Beyond Bread
Michiel Peeters - After his baptism in the Jordan River, to prepare for his mission, Jesus goes to a lonely place outside the inhabited world. For forty days he fasts there. At the end of it, he is very hungry.
Then, three temptations are presented to him. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” If you are what you claim to be, solve your hunger and that of the people to whom you are sent with bread, with food, with the goods of the world.
“All the kingdoms of the world, … all this power and glory … will be yours, if you worship me.” If you follow my dynamics, the dynamics of power, all people will be submitted to you. You can reach your goals through power. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,” from the parapet of the temple, for the angels will catch you. With this kind of spectacular display of power, you will be able to attract the people and bind them to you.
But all these temptations—which are subtle because they leverage Jesus’s desire to reach out and attract people—rebuff the Lord’s sovereign freedom. To the devil’s crafty Bible quotes—for with the same ingredients you can make very different soups—he answers not only readily, but above all freely—not blackmailed, unbound, without having to defend anything. For Jesus, it is not tempting at all to “arm” the beauty with which he is called to draw people to himself.
How can He be so free? The temptation does not touch him because of the fullness he already experiences in his relationship with the same father. Following Jesus’s forty-day fast, a remark on the austerity traditionally associated with Lent. First, in Christianity, the goal is never abstinence, aloofness, frugality, leanness, or meagerness.
The goal is enjoyment, satisfaction, abundance, fullness, happiness.But in experience—and each of us is called to verify this in our own experience—that fullness is not a matter of “stuffing yourself,” but enjoying the relationship for which our hearts were made: the free relationship with the infinite. And now we have the strange tendency to anesthetize the wonderful instrument that the One who made us has given us to live that relationship—our heart, our hunger and thirst for righteousness, for the infinite.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, says the Lord. Who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Who live the “demanding nature” of their lives (as the school or community calls it). For they shall be satisfied. Often we try not to feel that hunger and thirst—and there are many ways; not only with alcohol and drugs, but also with “normal” ingredients of life: food, drink, work, goods, curiosity, you name it and we can use it to try to numb our deep needs. It is what the school of community calls “the practical denial of questions.”
Lent invites us not to anesthetize our questions, our needs, our desire, our hunger and thirst for the infinite, our humanity. So it is not at all a question of setting ourselves certain more or less outlandish goals and counting ourselves against them. If we could save ourselves with our works the Lord would not have had to come. The invitation is not to numb our humanity, our deeply human hunger and thirst, but to live it.
The author has not revised its text and translation.
