Those who passed by derided [Jesus on the cross], shaking their heads and
saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save
yourself and come down from the cross!”
In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, where also
mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save
himself. Let the Messiah, the King of
Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also
taunted him. [Mark 15:29-32]
This was the last temptation
of Christ.
The devil didn’t stop
hounding Jesus after those forty days in the wilderness. As Luke notes in his
version of that story, “when the devil had finished every test, he departed
from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). The worst tricks up the
tempter’s sleeve were not merely about bread from stones or jumping from the
temple roof. The hardest and last
temptation is to come down from the cross.
(And not to give away any plot
twists, but this is exactly the point of the controversial book and film, The
Last Temptation of Christ.)
I say this is the
hardest temptation for two reasons. One,
because it is always easy to flake out.
It is always easy to give up.
That is one thing we humans are especially good at—breaking commitments,
leaving people hanging, running out of steam.
And it is one of the things that makes us humans particularly hard to
love, I think. If we are offered an “out,” we are usually pretty quick to take
it. And there are lots of times when we
“check out” even when we haven’t been offered a graceful exit. We just run.
We just bail out. We just quit.
It would have to have
been very, very tempting, hearing these mockers, for Jesus to do the same: just to summon up some divine energy,
disentangle himself from the ropes and the nails pinning him to the wood, and
just walk away. It would have been very
easy to say, “I tried to help you all, but you wouldn’t play ball. So now I’m done with you. Goodbye.” Jesus does not. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a temptation. It would have been an easy out then to go and just conquer the world with an angel army or two, and chalk up a victory that felt like a victory.
There is a second
reason I think it must have been awfully difficult for Jesus not to come down from the cross and save
himself. Staying on the cross meant looking
like he couldn’t come down.
Even though Jesus was choosing
not to save himself, it meant appearing like he could not save himself. It
meant being willing to look weak, to be
weak. And there surely must have been a
tempting diabolical voice saying, “But you could get them to believe in you if
you came down. You could get them to
recognize your power if you left the cross and saved yourself. You would convince them all without a doubt,
and you would do it by looking like a hero.”
Now there’s an insidious temptation: to
still get to be the savior, but to do it without a cross. To get to be the hero who looks like a winner! Maybe the devil knew
it would seem too obvious, too straightforward an assault, to try and get Jesus
to doubt he was the Messiah. But to hint
at a different way to be the
Messiah, a way with only celebrity instead of suffering, with "winning" instead of weakness that would have been much harder a fantasy not to entertain for a
while.
And in some ways, this
is the hardest temptation for us to
resist as followers of Jesus: to name
the name of Jesus without sticking it out through times of suffering, taken on
for others, when the time comes for it.
It is easier for us to flake out.
It is tempting for us to shrug off commitments with the excuse, “Eh,
we’re all human, and I just don’t feel like sticking this out anymore.” It is easier for us to look for an easy win somewhere else.
And it is tempting for
us to try to be Christians without doing the strange-looking, even weak-looking things, that followers of
Jesus do—things like turning the other cheek, loving our enemies, forgiving
debts and wrongs done to us, and putting ourselves in the servants’ roles. It is much easier to think we can be Christians and only talk about how God
will make us richer and more successful in business, or how God will make us
look like winners. Easier, maybe, but not true. That, too, is part of the choice in front of
us: whether we would rather have what is easy
but a lie, or the One who is the Truth, but who will lead us into uneasy places. What will we choose today?
The last temptation,
then, for Jesus is to be the Christ without the cross. And the ongoing temptation for us, too, is to
be Christians without the way of the
cross--to seek another kind of victory, apart from the victory that is suffering-love-on-a-cross. Is it any wonder that Jesus
taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation”? May we be true to the mark of the cross once
traced on our foreheads today.
Lord Jesus, as you refused to get up from the cross,
grant us the faithfulness to endure, and sustain us by your unflinching love.
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