The calculus of temptations

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Meditation for the 1st Sunday of Lent, year C2

“ No one can enter the kingdom of heaven untested. Take away temptations and no one will be saved. St. Anthony the Great

On the first Sunday of Lent, we read traditionally about the temptation of Jesus in the desert. And since it is good to start fasting with an examination of conscience, I would like to treat the text of today’s reading as an aid in this calculation. Sure, we have a lot of such aids in prayer books or elsewhere, but one more won’t hurt. Computer owners know that it is a good idea to scan them with a few antivirus programs, because each next one can detect threats not previously noted.

The temptations that Jesus encounters affect all of us to some extent. The first temptation is that Jesus is hungry and Satan wants to meet His need. This is the simplest temptation related to the material aspect of our life. It is not only about the need for food, but about a number of other material needs, sometimes created artificially, the satisfaction of which we find hard to deny, especially in our consumer culture. It happens that we consider something that is only pleasure to be a real need and we believe that we would not be able to live without it. It also happens that we get lost in the thicket of our material needs and see nothing outside of them. Or even worse – we add rationalizations to our overly expanded material needs and recognize them as higher spiritual needs.

It is also the temptation of “free dinners”, various wonderful occasions or winning the lottery. It is a temptation to imprudently believe in not always responsible promises of politicians or in persuasion of marketing specialists that we should buy another unnecessary thing for almost nothing. Nowadays, it is the temptation to take out a loan, which temporarily solves financial difficulties, but in the long run is often enslaving. We too easily believe that someone selflessly turns stones into bread for us, and then we fall into despair when, instead of bread, we begin to feel more and more clearly the stone, a great millstone, tied to the neck.

The second temptation is to bow down, submit to someone other than God in exchange for gaining power. I think we all have that need for power. Sometimes it is a need for political power on a national or world scale, and sometimes it is just a need for power in the family, in the workplace, among friends … There is also a connection between leaving people free and introducing peace. The more imperiously we enforce our requirements and force our own opinion, the greater the risk of resistance and conflict. But when we say, like Jesus, “If you want to …”, we bring peace.

The flip side of this temptation is Fromm’s well-described escape from freedom. Many of us prefer to bow down and acknowledge authority so as not to take responsibility for difficult decisions. Let the spouse, business associate, head of the company, leader of a party or social movement decide – in case of failure, they can be blamed. We choose strong personalities or organizations, and by following them, we sometimes get rid of moral restraints and remorse. What’s more, subordinated to the stronger, we look for the weaker, whom we could subordinate to ourselves to satisfy our need for power, create and accept rigid hierarchies, and then defend their most valuable good. The obeisances we give and force are not generally obeisances due to God.

The third temptation has to do with the need for security and with an otherwise very useful mechanism that man has, namely the instinct for self-preservation. How do we wrongly satisfy our need for security? For example, we instrumentalise people, treating them as cogs in a machine to meet our expectations. We run away from difficult matters. We isolate ourselves with a wall from people who have serious problems, so that they do not violate our mental comfort. We also instrumentalise God, asking Him to help us in difficult times, entering into various fairs with Him, or counting on an angelic intervention in a situation when we recklessly got ourselves into trouble.

Jesus found himself in an extreme and quite artificial situation. Satan put it on the corner of the temple, on the roof. Our temptations also often arise from the fact that Satan exaggerates our need for security by his actions. Before us, there are visions of events and matters that do not really exist and will not exist, are something artificial, but are sometimes suggested to us to arouse our fear. Satan prompts us to do more for our safety than is necessary in our normal life. It makes us focus on the quality of life and pretend that it can proceed without suffering. He hints that a man, if he wishes, can even change the laws of nature or at least bend them to his needs. He wants us to throw ourselves down the abyss of uncontrolled biotechnology and medical experimentation or the over-use of our planet’s natural resources.

Let Lent become a time for us to face our temptations – those described above and those that have not been mentioned, but that haunt each of us in a special way, depending on our individual circumstances. Let us trust that, strengthened by the example of Jesus, supported by His grace, we are able to courageously face such a confrontation, and having become aware of the dangers, we can oppose them victoriously. We certainly won’t be able to deal with everything at once, but recognizing and overcoming even one temptation is a very important step towards conversion.