This is the second part of an impromptu series on the temptation of Christ in the wilderness as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, chapter four. The first post is immediately below and concerned the appropriateness of John Milton’s qualification of this event as the moment when paradise, lost in the fall of Adam and Eve, was regained.
This post will seek a way of understanding the divinity of Christ and perhaps how he himself understood it as he went into the wilderness. The Athanasian confession states the following*:
29. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.
30. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and made the substance of his mother, born in the world.
31. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.
34. One, not by the conversion of Godhead into the flesh, but by the taking of manhood into God.
Well, you get the point. Jesus was fully God and fully man. This is orthodox belief and has been for millennia. The question of how this actually worked, though, is perplexing and has been since the earliest Christians found this doctrine emerging in Scriptural texts. I am not here to iron out all of the historical minutiae surrounding Trinitarian belief and evidence, mostly because I am incapable of doing so, but the question most palpable for this post is how did Jesus understand his divine calling and his diving essence while he was a man walking the earth?
I think this is a question that merits some consideration, but it is also a dangerous question that can lead to idle speculation. One of the most famously controversial films of all time is Oliver Stone’s 1988 project “The Last Temptation of Christ.” The film was based on a book by Nikos Katzanzakis in which he meditated extendedly on this question: how did Christ understand his nature? Katzanzakis shows the perils of going too far down this road. He imagines Jesus being tempted before the cross to escape his impending death and marry Mary Magdalene and hunker down in the countryside and raise a family. I believe this is Biblically indefensible. Obviously, no one can say precisely how Christ labored through this issue and the heart-wrenching prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his betrayal shows that Christ longed for another way—you can believe all of this and hold to orthodoxy—but to imagine that he was almost drawn away from the cross because of a romantic attraction is nowhere evident. Rather, it is far more appropriate (and faithful) to imagine this time as Jesus agonizing over the fact that the presence of God the Father will be withdrawn from him for a time and the weight of the sin of the world will be heaped upon his back. This certainly seems more plausible to me.
Moreover, the story we are considering here, the wilderness temptation, helps move us toward an answer to this question. Immediately before his forty day fast and exchange with Satan, Christ has been baptized by his cousin John. The Spirit of God has descended in the form of a dove and the Father addresses him from heaven, declaring Sonship. Immediately following Jesus’ return to Galilee, he visits the synagogue in Nazareth, as was his custom, and reads to those assembled chapter 61 of the prophetic book of Isaiah, a text declaring the year of the Lord’s favor—a time when the oppressed will be liberated and the blind will be restored to sight. And then, with all eyes fixed on him, he makes the following declaration: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21). However Jesus understood himself as he was growing up in Galilee—despised by the community, being called a bastard, hearing his mother called a whore and his earthly father a fool, being talked about behind his back—it is clear at this point that he has a defined sense of who He is and what His purpose is on this earth. Indeed, his experiences in the wilderness no doubt clarified his sense of calling, confirmed his manifest perfection, his status as the new Adam.
He might not have been eager for the cross, but he was fixed on his calling.
*source: www.reformation.org/documents
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