Pádraig Ó Tuama’s first address to the United Reformed Church’s Ministers’ Gathering 2022 was a reflection on the temptations of Jesus as retold in the Gospel of Luke.
In Luke, Jesus’ encounter with Satan immediately precedes his return to Nazareth and his proclamation of the “the year of the Lord’s favour” (“jubilee”) in his home town synagogue (Luke 4). Hence Pádraig’s title: “Before the Jubilee”’.
Pádraig, a compelling poet and teacher whose work centres around themes of language, power, conflict and religion, opened with thoughts on the deeply human experience of confession – moments of powerful encounter when we say: “I have something to tell you. . .” He envisaged that there must have been a moment when Jesus turned to his disciples and confessed the temptations he had faced in the wilderness. What was it like for Jesus to re-tell this story – to say: “I faced a part of me that I had to face. . . I have something to tell you about what tempts me.”
Pádraig noted that the temptations begin with “If” (“Since”): “If you are the Son of God. . .” Jesus, by this stage, has “a disturbing confidence” in who he is; the question now is what he should do with it. At 30, Jesus is facing his future and the nature of the temptations say something about what his deepest fears are at this point.
A temptation has to tempt – it has to get under your skin. That will be different for everybody. What got under Jesus’ skin? What were the temptations for Jesus? Short cuts to power, magic. . . He was asking: What drives me? What measure of adulation will I inspire? Or – will I throw it all away? (“Sometimes, we’re not so much tempted because of our inability but by our capacity.”) And what is important to note about the role of Satan (tempter/adversary) is that Jesus recognises in him someone just like himself. “Temptation is when something looks like you, sounds like you, is as clever like you.” (Pádraig recommended a series of cartoons, entitled “40”, by the artist Simon Smith as one depiction of Jesus’ experience in the wilderness.*)
Pádraig identified Jesus’ anxiety about what it means to be followed – to have the power that attracts others to follow, or to show antagonism towards you. It is an anxiety characterised by Jesus’ awareness both of the private (revealing his temptations in some personal disclosure to his disciples) and the public and political (as demonstrated in the following encounters with the townspeople of Nazareth). After proclaiming the Jubilee and his role in it, the crowd threatens to throw Jesus of a cliff – a telling echo of his own temptation to hurl himself from a great height in during his temptations. At this point, Jesus “disappears into the crowd” – in effect, allowing the confrontation to dissipate. (Pádraig also referred to the three manifestations of hostility identified by Wilfred Bion (Experiences in Groups, 1961): aggression; pairing, and adulation. Even adulation/praise, Jesus had realised, is something to be wary of.)
With a deep and powerful capacity to attract people to him or to engage in confrontation, Jesus is nevertheless able to say not now, this is not the time. Jesus had the resources to pay attention to what was needed at the time. And his response to aggression differed at different times at his life, culminating in his arrest, when he chose not to disappear into the crowd.
Pádraig observed that, as well as being a “pastoral” gospel, the Gospel of Luke powerfully depicts the political context of the time; Jesus was responding to the aggression of occupation. The cross is a symbol of empire at its most brutal, from which the disciples wanted to be freed. Oppression, Pádraig said, brings people to wish for all kinds of jubilee. And Jubilee is always something to which the whole community is called and which requires the individual to modify their capacity, as Jesus had demonstrated during the temptations in the wilderness.
Pádraig concluded by asking what this means for us. At a personal level: listen to the inner life and what tempts you. Don’t be appalled by it but pay attention to it and find a group to speak to (cf. 12 step programme). At a public level: Jubilee is always proclaimed at times of oppression – so what’s happening in our world and communities – who’s been manipulating power in public?