promises of divine protection contained in the Scriptures, the devil searches for another biblical cite susceptible to manipulation, and, cleverly taking it out of context,17 he attacks his victim in the realm of His own faith, pushing Him to take a shortcut in His ministry.
If you cite the Bible, so will I. Given that you have so much confidence in your Father and in his promises, demonstrate it. There you have it, before you, the atrium of the temple.
Observe how Your people pray and implore for the coming of the Messiah around the altar of sacrifices. Go down and tell them that You are already here, that they do not need to wait any longer. Does the Bible not say that the angels will accompany You in Your glorious descent? Thrust Yourself now and end their wait; end once and for all the suffering of Your people and Your own torture.
To throw oneself through the air toward the temple is not to take a deadly leap without a net and with the parachute closed. This is not about the temptation to make a BASE jump. Jesus is tempted to make a much riskier leap. Descending in the middle of the temple carried by angels equates to presenting himself before the people of Israel as it expected that the Messiah would appear; that is, “I will fill this temple with glory.” 18
The tempter, again, is not asking Jesus to do anything bad, but rather to simply agree to appear before His co-religionists as they expect. The proposed spectacular appearance could bring Him enormous advantages at the time. If He presents himself as the expected liberator, His immediate success is guaranteed. He would be received no less as the glorious King His people yearn for.
But Jesus reflects and says to himself:
Careful. In the design outlined by God, that is not the plan for my first coming, but for the second.
The devil is proposing to Jesus that He take a shortcut to avoid problems in His salvific mission. But He, who in fact has come to this earth to give us victory over evil’s complex web, does not want to obtain such with the irresistible force of spectacular miracles but through the conversion of the heart, eternally placing Himself at the service of humanity up to the sacrifice.
If Jesus appears in the temple as the tempter implies, He is acting outside God’s plan, forcing the latter to change His plans. He would be tempting Him. In this way, He would not be answering the great challenge cast to God by fallen humanity, which has always been the same:
Come down if you are a man.
And Jesus is there, accepting that challenge until its ultimate consequences.
He therefore responds once again entrenched in his condition of man:
I am not willing to tempt God or to impose My ways upon Him. I submit to His plans, although at the moment they may seem incomprehensible and may be painful.
Jesus is being tempted to muddle up His faith with the audacity of presumption, and His trust in God with the insolence of demanding a miracle from Him, and thus disregarding His plans.
This second great temptation of Jesus, like many of ours, has, ultimately, this challenge:
Dare yourself; nothing is going to happen to you. Do whatever you feel like doing; the easiest, the most gratifying. Forget about what God says and do not think about the consequences of your actions.19
The devil bites the dust of a new defeat. But he does not give up the battle. He well knows that Jesus has come into the world in an attempt to save planet Earth from its self-destruction, and, if possible, to save each human being from that evil that kills him. For his third assault20 the enemy leads him to contemplate in His reflections, from the heights of His plans of salvation, the spiritual and historic reality of this world.
If you think about the outlook of humanity, you can already see that it is lost as a whole. Human beings have fallen into my power. They are all mine. Well, then, I will give them to you if you bow down and worship me. In other words, they can all be yours if you do as I say, that is, if you do as I do.
Jesus very well knows how the enemy has waged against humans, how he makes us fall into his clutches and separates us from God: to this effect he uses shrewdness, deceit, seduction, money, pleasure, pressure, violence, whatever, to impose upon our will.
Satan is in fact the provisional master of the world, in the sense that all human beings, upon succumbing to his will in one way or another, place themselves, without realizing it, under his dominance. Jesus comes to establish the kingdom of God, that is, to try to make good reign once again in this world and in each one of us. He knows that winning us over for God,