Guilty

I just read in NT Wright's "Jesus and the Victory of God" a convicting little passage. Wright explains the temptation of Jesus in a different way than I've ever heard. To be honest, I'm not sure I can articulate why I thought Jesus was tempted other than to validate a point in Hebrews: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin" (TNIV). Doubtless, those are related.

Wright's point, however, is that the temptation is much more related to Jesus's vocational calling. Jesus was called to be Messiah, to lead Israel (and the world) on a new exodus, to defeat the power of evil behind the liminal enemies. (Sidenote: A few pages earlier, Wright blew my mind by saying that our conventional enemies, the people we want to blow up or make look silly, are fellow sufferers under the regime of sin and death. No need to fight and kill them; we must face and defeat death and sin through Jesus.) So given Jesus's calling, his temptation was to take a shortcut. I'm not sure I can figure out all three temptations, but Wright summarizes them this way: "The pull of hunger, the lure of cheap and quick 'success', the desire to change the vocation to be light of the world into the vocation to bring all nations under his powerful rule by other means."

If Jesus's calling were to gain control of the nations, this would have been an easy out. But Jesus was trying to reform the nations, something that could not be done if he submitted himself to creation's enemy, the accuser, the satan. National Day of Prayer being yesterday, I heard a lot of prayer which in my mind pointed to Jesus taking control of the nations. In fact, I've prayed that myself in some ways. I'm afraid this illustrates that I would have fallen to the temptation to take the easy way out. (Oh, and I do.)

God's calling is for us to submit to him, but in a really strange way, submit to evil. That's where suffering becomes redemptive. Evil can pour out its worst on us, yet God is abundantly sufficient to see us through the temptation of an easy fix. We must be disciplined to carry out our vocation of redeeming the world through Jesus in the God-ordained way. Yes, I believe this precludes bombing "terrorists," but on a much more practical level, it demands that we open our hands and let God direct the redemption, rather than grabbing for control to do things our own manipulative way. And Jesus is our high priest who completely empathizes with us. That is immensely comforting to me when I understand it in this context.