John Bazalgette's Lent reflections on the meaning of the three temptations of Christ in today’s world
Introduction
I began to write this reflection on the First Sunday in Lent when the Gospel reading for the Eucharist was from Matthew.[1] In this passage, the writer describes Satan’s three temptations of Jesus after 40 days in the wilderness.
Assumptions - then and now
As a modern student of human behaviour, I am interested in comparing the assumptions which Matthew made as he wrote his account of how Jesus addressed those temptations, with the assumptions that I make about today’s comparable temptations. I use this account of the temptations because they probably give a reasonably reliable account of those made by Jesus himself.[2]
I also want to write about this because in John’s Gospel Jesus describes himself as the ‘way’. While I accept the idea of him describing himself as the authentic path to God, I’m also interested in thinking of him as a coach or mentor, who says ‘This is my way of doing things …’, suggesting that if I adopt his way of behaving in today’s world, I will find myself being an authentic member of the Church – The Body of Christ – and the God’s spiritual resources will be available to me to use with authority and power to offer leadership today.
As I wrote, I became strongly aware of three existential issues in the last week in February 2026. Two of them were about the structures through which we British govern ourselves, the third was about the latest technology which gives us the practical tools we use to manage our lives.
Addressing the two governmental issues: Members of three of the core elements of our British constitutional structure have been exposed compellingly in the news locally and internationally. A member of our royal family was arrested and taken into custody on suspicion of misconduct in Public Office. This is the first time a member of the British monarchy has been arrested in 250 years. In that same week, a former British Ambassador to the United States, also a member of the House of Lords, was taken into custody on a similar accusation. And at the end of that week a Bishop of the Church of England, a spiritual leader of our established Church, was arrested on the grounds of sexual assault. Given the oddity of our unwritten constitution, he is also a member of the House of Lords!
The third existential issue was that 2,500 technical experts from around the world have been meeting in Delhi, to work out a global collaborative framework for the safe governance of Artificial Intelligence. This addresses the reality that quantum computing brings us to the threshold of everything being instantaneously accessible across the world. As yet, details of the outcomes of their deliberations are not generally available.
I feel that those three issues are significant factors about the trustworthiness of world we live in and our feelings of the way we belong in it. The first two suggest that the behaviour of those who hold positions of influence is evidence of dry rot in our structure of accountable governance that has gone beyond our existing systems designed to prevent ‘rotten apples’ infecting the whole barrel. While in the third, we are at the beginning of designing how ‘machine usefulness’ can be prevented from supplanting human intelligence and our ultimate accountability.
In this essay I will offer a reminder of what Matthew’s gospel says and then will attempt to analyse the assumptions Jesus seems to make as he grapples with the challenges put to him by Satan. I will explore this through two different dimensions. The personal dimension of body, mind and spirit which is probably not radically different from what it was 2,000 years ago. The corporate one explores how people lived together then and how we live together now in families, in local communities, nationally and internationally.[3] I will explore the corporate dimension through economic, political and spiritual thinking. Our thinking about democracy will have radically changed the corporate dimension since the time of Jesus.
In conclusion, I will make sense of the way the temptations Jesus thought in his time and how that can provide us with a way of understanding of how the Holy Spirit is leading us today, especially in our local lives.
Lived Experience and Living Faith – a Starting Point
Seeking the Way of Jesus in today’s cultural assumptions
Two or three years ago, the late Rev Julian Reindorp introduced me to the fascinating book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels by the theologian Kenneth E Bailey.[4]
Matthew’s account of the temptations in the Gospel for the First Sunday in Lent challenges me to work at how my current organisational thinking about how belonging together relates to assumptions made by people two thousand years ago. Kenneth Bailey alerted me to the need to examine how I think about resisting ‘sin’ and ‘temptation’ against the way Jesus probably thought about them.[5] I can then consider what I share with him as I make sense of my own leadership based on my own human and culturally shaped experiences.
Mattthew’s account Matthew’s story about the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by the devil makes complete sense. Jesus’ Baptism was immediately followed by the descent of the Holy Spirit embodied in a dove and God’s voice declaring to those assembled “This is my Son, my beloved. With whom I am well pleased.” If this mind-shattering declaration were true, Jesus needed mind-space to work out how he would identify the key challenges he would face and to test what resources would be available to tackle them.
