Bread Temptation

Jesus is famished, and Satan offers a friendly suggestion. "Why don't you use your Super God Powers to make yourself a snack?" Jesus' answers to the Devil sound so lofty to me. Helpful quotations. Jesus says, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, ("but by the word of God", adds Matthew).'" And to the other temptations - to have power over whole cities if you worship Satan and to prove that you can do anything you want and God will protect you, he is equally prim: "You shall worship only God" and "Don't put God to the test." When I am hungry, or feeling powerless and afraid, and I have to think Jesus was, abstract principles do not help. Picking up my Bible and finding the appropriate passage wouldn't do it.

Every addict knows the temptation to make bread from stones, to think we can rule over cities, to risk ruin to our bodies and think that nothing can touch us. We can control everything in our path, and if there is nothing life-giving in sight, we can create it from booze. Or drugs. Or sex. (For some it may be logic, or ambition or another person, though these have the disadvantage of being slower cooking in their misery.) In my case it's food. I think I can find comfort, companionship, and freedom from feeling there, bread from stone if there ever was. And many of us have to feel the misery of saying yes to Satan and be desperate and ashamed enough to grab someone's offer for help. I have known the demon of compulsive eating for years, and am grateful every day for the fellowship of addicts who have been the voice of God's love to me. These humble people, the most spiritually mature people I've ever run into, know they need God. That we control nothing.

We all have something that calls to us, and tries to lure us into throwing ourselves away. God's countering word has to come through human beings, I think. Jesus must have had it so deeply infused in him - through his family, through his community with John the Baptist - that when he went into the desert it came with him.