What a beautiful Baptism experience Jesus had. A dove descended from heaven and landed upon him and God spoke words of favor and blessing… and then…

Jesus is barely dry before Matthew’s gospel places him in the wilderness, where for 40 days of fasting only to be tempted by the devil in his most vulnerable moment. The Spirit lead him them there, and almost as if on purpose. Matthew 4:1-11 is intense, as Jesus is hungry from fasting and the devil is relentless in pursuit of getting Jesus to cave to the temptation.

Jesus endures and all the while proclaims commitment to God with words of instruction for the reader to take to heart. He is tempted by bread for his hunger, safety from danger, and offered all the power he could ever want.

In her essay in Feasting of the Word, Maryetta Anschutz said of Jesus temptation, “Each time Jesus rejects temptation, he sets up for the reader a way to understand the cross to come. Certainly God can save God’s self from death on the cross, and certainly God in Jesus can refuse temptation to sin, but in our humanity we need to see God offer sacrifice and refuse temptation in order to learn the lesson ourselves.”

In this we wrestled deeper with the Church’s ability to learn this lesson of trusting God and ourselves to endure the temptations of the world we face.