Right afterward the Spirit threw him into the wild. He was in the wild 40 days, tested by Satan. He was with the animals. Angels ministered to him.
When you read Mark straight through, instead of breaking it up into a verse here, two verses there, as I do in these Red Letters posts, you get this sense of haste and urgency. Jesus doesn’t sit around a whole lot. He’s busy. Busy busy busy. Even in a 40-day trek to the middle of nowhere so he could fight the devil singlehandedly, Mark makes him sound busy.
The temptation story is therefore pretty brief. Seems the author wanted to whip through it, and get straight to Jesus’s ministry in the Galilee. Other gospels go into a lot more detail. Matthew and Luke list the devil’s particular temptations, and the Lord’s particular responses. All Mark has is Jesus, out there, facing the devil and the animals. Yet not all alone; there were some angels too. And that’s all. No more than that. ’Cause there’s ministry to be got to.
It’s interesting to look at the temptations Jesus went through. For lots of reasons: There’s recognizing how Jesus was tempted, same as we are; there’s the sort of things the devil tempted him with, and loads of apt comparisons to make with the way we’re tempted; there’s how Jesus resisted temptation, and what we can learn about how to do likewise. I’ll certainly discuss those temptations at another time.
But it’s also important to not dwell on temptations.
Dwelling.
The operative word here is dwell. We ought not mentally go there, and stay there, reliving the experience again and again, fighting the battle multiple times, wondering whether we could’ve improved our outcome, looking for errors that we can preach on.
Lots of people do in fact do that. Some people have made a ministry out of it. Certain preachers go from church to church and tell the story of how they came to Jesus—and it usually involves all sorts of horrific sins they committed before they met Jesus and he pulled them away from all that. The annoying preachers are the ones who tell their sin stories with such glee… but when they tell their Christianity stories, their cheerfulness seems to vanish. Makes me wonder if the reason they retell their sin stories is because they’d rather dwell there.
When we look back on our own temptations, do we do so to learn from them, or to relive them? When we failed, and didn’t resist temptation, are we going back there because deep down we enjoyed the sin, and are wistful for the times before we straightened out and stopped doing such things? When we succeeded, and did resist temptation, are we going back there because deep down we enjoyed kicking the devil’s ass, and pridefully, pettily wish to relive that one moment of victory after (or in the middle of) a string of defeats?
What’s our motive for going back there?
Had you ever considered where Matthew and Luke got their data about Jesus’s temptation? After all, nobody was there but Jesus and Satan. So the original source of the information had to be one or the other, and likely not Satan.
That being the case, what was Jesus’s point in sharing these details? Certainly not, “Check out how the mighty Messiah thumped the devil real good.” It wasn’t to brag. It wasn’t to show off what a success he was at spiritual warfare. It wasn’t even to provide “encouragement” for people who were undergoing temptation themselves—“Hey, I defeated Satan, and so can you.” Speaking for myself, I am not encouraged to resist temptation by hearing others’ success stories. They’re not me; we’re not tempted by precisely the same things. I’m encouraged by love for God. So are most of us.
Jesus’s point was not to dwell in his victory over the devil. It was one of many victories he had over the devil, and he is always looking ahead towards his next victory. Nor was it to glory in the devil’s defeat like a sore winner. Nor was it to show off. It was to share the things he was tempted by, and to warn us lest we fall for the very same things. And that is all.
Visiting, briefly.
When we avoid those temptations to take pride in our victories, or to long for the good old days of defeats, we can look back at our temptations from time to time and learn from them.
Therapists, for example, encourage people to look back at past mistakes. Usually that’s because their patients don’t dwell in the past—or at least that particular event in it. They avoid it like crazy. They don’t want to go there. So they don’t know why they made those mistakes; they avoided the mistake, and with it their own motives for making it, or the things that were successful at tempting them.
Lots of people can’t admit to their own self-centeredness, greed, ego, lusts, impatience, prejudices, bitterness, maliciousness, unkindness, sense of position, and various other character flaws. They like to think of themselves as good people, and carefully edit out and throw away the memories that say otherwise. Even Christians will do it. But when we’re humble, and admit our flaws, we can identify right away which problem caused what sin, or what hard-to-resist temptation was our downfall. It doesn’t take a lot of thought at all: We don’t need to dwell on that past event, and ponder it carefully. We know ourselves.
Our own temptations don’t bear a lot of close scrutiny. With us, the devil doesn’t have to try anything too fancy. Little, stupid things will trip us up quite easily. Pride and petty cravings, usually. The temptations of Jesus require a closer look, because in his case the devil was bringing out its very best stuff, stuff so subtle that Jesus’s temptations weren’t themselves sins; only things that lead to sins, the fifth move before a checkmate. We need to study Jesus’s temptations. Our own… well, we know what we did wrong. Let’s not do it again.