In one sense, our Lord is His own perpetual theme. He is ever
speaking of Himself, inasmuch as He is ever presenting what He is to
us, and what He claims of us. In another sense, He scarcely ever
speaks of Himself, inasmuch as deep silence, for the most part, lies
over His own inward experiences. How precious, therefore, and how
profoundly significant is that word here--'in My temptations'! So He
summed up all His life. To feel the full force of the expression, it
should be remembered that the temptation in the wilderness was past
before His first disciple attached himself to Him, and that the
conflict in Gethsemane had not yet come when these words were
spoken. The period to which they refer, therefore, lies altogether
within these limits, including neither. After the former, 'Satan,'
we read, 'departed from Him for a season.' Before the latter, we
read, 'the prince of this world cometh.' The space between, of which
people are so apt to think as free from temptation, is the time of
which our Lord is speaking now. The time when His followers
'companied with Him' is to His consciousness the time of His
'temptations.'
That is not the point of view from which the Gospel narratives
present it, for the plain reason that they are not autobiographies,
and that Jesus said little about the continuous assaults to which He
was exposed. It is not the point of view from which we often think
of it. We are too apt to conceive of Christ's temptations as all
gathered together--curdled and clotted, as it were, at the two ends
of His life, leaving the space between free. But we cannot
understand the meaning of that life, nor feel aright the love and
help that breathe from it, unless we think of it as a field of
continual and diversified temptations.
How remarkable is the choice of the expression! To Christ, His life,
looking back on it, does not so much present itself in the aspect of
sorrow, difficulty or pain, as in that of temptation. He looked upon
all outward things mainly with regard to their power to help or to
hinder His life's work. So for us, sorrow or joy should matter
comparatively little. The evil in the evil should be felt to be sin,
and the true cross and burden of life should be to us, as to our
Master, the appeals it makes to us to abandon our tasks, and fling
away our filial dependence and submission.
This is not the place to plunge into the thorny questions which
surround the thought of the tempted Christ. However these may be
solved, the great fact remains, that His temptations were most real
and unceasing. It was no sham fight which He fought. The story of
the wilderness is the story of a most real conflict; and that
conflict is waged all through His life. True, the traces of it are
few. The battle was fought on both sides in grim silence, as
sometimes men wage a mortal struggle without a sound. But if there
were no other witness of the sore conflict, the Victor's shout at
the close would be enough. His last words, 'I have overcome the
world,' sound the note of triumph, and tell how sharp had been the
strife. So long and hard had it been that He cannot forget it even
in heaven, and from the throne holds forth to all the churches the
hope of overcoming, 'even as I also overcame.' As on some
battlefield whence all traces of the agony and fury have passed
away, and harvests wave, and larks sing where blood ran and men
groaned their lives out, some grey stone raised by the victors
remains, and only the trophy tells of the forgotten fight, so that
monumental word, 'I have overcome' stands to all ages as the record
of the silent, life-long conflict.
It is not for us to know how the sinless Christ was tempted. There
are depths beyond our reach. This we can understand, that a sinless
manhood is not above the reach of temptation; and this besides,
that, to such a nature, the temptations must be suggested from
without, not presented from within. The desire for food is simply a
physical craving, but another personality than His own uses it to
incite the Son to abandon dependence for His physical life on God.
The trust in God's protection is holy and good, and it may be truest
wisdom and piety to incur danger in dependence on it, when God's
service calls, but a mocking voice without suggests, under the cloak
of it, a needless rushing into peril at no call of conscience, and
for no end of mercy, which is not religion but self-will. The desire
to have the world for His own lay in Christ's deepest heart, but the
enemy of Christ and man, who thought the world his already, used it
as giving occasion to suggest a smoother and shorter road to win all
men unto Him than the 'Via Dolorosa' of the Cross. So the sinless
Christ was tempted at the beginning, and so the sinless Christ was
tempted, in various forms of these first temptations, throughout His
life. The path which He had to tread was ever before Him, the shadow
of the Cross was flung along His road from the first. The pain and
sorrow, the shame and spitting, the contradiction of sinners against
Himself, the easier path which needed but a wish to become His, the
shrinking of flesh--all these made their appeal to Him, and every
step of the path which He trod for us was trodden by the power of a
fresh consecration of Himself to His task and a fresh victory over
temptation.
Let us not seek to analyse. Let us be content to worship, as we
look, Let us think of the tempted Christ, that our conceptions of
His sinlessness may be increased. His was no untried and cloistered
virtue, pure because never brought into contact with seducing evil,
but a militant and victorious goodness, that was able to withstand
in the evil day. Let us think of the tempted Christ that our
thankful thoughts of what He bore for us may be warmer and more
adequate, as we stand afar off and look on at the mystery of His
battle with our enemies and His. Let us think of the tempted Christ
to make the lighter burden of our cross, and our less terrible
conflict easier to bear and to wage. So will He 'continue with
_us_ in _our_ temptations,' and patience and victory flow to us from
Him.