Temptation Leaves and Fulfilment Approaches
The First Sunday of Lent
When I was studying in Siena, Italy, I visited the Museo dell’Opera which houses works of art that were formerly part of the city’s marvelous Cathedral of the Assumption. Among the museum’s collection is the Maestà altarpiece, the most famous work of the Medieval artist named Duccio. The panel of the altarpiece that struct me immediately upon seeing it depicts today’s Gospel: the Temptation of Christ on the Mountain. Duccio paints the scene – Christ and the Devil high above earth’s kingdoms – against a backdrop of brilliant gold leaf. What caught my attention right away was that, from a bit of a distance, it looked as if the figure of the Devil had been scorched right off the wood, for the Devil had been painted with an intense darkness.
The artist’s point in contrasting heavenly gold with infernal black is clear enough. But, whether Duccio realized it or not, his choice to depict the Devil in this way stands in continuity with the Church’s long understanding of the nature of evil. Dating back to the 5th century, Saint Augustine defined evil as the privation of a good that ought to be present. Duccio’s Devil is just that: a privation, a lacking, an absence of the highest, most dramatic degree of all that is good, and true, and beautiful.
Art, however, does not exist just to put flesh on theological insights. Art draws our experience from the inner recesses of ourselves out into reality and gives us a greater ability to look at and understand it. Anyone who has grappled with what Duccio depicts – the lure of temptation – knows that his depiction is apt. Who has not, after falling into temptation, not felt as if they have fallen into the dark, infernal abyss with which the painter represents the Tempter himself?
We have all been there, but having been there and felt its dread, none of us are foolish enough to think we won’t end up there again. Why is that the case? Why does darkness tempt us so? A bit more of the Church’s wisdom helps us make sense of temptation. Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that our will is ordered toward the good. That is, whatever we desire and, ultimately, choose is that which we consider good. We may know what we want isn’t the best good, but if it weren’t good at all, we simply wouldn’t want it. Even if, to prove a point, we were to try to choose evil for the sake of evil, our want to be right would still be want for a good. Our will’s disposition toward the good goes all the way back to the beginning, as Eve herself, so the book of Genesis tells us, saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. In her temptation and ours, our attention is fixed only upon the good of what is before and fails to see the rest, the privation of good that is evil that surrounds it.
Victory over temptation is a campaign fought on many fronts with the whole of our personhood. There are no simple strategies or quick solutions. We can, however, identify and practice some necessary steps which together over time lead to freedom. We must ask two fundamental questions. First: Within this particular temptation, what is the good toward which I’m attracted? And second: Why am I attracted to it? We might discover, for example, that our tendency to gossip is, in fact, evidence of a desire for intimate relationship with others that is going otherwise unfulfilled in our life. What we’re really after may be the deeper connection indulging in gossip gives us with those who are also ‘in the know’. And, if we can come to that conclusion, then we are closer to overcoming that temptation, because the good that we seek is not only available to us by following the paths of sin but, actually, is what God himself desires to give us, if we but follow his ways.
This is the very logic with which the drama of today’s Gospel operates. The Devil makes three temptations to Christ: to turn stones into bread with which to feed himself, to cast himself down from the temple parapet to coerce the Father to send his angels to save him, and to worship the Devil so as to gain the world. Once Christ rejects all three, the Devil leaves him, and the Gospel says, angels came and ministered to him. As one commentator put it:1 Instead of his eating the bread Satan tempted him to create out of stones, angels now wait on him as at the heavenly banquet… Instead of casting himself down from the temple parapet […] now the Father, unbidden, sends a host of angels to carry on with their heavenly task. And in refusing obeisance to any but the Father, Jesus receives the adoring service that Satan had tried to wrest for himself. In a word: As temptation leaves him, fulfillment approaches.
If we can carry that truth of the Father’s mercy, evident before us in the life of Christ, then we can be victorious over temptation. If we can remember that the good to which we’re attracted within any temptation will be given us – and given in measure far surpassing even our most fanciful imaginations – by God, the giver of every good and perfect gift, then we will see the Devil and his promises for what they truly are, as Duccio did: empty show, sheer veneer, the total absence of total goodness, total truth, and total beauty. What Satan’s promises lack is God in his totality. But it is nothing less than God in his totality that the Father offers to us through his Son, who rejecting everything less than himself empowers us with his Holy Spirit to do the same. And may the Trinity, in their mercy, grant us the full and perfect good we desire– their own life – to us sinners now and for all eternity. Amen.
Homily preached February 26, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996),155.