annihilation, about non-being. The driving question to this understanding of the temptation, then, was whether Jesus could withstand self-giving, self-emptying. Could Jesus withstand kenosis, which as the Christ he would have to suffer on the cross?
But none of this is to make light of Matthew’s understanding of what Jesus withstood, which was also Luke’s understanding—for here, though Jesus didn’t face the threat of annihilation, he did face the threat of conscription to serving some master other than God. That he doesn’t succumb is perhaps the obvious point.
“[T]he essence of Jesus’ sinlessness,” writer Gil Bailie claims, “was his immunity to the contagion of desire.”3 This is typical of Mr. Bailie, he for whom a central question in the life of faith is this: Whom are you going to imitate? Who is your model for living? And so, to his mind, and to mine, Jesus’ success in the wilderness is about desiring the right thing, desiring to be like the right one. “His triumph over the demonic snares in the wilderness was a triumph over the glamour of mimetic suggestion; but it was an achievement made possible, not by Jesus’ strength of will, but by the superior strength of another mimetic desire: Jesus’ desire ‘to do the Father’s will,’”4 that is, Jesus’ desire instead to imitate the Father.
So, to sum up, Jesus’ triumph in the wilderness was in resisting the suggestions of the devil, which would have made him like the devil; and in continuing to model himself after the One in whose image and likeness he knew himself to have been made. Jesus might have become like the devil, following the devil; but instead he became evermore like the Father, following the Father.
Got it.
But wait. Wasn’t it this that God didn’t want in the beginning? Wasn’t it this that God meant to avoid—that any should be like God? Didn’t God mean to be inimitable? Or was that just in reference to regular old people?
“You will not die,” the serpent assured the woman and, by mimetic extension, the man. “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it [the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil] your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” But we’re not supposed to seem to be like God, are we?
Certainly, this is what most preaching about Adam and Eve has focused on, at least as far as I know. Certainly, this has made for many a fine preaching point. We should be content in our humanity. We should rejoice in our humanity. We’re not in control; God is. None of us is sovereign (not Pharaoh, not Caesar, not the king or the president, certainly not the dictator); God is. When this message is rubbed up against Jesus in the wilderness, the harmony is striking. As Jesus is pushed to act out his divinity but chooses instead to inhabit his humanity, the irony resounds.
Barbara Brown Taylor, writing in The Christian Century, claimed (and is often quoted for having done so), “[W]hereas Adam stepped over the line and found humanity a curse, Jesus stayed behind the line and made humanity a blessing. One man trespassed; one man stayed put. One tried to be God; one was content to remain a human being. And the irony is that the one who tried to be God did not do too well as a human being, while the one who was content to be human became known as the Son of God.”5
And this is lovely, right? The symmetry, the irony—it’s lovely. As a preacher, I’d be so tempted to preach it! The problem is that it’s based on a lie, or on the suggestion of a liar—the serpent suggesting that God doesn’t want us to be like God, that God would have a real problem if we were to become too much like God.
But if God doesn’t want us to be like God, then why would God have sent us Jesus? If God doesn’t want us to live fully into our resemblance to God, then why would God have sent us God’s Son who so perfectly imitated God and said also to us, “Follow me,” who so completely embodied God’s self-giving love and also invited us, “Come and see,” assuring us, “I am the Way”? If God doesn’t want us to be like God, then why would God have sent us God’s Holy Spirit by which we might come together as the church to be formed, informed, reformed, transformed into the mystical body of Christ? If God doesn’t want us to have our eyes opened that we might see, then what was with all those encounters between Jesus and blind people that left those once-blind-people now to see? Truly, if God didn’t want us to be like God, and yet sent God’s Son to stimulate in us such a desire and also sent God’s Spirit that this desire might be fulfilled, then God is more tempter than the serpent, more tempter than the devil.
Come to think of it, God would only have a problem with our becoming like God if God were certain things that we know, through Christ, God not to be. (Jesus is said to be Godlike, so it also must be that God is Jesus-like.) So, consider: God wouldn’t want to us to be like God if God were all about control—for there can be only one force in control. But God isn’t about control. God is about freedom and responsibility, call and response. God wouldn’t want us to be like God if God were powerful as the world understands power—for such power secures itself against all who want in on that action. But God isn’t about the power that seeks domination. God is about power as expressed in service and self-giving. God, this God who is love, who sent his Son to be our shepherd and his Holy Spirit to empower the church: of course God wants us to be like God!
And yet.
There is this prohibition: “[Of the fruit] of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat . . .” What of that, you might rightly ask? Well, perhaps what God didn’t want was for us to suffer—to know not only good but evil as well. Or perhaps what God didn’t want was for us to attempt to distinguish between these two, good and evil, a process of judgment we so often get woefully wrong. Or perhaps God didn’t want us to dwell in the world as if duality were a given condition rather than but one way to conceive of and relate to reality. Or perhaps, according to the storyteller’s understanding, this fruit really did introduce death into the dynamic of life, really did mean to explain the mystery of mortality; and God didn’t, doesn’t, want us to die. Really, this prohibition could be about any number of things. I just don’t think it’s about what the serpent suggested it was about. After all, though a preacher, he’s not necessarily right—crafty, yes, but not always correct.
You might think that what I’m suggesting is that there’s something essentially corrupt, crooked about the rhetorical device of suggestion. But that’s not what I’m suggesting because, the truth is, this device is one of my favorites. As a way to insight, a way to surprise, a way to sudden laughter, a means for art, suggestion is a powerful mode. What’s more, as it happens, I am a member of a most earnest group of people: the clergy. This group, especially Protestant clergy, can be chokingly earnest—and there’s seldom much fun in that, much delight or surprise. Most crucially of all, though, is that I most often encounter God’s living truth when I find it suggested to me in the many layers of Scripture, tradition, translation, and experience. My faith practice is preparing worship for you, writing sermons for you; and for me the writing of a sermon is a process of unearthing some suggestion and following up on it. For this reason, the question that nearly always spurs a sermon’s conclusion is this, a question that I quite literally and often out loud ask myself, an indicting question as it were: Just what am I suggesting? Just what am I suggesting to you about this passage from Scripture, which means to suggest something to us of God?
When suggestion didn’t work for the devil, he had to make it plain. “Fall down and worship me,” he said, thus stripping away any pretense—at friendliness, at alliance, at well-meaning advice-giver—and making his agenda now known. The previous two statements of temptation were indeed suggestions: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. . . . If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from this high place . . . ” But at last it’s as if someone even asked him, “Just what are you suggesting?”
It’s
