Failing Jesus’ Temptations

According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the first thing Jesus did after his baptism was to go into the wilderness to fast and pray. There he was tempted by the devil, in three ways: to make bread from stone, to save his life through miraculous power, and to take control of all the nations of the earth. As Philip Yancey notes, each of these was within his power, but such shortcuts to success would have violated his core mission.[1]

 Jesus refused all three, and instead devoted his life to serving the poor and powerless, teaching his disciples to love their enemies, and demonstrating what it means to give up your own life for the sake of others. When he told parables about the Kingdom of God, he did not depict it as an empire conquering its enemies, but as a crop growing from the ground up, as a great feast to which all are invited, and as a treasure, for which we should sell all we have. 

Yet far too often, Jesus' followers have failed the same temptations that he so forcefully rejected. We seek first our own comfort and protection, and grasp after political power instead of giving of ourselves to serve others. Instead of being salt and light in the world, we try to use the world’s power to impose our will on others. 

In The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky notes how often the church has fallen to all three of the temptations Jesus rejected, making “miracle, mystery and authority” the basis for its standing in the world.[2] Where Jesus chose humility over power, the church has used those very tools to compel belief, with devastating consequences.

From Constantine’s rebranding of the cross as a symbol of conquest, through the crusades, colonialism, the slave trade, the Holocaust, and too many other times to list, when the church tries to use political power to extend the kingdom of God by force, it is inevitably the poor, the marginalized, and those seen as enemies, who pay the price.

There is a museum in Berlin, not far from the ruins of the Berlin Wall, called the Topography of Terror, which documents the rise of the Third Reich through a massive collection of Nazi propaganda.[3] I’ve been there, and the most distressing thing about it is how familiar it all sounds. They did not promise violence and genocide; no, like many modern politicians, they emphasized traditional family values, economic stability, and law and order. They portrayed foreigners, religious minorities, and queer people as dangerous and anti-social, and they claimed that “God is with us” (Gott mit uns). And a majority of German Christians bought into this Christian nationalist propaganda, whether reluctantly or enthusiastically.

Yet here we are again, on the verge of repeating that shameful history.

That might sound like an exaggeration, but in many ways the world today is in a similar state to what it was in the 1930s: divided by growing hatred and fear, too many of us are willing to embrace flawed and dangerous people as heroes, while demonizing our opponents as less than human.

This kind of Christian nationalism has already swept to power in places like Russia and Hungary, and many churches in America have turned toward the same disastrous path: In the place of Jesus’ call to love our enemies, prominent voices within the American church are trying to turn America (back) into a “Christian nation” by force. Under the guise of "economic stability," "national security," and "moral values," we have embraced a form of exclusionary politics that prioritizes our own comfort and privilege at the expense of those most vulnerable among us: immigrants, LGBTQ+ folks, the poor, and minorities.

So as many of us are grieving this political upheaval, it is worth remembering those who have resisted in the past, including Deitrich Bonhoeffer, a German Christian who left the German state church when it embraced Naziism, helped found an underground church, led an illegal seminary to train independent pastors, became a spy against the Nazis, helped to smuggle a number of Jewish people out of the country, and eventually lost his life due to his involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler. He was also a theologian, who argued that his fellow German Christians had abandoned the truth of the Gospel for the sake of political power.

Regarding support for Hitler, Bonhoeffer’s words sound eerily familiar, and offer a needed challenge both to those who supported such tyranny, and those too afraid to stand up to it:

At such a time as this it is easy for the tyrannical despiser of men [that is, Hitler] to exploit the baseness of the human heart, nurturing it and calling it by other names. Fear he calls responsibility. Desire he calls keenness. Irresolution becomes solidarity. Brutality becomes masterfulness…. In the presence of the crowd he professes to be one of their number, and at the same time he sings his own praises with the most revolting vanity and scorns the rights of every individual....

But the good man too, no less than the wicked, succumbs to the same temptation to be a despiser of mankind if he sees through all this and withdraws in disgust, leaving his fellow-men to their own devices, and if he prefers to mind his own business rather than to debase himself in public life. Of course, his contempt for mankind is more respectable and upright, but it is also more barren and ineffectual.[4]

At root, hatred and division grow out of distrust and contempt for others: Atrocities are justified as good for “us,” protecting those we care about from “others,” who are portrayed as dangerous outsiders. And the more extreme the tyrant’s rhetoric, the more his followers come to see him as their savior, and their opponents as the enemy.

But even when we see through all this, and recognize the tyrant for what he is, we so easily lose faith in public action and abandon the fight for justice, reflecting a different kind of contempt for our fellow citizens. We accept compromises, ignore atrocities, or justify injustice. We bite our tongues in support of those on “our” side, while dismissing and attacking those we see as opponents. It’s a temptation I feel too, especially this week.

For Bonhoeffer, the only way to truly overcome the divisive politics that enables tyrants to take power is to emulate the self-giving love of God in Christ:

In Him the world was reconciled with God. It is not by its overthrowing but by its reconciliation that the world is subdued. It is not by ideals and programs or by conscience, duty, responsibility and virtue that reality can be confronted and overcome, but simply and solely by the perfect love of God. Here again it is not by a general idea of love that this is achieved, but by the really lived love of God in Jesus Christ. This love of God does not withdraw from reality into noble souls secluded from the world. It experiences and suffers the reality of the world in all its hardness.[5]

As we try to make sense of and respond to the new political reality we find ourselves in, I pray that we would keep Jesus’ love for “the least of these” at the center of our lives, not secluding ourselves from the world and its suffering, but “suffer[ing] the reality of the world in all its hardness.”

[1] in Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), chapter 4.

[2] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 255; on this, see also Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, 74-75.

[3] https://www.topographie.de/en/

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (trans. Neville Horton Smith; New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1995), 74-75.

[5] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 72.