The devil’s first temptation bluntly addresses hunger: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” The devil’s test is based on Jesus’ lived human experience at that moment. Given what he’d been through in the wilderness, scarcity would have been high in Jesus’ mind: “Do I really have the power to tackle this in a way that would please my Creator/Father?” If he were truly human, he must have wrestled with some degree of uncertainty and his lived experience would provide him with evidence of some of the resources available to him.
Given his formation over 30 years, Jesus knew what his key resource in dealing with the first temptation was based in scripture. “It is written, one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He tells the Tempter that the evidence of God’s faithfulness throughout scripture equips him to tolerate any uncertainty which Satan might try to exploit.
The second temptation was more subtle. For generations until Jesus’ own life, the Jews were subjected to the oppressive conditions of both religious and imperial rulers. They were yearning for the One who scripture told them would lead them to freedom. If God were publicly to demonstrate his willingness to ‘support’ his Beloved Son by cancelling the unquestionable laws of gravity, that leader would have everything he needed to win the wholehearted adulation of a multitude of followers. This time in his human heart, Jesus must have experienced an even greater degree of uncertainty, nevertheless he again drew on the historical evidence of God’s faithfulness and responds “It is written, do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
The third temptation addresses any excessively ambitious leader’s yearning to possess for his own purposes all the divine powers over the whole of God’s creation. However, ceding power to Satan would also mean that Jesus would had have undermined his Creator/Father’s full accountability for the inevitably costly pain of the mysterious, rich and dynamic nature of His cosmic creation. Jesus chose to accept those costs by giving orders to the devil “Away with you, Satan. It is written ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him’.”
Recognising and managing these natural human feelings by relying on God’s economic, political and spiritual faithfulness, Jesus finally takes full authority for driving the devil away. Understandably he needed to recover from those tests, so Matthew tells us that “angels came and waited on him”. However, he also tells us that Satan will seek further opportunities, as the gospel writers will describe later.
Responding to Jesus’ way Jesus was not naïve, even in today’s terms. Though he quoted scripture, he would have drawn on his lived experience in the prevailing economic, political and spiritual assumptions of his day. My suggestion is that in today’s world those assumptions are still relevant to us in the here and now. Entrusting ourselves to his inevitable guidance and leadership means that we need to address the same temptations for ourselves. So, let us engage with them.
Jesus had lived a ‘normal’ life for 30 years before he presented himself to John the Baptist. He understood the question of scarcity. In Nazareth all his family knew that making bread involved work, not ‘magic’: preparing flour, yeast and water; kneading dough to be baked in an oven. He and his father worked for other people in the Nazareth to get the money to buy those ingredients and to pay for other costs of living. To survive, the Bar-Joseph family participated in a series of processes in the village and the wider context. These were economic facts of life for everyone. Though we have learnt a great deal more about how they work, they are the same facts of life!
He knew the realities of the way life together in the village was governed. It was through meetings, disagreements and debates, leading to decisions being made affecting the community as a whole. These involved a lot of time by several powerful people who engaged with one another, seeking to agree on the best way to create a satisfying life together as a whole community. On occasions, dominant figures would have tried to impose themselves on everyone else, dragging everyone into their own view of what needed to be done. It is probable that some drew on their positions in the synagogue or its religious factions to gain the unquestioned support of others. On occasion they might have used their age and longer experience of ‘life’ to claim that they knew how to get what they wanted by claiming superior knowledge with which to resist the ‘laws’ of normal political gravity Drawing again on scripture and his twenty plus years of ordinary family and village life, would have shown Jesus the need for leaders to resist the temptation to follow such false human examples. To exploit God’s public declaration of his being God’s ‘Beloved Son’ without true evidence was not acceptable.
As with the whole of Judea and the Middle East, Nazareth was subject to the Roman government. Soldiers led by centurions would have imposed imperial rules, cruelly punishing those who dared to question them for whatever reason. Jewish ‘King’ Herod had bent his knee to the pagan emperor, apparently handing over the sovereignty of God to the beliefs of the Romans. Jesus knew and would later declare that substituting the Roman Emperor for God was not acceptable to a faithful Jew. Without knowing our language, Jesus would know that this was not an example of what we would now call ‘good governance’. He drew attention to the ‘spiritual’ culture and the evidence about how risky that it was, as he later told his disciples.
