Decisive Encounters. Roberto Badenas

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СКАЧАТЬ Him. I submit to His plans, although at the moment they may seem incomprehensible and may be painful.

      Jesus is being tempted to muddle up His faith with the audacity of presumption, and His trust in God with the insolence of demanding a miracle from Him, and thus disregarding His plans.

      This second great temptation of Jesus, like many of ours, has, ultimately, this challenge:

Dare yourself; nothing is going to happen to you. Do whatever you feel like doing; the easiest, the most gratifying. Forget about what God says and do not think about the consequences of your actions.19

The devil bites the dust of a new defeat. But he does not give up the battle. He well knows that Jesus has come into the world in an attempt to save planet Earth from its self-destruction, and, if possible, to save each human being from that evil that kills him. For his third assault20 the enemy leads him to contemplate in His reflections, from the heights of His plans of salvation, the spiritual and historic reality of this world.

      If you think about the outlook of humanity, you can already see that it is lost as a whole. Human beings have fallen into my power. They are all mine. Well, then, I will give them to you if you bow down and worship me. In other words, they can all be yours if you do as I say, that is, if you do as I do.

      Jesus very well knows how the enemy has waged against humans, how he makes us fall into his clutches and separates us from God: to this effect he uses shrewdness, deceit, seduction, money, pleasure, pressure, violence, whatever, to impose upon our will.

Satan is in fact the provisional master of the world, in the sense that all human beings, upon succumbing to his will in one way or another, place themselves, without realizing it, under his dominance. Jesus comes to establish the kingdom of God, that is, to try to make good reign once again in this world and in each one of us. He knows that winning us over for God, appealing to the free choice of each one of us, knocking at the door of each heart, will take him a long time, and will eventually not be able to gain us all. And what if He were to force everyone to love, ending once and for all the human tragedy? Does God not want everyone’s salvation?21

Well, for that He would have to force human liberty, use the strength of divine power. Doing so would be possible, but it would transgress the ethics of the Creator, who wants only free subjects. It would be to succumb to the methods of Satan, upholding that he is right. It would be to acknowledge failure of the divine plan and to justify the accusations of the devil, yielding before him, which would amount to worshiping him.22

      Jesus sees the cunning trap and once again replies like a man of faith:

      I worship only God and I serve only Him.

      The third great temptation of Jesus is the temptation we all encounter when we say to ourselves:

Obtain whatever you want at any cost. The end justifies the means.23

      The three temptations attempt to make Jesus separate Himself from divine will, leaving aside His human condition, and to use His divinity for personal gain.

But the account of these decisive moments in the life of Christ clarifies what temptation truly consists of, also for us: it is the struggle with a dangerous desire that challenges us to exercise our freedom on the fringe of divine will.24 In the face of that challenge, we can resist or surrender. But to desire what is unsuitable and to be tempted is not yet to fall. To sin would be to let oneself be captivated by desire in a game of capitulations that has all the ingredients of erotic seduction, that is, one is tempted when lured and enticed by one’s own desires.25

Every temptation contains one of these elements: giving in to a compelling urge that prevails over reason, succumbing to the irresistible desire to see something improper come to fruition, or acting in a way that puts one’s will above all.26 For this, we do not need to look for occasions: they present themselves. We are at war with the worst of ourselves, in a corrupt world, and our daily life is in the middle of the greatest conflict.27

Jesus has been tempted as are the best believers,28 as a mere mortal, overwhelmed and sensitive.29 But He has overcome temptation, remembering that He is also a Son of God, and that if He seeks His help, the latter will never allow Him to succumb.30

Nothing defeats temptation better than the decision to turn to God.31 Because, at the end of the day, it is about choosing between the will of God and ours, behind which the devil always attempts to camouflage himself.

After overcoming this decisive moment, exhausted, at the edge of the abyss, Jesus relishes the incomparable joy of victory over temptation: ephemeral, momentary, as all of ours,32 without witnesses, but heroic.

Having prevailed over the assaults of the enemy latched on to God, the Teacher surfaces stronger, and consequently, more capable to overcome his next assaults.33

The enemy has fled. “Now you can hear the full depths of the desert silence. It isn’t the quiet before the storm, or the silence of the end of the world, but a silence that only covers another, even deeper, silence.”34

      Upon putting the backpack on his shoulder to leave the desert, headed toward other struggles, Jesus has already decided that He will be a Teacher, and that He will dedicate Himself to teaching other mortals, one by one, the difficult art of surviving in a besieged world.

      He knows that, to carry out His plan, He will have to face new dangers.

      What He still ignores is that His first followers are already waiting for Him.

      1 . In the biblical world, deserts are places suitable for transcendental encounters. Great spiritual leaders such as Moses and Elijah spent some of the most decisive periods of their lives in the desert. Following their example, throughout history thousands of men and women have renounced the world seeking spiritual enlightenment or communication with heaven in a withdrawn life.

      2 . Jesus usually withdrew himself to deserted places to pray, at times including at night (Matt. 14:23; Mark 6:46; Luke 6:12, 9:28).

      3 . See Roberto Badenas, Encounters (Madrid: Editorial Safeliz, 2000, pp. 13-27).

      4 . Mark 1:11; Matthew 3:17; Luke 3:22.

      5 . Mark 3:20-21; 6:4; John 7:5.

      6 . Luke 4:24; Matthew 13:47.

      7 . Giovanni Papini, The Story of Christ, Madrid: ABC, 2004, p. 47.

      8 . See, for example, the case of the prophet Elijah (1 Kings 19:4).

      9 . These forty days of solitude in the desert remind of other biblical periods of quarantine, always experienced as periods of test: the forty-year exodus in the desert from the city of Israel, which took it from the slavery of Egypt to the promised land; the forty days Moses waited at Sinai before receiving the revelation of the divine law (Exod. 34:28); or the forty days Elijah spent refuged in the desert until finding the strength that would allow him to face the wrath of queen Jezebel (1 Kings 19:8).

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