“He brought God”
The Gospel of the First Sunday of Lent fittingly recounts Jesus’ fast of forty days, followed by Satan’s testing.
In his book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict devotes the second chapter to an extended meditation upon “The Temptations of Jesus.”
The Pope concludes:
What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought?
The answer is very simple: God. He has brought God. He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature — the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was also honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises. It is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the nations of the earth.
He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him….. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope, and love….. The earthly kingdoms that Satan was able to put before the Lord at that time have all passed away. Their glory, their doxa, has proven to be a mere semblance. But the glory of Christ, the humble, self-sacrificing glory of his love, has not passed away, nor will it ever do so.
The pope quotes Hebrews 2:17-18 and 4:15 to make the point that Jesus can sympathize with us and help us because he “is one who in every respect has been tempted as we are.” But there is nothing that I see in the accounts of the temptations of Jesus to indicate that he experienced any kind of temptation or internal struggle, nor does the pope make the case that he did. The chapter has basically nothing in it about Jesus the man.
If Jesus could not have faith (see the Luke Timothy Johnson article in which he discusses the CDF’s pronouncements about the work of Jon Sobrino) because he knew God the Father directly, it’s difficult to imagine he could experience temptation.
“He brought God” — I just don’t feel very uplifted by this assertion. It is too abstract. Luther is to the point when he asks how do I find a gracious God, and the Liberation Theologians are to the point when they ask how we can find a liberating God. It takes a theological struggle to find God as gracious and liberation. Otherwise you are stuck with an oppressive and paralyzing God-image.
Both David and Joseph raise issues that need serious discussion — beyond “comments” possibilities.
May I merely offer some thoughts:
1. The testing by Satan seems directed against Jesus’ messianic mission and how it is to be realized. Matthew’s account, which the Pope uses as his framework, does not speculate on the psychology of Jesus. But his full humanity is taken for granted.
2. I don’t think that Luke Johnson’s parsing of “faith” in terms of “trust” and “obedience” is at all compromised by the approach Benedict takes here.
3. Though I regret that Joseph did not experience “uplift,” I can think of any number of ways that the Pope’s terse assertion can be adjectively expanded by what the Pope says in the chapter. For example, how do I find a compassionate God? how do I find the thrice-holy God beyond our inveterate erection of idols? etc. I surely do not need to recall that context — specifically the context of the entire chapter and book — is all (or at least a good part)!
4. Finally, a prominent Italian theologian, Pierangelo Sequeri has a book Il Dio affidabile. I think the title sums up the import of the Temptations Narrative: can God be relied upon, or do we need to replace the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus with a god of our devising?
Fr. Imbelli,
The disappointment I feel with the pope’s book so far is that while he accepts the the Gospels as actual events, he seems to be more inclined to subject them to literary analysis than to discuss them as the story of an actual human person, Jesus. I presume the pope maintains that Jesus was indeed tempted in the desert, but for the purposes of the lessons the pope draws from the temptations, they could easily be literary inventions. In the temptation to turn stones to bread, for example, he discusses other stories in the Gospels involving bread. He talks about what could or should be expected from a Messiah and from the Church regarding hunger in the world. Regarding devil’s attempt to get Jesus to throw himself from the parapet of the temple, the pope sees the interchange as being over correct exegesis, since both the devil and Jesus quote scripture. (And the pope works in a criticism of modern exegesis.)
I think it is taken for granted in mainstream Catholic Biblical scholarship that the evangelists were not writing biographies of Jesus, so I don’t think it would be out of the question at all to take the temptations as literary commentaries on aspects of the choices and themes in the ministry of Jesus. But to accept them as actual events and then subject them to literary analysis strikes me as odd.
The same applies to the encounter of Jesus and John the Baptist. Although it works very well literarily speaking, unless John the Baptist had some kind of advanced revelation of the crucifixion and the symbolism that would be used to describe and understand Jesus, it is difficult to believe he would really have said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” It is particularly difficult to believe in the light of John the Baptist at a later point sending disciples to Jesus and asking, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” (Luke 7:19)
David,
There is always the danger in blog exchanges of talking past one another, but I’m not sure if I grasp the difficulty you find.
You say: ” But to accept them as actual events and then subject them to literary analysis strikes me as odd.”
I don’t see why that is odd, given the nature of the sources.
I recently re-read something Luke Johnson wrote in “The Real Jesus” — which may be to the point.
“The New Testament writings yield some historical information, but this is not what they do best…The literary compositions of the New Testament are analyzed best when their literary integrity is respected and appreciated” (p. 167).
Fr. Imbelli,
Perhaps I am misinterpreting what the pope is trying to do. Does he intend for us to believe that Jesus and the devil actually had an encounter and spoke the words Matthew attributes to them? Or does he believe Matthew is telling us something true about Jesus’s approach throughout his ministry, and dramatizing it by inventing an exchange between Jesus and the devil? Or would he say it simply doesn’t make a difference whether it happened or not, we just trust Matthew to be telling some kind of truth about Jesus in whatever he says?
I think (although I could be wrong) that he intends for us to believe that what is written in the Gospels actually happened as it is described there, and the problem I have with that is that it doesn’t explain the clearly literary character of much that is in the Gospels. To take a small example, one of my commentaries points out that immediately preceding the temptations is the baptism of Jesus, in which a voice from heaven says, “This is my beloved son.” And in the temptations, the devil says, “If you are the son of God . . . ” It appears to be a literary touch that the words of the devil “look back” to the previous scene. But if the Gospels are merely recounting what happened, then events must have been pre-programmed to yield literary effects when they were written down.
David,
I don’t pretend to do more than honor your questions and concerns in sharing two associations that they evoked in me.
The first relates to an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Communio: “The challenge of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ for Theologians” by Father Roch Kereszty. In his examination of the book he writes of the Pope’s attempt to do “a new type of theology,” “not a slavish imitation, but a contemporary re-creation of the patristic model.” Such a theology will take seriously the findings of historical-critical research, but also recognize its intrinsic limitations and insufficiency for the life of the Church.
I do not claim (nor do I think Pope Benedict would) that he has entirely succeeded. But I think the enterprise is sorely needed. That is why I often invoke Luke Johnson, who I believe, sees a similar need — see his “The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship” where he too gives a sympathetic reading to patristic exegesis.
Interestingly, at the end of his article Father Kereszty quotes Peter Steinfels appreciative reflection upon the Pope’s book in Commonweal (August 17, 2007).
The second association that your thoughts brought to mind was the article on “Inspiration” in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, by Msgr. Raymond Collins. In his conclusion Collins writes of the need for a renewed understanding of what we mean by biblical inspiration.
Perhaps that is what we are groping towards.
Fr. Imbelli,
I found the Kereszty article online in PDF format. If anyone else is interested, here’s the link:
http://www.communio-icr.com/articles/PDF/kereszty34-3.pdf
I will check out the article in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary by Raymond Collins. I assume he is the same Raymond Collins who wrote Introduction to the New Testament, which I read over 20 years ago (I am shocked to realize) and remember as one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.
Thanks for taking my questions seriously. I am surprised these kinds of threads seem to generate so few comments.