The Temptation of Whatever It Takes: Part 1
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Last week for Ash Wednesday, I wanted to try to help my Confirmation students understand Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. Last year I started working with my own version of Confirmation that links up with the Enneagram and some of the process perspectives that offers me. So it didn’t take much for me to see a link between the three temptations of Jesus and the 3 energy centers of the Enneagram (also the three energy centers of Thomas Keating).
But even that didn’t lead me to connect well with the students because the needs of the three centers are basic needs for life. What makes them traps for us is when we go to the extremes with the importance of or the means to achieve our needs. The common thread with all the temptations of Jesus was the temptation to do “Whatever it takes.”
Temptation 1: Turning Stones to Bread
We all have the basic desire for survival, to not be hungry. We like to feel safe and secure with all of our needs met and our fears taken care of.One of the things we really don’t like is that feeling of emptiness and it doesn’t matter if the emptiness is in our stomachs, the noise level around us, our bank accounts, our schedules, our understanding of life, or our inner spirit. We just don’t like it. In US society we loath emptiness so much we overindulge and hoard just about everything. We have fallen into the trap of confusing what we want with what we truly need all in the service of preventing us experiencing even the hint of being less. On the Enneagram this would correlate with the Head corner of the 6-5-7.
So Jesus in the wilderness after 40 days of no food sits in a place that we actively avoid. My confirmation students thought the idea of going 4 hours without food was ghastly enough let alone 40 days. So Jesus is set up for the first Whatever it Takes temptation. He was famished, and I can imagine that emptiness raising weakness and fear that he might not survive this time and the wilderness would be the end of his journey even before it really got started. So the temptation is to not believe that God will really take care of him, that the Spirit left him out here to die in the wilderness, so if Jesus wanted to survive, he would have to take care of it himself.
Both Jesus and Satan knew that Jesus had the power to make it happen and besides who would know. Jesus would know. And the truth he would know was that in the end he wasn’t able to trust God to care for him with even his basic needs, so he had to step in and fill the void of God’s activity in his life.
Whoa. That raises a lot of questions for me about all the things we do to “insure” that we will succeed in surviving our life. I will leave any personal reflections up to your living conversation with God’s Spirit.
But I find this temptation causing me to wonder how many survival programs for struggling churches are all based on the idea that God hasn’t stepped up to save you yet, so you need to do Whatever it Takes to make sure you have your needs as a church met. I’m all for hoping the Church of God continues (my income is a vested interest in that endeavor). However, I think we have lost sight of the idea that the Church is the Body of Christ and that the God who creates us and forms us together as a people is also desiring for us to live abundantly.
Where is the Trust that God holds the future and is faithful to us?
In many books and programs that come through my email and inbox the trust seems to lie instead on how we are processing the metrics of “successful” churches to “insure” our survival as a congregation or as a denomination.
Are we as the church being seduced by the Surviving by Whatever It Takes temptation? I’m afraid we are more than we would like to admit.
OK, this ended up being longer than I expected, so I will break it up into 3 parts and take each of the other two temptations.
Feel free to comment below.
As I started studying the Enneagram I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to keep track of all the various traits and characteristics of the different types. I also come to the enneagram from the perspective that it helps provide an orientation map to the energies of life, the spiritual and emotional system that helps to motivate us and form our living.