“And if Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?” The very name of Satan, diabolos, makes reference to splitting. Splitting is the secret to winning. The very wound of our hearts is a deep splitting. Split between what we want to do and what think we should do; split between what we feel like doing and what we consider is best for us; split between doing good to the people we love and finding ourselves hurting them. Split is to defeat as integration is to victory. That Satan, the splitter, would split himself is unthinkable, a truly intelligent being would know that it would mean his end. There are only two roads: to gather or to scatter; to integrate or to split.
Temptations do come our way: 1st Sunday of Lent
February 9, 2008 — fr. davidThe most common temptations in our lives manifest themselves not in the form of ugly demons, but under the aspect of attractive shortcuts. Temptations come in the form of easy money, easy dignity, easy getting away with things, easy power, easy sex, easy getting rid of problems, etc. Temptations are effective, not because we are fundamentally bad, but because they fool us. Because we are fundamentally good, we like and love to do good… fundamentally only, which means, not all the time actually. In the first pages of Genesis, Satan shows his true colors when tempting Adam and Eve. Satan needs to lie. He is not called “the father of lies” for nothing. He tells Eve, “God forbade you to eat from any of the trees…” when in fact only one tree was forbidden. Eve is alert to the first lie, but succumbs to the second: “you will be like gods”. Satan knows our true nature and knows that there is only one way to entice us into evil: to make evil look good. Only by fooling our God-given navigation system, humans can get lost.
No where else does this fooling appear to be more acute than in the temptations of Jesus. Can even the Son of God be fooled into temptation? Can the one who is the Truth be lied to? If He truly can, how are we, sheer mortals with limited intelligence, be spared?
Theologian H. u. V. Balthasar is of the opinion that there has been no other temptation more authentic, serious and decisive for the destiny of the world than the temptation of Jesus. The reason is that unlike us, Jesus is not tempted to the evil that appears superficially as a forbidden short-cut to happiness, but to the betrayal of his divine mission. In other words, the Son is tempted to become, not a Son, but an independent agent of his own destiny, to be estranged from the Father. In a way, He is tempted to be God apart from the Father, just as Adam and Eve were tempted to be gods apart from God. The lie is still the same and still enticing to all of us. Jesus resisted it with Truth; and we are called to be smart and to realize that we can only be “gods” or “image of God” if we remain children, not competitors, of God; if we learn that our autonomy and adulthood has a limit and needs to halt at the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”.
Jesus’ temptations were not our temptations. We are unlikely to be tempted to throw ourselves off the pinnacle of any temple. Our daily, common, ordinary temptations will continue to entice us with the beauty and easiness of short-cuts. There is only one sensible answer: No. But there is an adult way of saying “no” and a childish way of saying “no”. Our “no” is not only because it is a forbidden taboo, but because it is a lie. Easy money is not truly “our money”, easy dignity, as when we judge others to feel more righteous, is not true dignity, easy sex is not truly sex, easy power is not true power, etc. And these are not just lies, they are lies that break our filial relationship with God because they are attempts to make of us “non-son gods” versus “children-gods”.
