The Last Temptation

“The Last Temptation”—Mark 15:29-32

Those who passed by derided him, 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 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.

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. 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, 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.”

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.  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.