Contrasting the cultures of then and now It is tempting to ignore the difference between the cultures of first century Palestine and those of 21st century Britain. If we do that, we can be tempted to use our image of the redempting Jesus to carry all the real burden of resisting the ways in which Satan tests us today. Rather than accept our full responsibility to live as members the Body of Christ – the Church - we effectively run the risk of denying Jesus in our own time.
I want to examine and differentiate the assumptions embodied in the tests on the three dimensions: personal; social; and spiritual.
Personal Hunger personally tested Jesus’ body and his need to survive physically. The idea of the suspension of gravity tests his mind: if angels are seen to save Jesus from ‘dashing his foot against a stone’, he can have confidence that he can take physical risks without the ‘normal’ consequences. Thirdly, his spirit was tested by Satan who said he will take away God’s sovereignty and give it to Jesus, if he will bend the knee to him.
Social The social dimensions are the family; the local community; and the nation, each with their economic, political and religious structures.
The culture in Palestine in BCE 1 was different from ours in important ways. It was generally assumed to have been ordained by God and not open to being questioned by humans. Social boundaries contained in the Law were clearly drawn and had been in place for generations. The fifth Commandment ordered ‘Honour your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land your God is giving you.’ As we know Jesus aged 12 did not conventionally conform to that commandment!
Economic and political boundaries in the village and beyond were clearly drawn in the Ten Commandments and the Torah and were expected to be observed. Socially these applied between Jews and Samaritans; Jews and Gentiles; the Pharisees and Sadducees; Romans and Greeks; masters and slaves; and even between men and women. These differences were clearly understood and hierarchically ordered. As a ‘jobbing’ carpenter with his father, Jesus would have been familiar with the authority and power they had in relations with their clients.
Many of Jesus’ apparent ‘transgressions’ were in pursuit of his mission as he questioned and tested those boundaries. He did not deny the boundaries, but he saw the greater ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of which these marked the differing living parts. His resources always his genuinely human experience of the faithfulness of the living God, and the evidence of scripture. The evidence of how risky that was, was clear to him, yet he gave himself to both right to the very end.
In my view, the 21st century does not require different principles from those that Jesus experienced: we need to understand them in the more sophisticated ways available to us. Our ancestors - not just the Jews - were comfortable believing that their whole context was a mystery and that their forms of a divine creator or creators were the most mysterious factors active within it.
Understanding our world is different in several ways. It differs in the scale of the whole known universe and indeed the cosmos, which increases the complexity of what it means to live and belong together. Not only that, but within a generation the tools which help us understand its changing shapes and forms are expanding exponentially, for example quantum computing and artificial intelligence (machine learning). This makes it harder for us to understand how we can safely belong anywhere. Yet we still yearn to belong. It’s clearly an existential part of being human. The cost of belonging is to accept our accountability. And that cannot be separated from our learning to be accountable for what we do and how we do it.
The major factor is our existentially greater physical knowledge of the universe and the forces at work in and across it. Psychologically we can better understand our bodies, minds and relationships though we cannot claim to be better informed spiritually. For our forefathers, concepts of ‘mystery’ and ‘supernatural’ were the natural places to go to understand mysteries. Though that does not eliminate us from the resources available to us, they’re no longer the first place to go to make sense of things to accept accountability between us for the world we create.
To return to the way of Jesus. Challenged by the scribes and the Pharisees about what should be done to the woman caught in adultery, he turned the challenge on them saying “Let anyone who is without sin cast the first stone.” Scripture says that ‘one by one they went away’.[6] Surely, we face that challenge today?
[1] Matthew 4.1-11
[2] Luke 4.1-12. It’s worth saying that Matthew’s account doesn’t differ essentially from St Luke’s.
[3] As I came close to completing this essay, the President of the United States has led the world to the threshold of World War 3. It would take a major rewrite to take that into account in this essay, but that deserves consideration later along similar but expanded lines.
[4] Kenneth E Bailey (2008) Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, SPCK, London.
[5] The Ancient Greek word for sin used in the Gospels is ‘hamartia’, a term drawn from archery. I understand that the use of the archery link also occurs in Hebrew.
[6] John 8.1-11