Daily Thought for Sunday 9th March 2025
“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, turned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert …”
Luke 4:1
Sweet desserts
Stuart Kelly
It has taken me a long time to understand fully the brilliance of one of the opening scenes of C S Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; precisely, where the White Witch tempts Edmund. What he succumbs to is Turkish Delight, and it confirmed for me that he was exceptionally dull-witted because I didn’t like Turkish Delight. It is very easy to resist what we didn’t want anyway, and as a child I thought Turkish Delight was like gelatinous air-freshener.
Christ’s temptation is of a different order entirely. Satan is not foolish enough to try to persuade Jesus to indulge himself or get away with something. His temptation is far more sinister. As T S Eliot wrote in Murder in the Cathedral “The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason”. Perhaps the worst sins are not those committed by monsters, but by those who earnestly believed that what they were doing was for the best, that they could make the ends justify the means.
For a simple story, the Temptation is remarkably subtle. Firstly, Satan doesn’t suggest doing something we would automatically recoil from: he doesn’t say “Why not just smite Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas and Judas Iscariot right now?” Secondly, all Satan’s blandishments, material, political and religious, will in time come true of God’s own accord: he gets, as it were, his sweet desserts. Bread shall be miraculously created for thousands, the rulers of the world shall all kneel before the Lord and angels shall tend him from a greater fall and rise with him in a greater ascension. Moreover, Jesus becomes the Bread of Life, he is the King, and not just of Israel, and he is the Temple itself, torn down and restored. Finally, Jesus quotes solely from Deuteronomy, from the Law, is refuting Satan: he is the fulfilment of the Law, the only one who in perfection could keep all its commandments. But finally, Satan departs for a more opportune time.
Are we at our most vulnerable when we have successfully resisted temptation?
Shall we pray?
Lord, we ask you to give us such insight as to distinguish what is truly right and when it is right to act. Guard us from reckless and foolhardy deeds, especially when well-intentioned. Make us cautious, alert and aware how easily noble aspirations can be twisted to selfish ends. Amen.
Stuart Kelly is an elder in Cheviot Churches and interim moderator for Ale and Teviot United linked with Jedburgh and Oxnam.