Power, Service, Humility: A New Testament Ethic

Prelude with the Devil

1 Prelude with the Devil “You will be like God”—with this enticement, the serpent comes to the human being after the creation (Gen 3:5) and seduces him into falling away from God. The consequences are drastically illustrated already in the following chapter, when Cain kills his brother Abel. The “prehistory” at the beginning of the Bible makes it clear that the urge to push oneself up too high is so elemental to the human being that the tempter can successfully take hold of him by means of it, and bring about his downfall.1 This is why Bernard of Clairvaux, the great preacher of humility, advises his pupil Pope Eugene, “No poison or sword ought to terrify you as much as the lust for domination.”2 It is thus no cause for surprise when the devil applies precisely this lever—the libido dominandi, the “will for power”—against Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel story, before he first appears on the public scene.3 After Jesus has been revealed by God in the baptism as his “beloved Son” 2 Power, Service, Humility and he has prepared himself for the path that lies ahead by fasting for forty days in the desert, the tempter comes to him to interpret in his own way what “the Son of God” means. Like Adam and Eve at the beginning of prehistory, Jesus too must decide at the start of his public ministry what will orient him on his future path. The temptation consists of three exchanges that are related to each other in the form of a climax. In the first two exchanges, the devil takes up the words addressed by God to Jesus (Matt 4:3, 6).4 He starts with the most obvious issue: since Jesus is hungry after his lengthy fast, the devil suggests, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” The subtext runs, “What is the point of divinity, other than to satisfy one’s own needs?” Jesus counters with a quotation from the Bible: “The human being does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt 4:4 = Deut 8:3). But the devil does not give up. In the second exchange, he takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and begins once more with the conditional phrase “if you are the Son of God . . .” This time, his interpretation of the title “Son of God” is more subtle: by jumping from the pinnacle of the temple, Jesus is to demonstrate to all the world that he truly has God on his side. And if Jesus argues by means of quotations from the Bible, then the devil can do the same. In justification, he quotes Psalm 91:11-12: “‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Once again, Jesus repulses him with a quotation from the Bible: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matt 4:7 = Deut 6:16). The devil now forgoes further arguments and drops his mask. He leads Jesus to a high mountain, where he offers him the lordship over all the kingdoms of the world—an immediate and comprehensive satisfaction of Adam’s craving for power. His only condition is that Jesus shall fall down Prelude with the Devil 3 before him and adore him. In other words, Jesus must submit to him rather than to God. The devil wants Jesus’ divine sonship to be understood as a synonym for superior power. He wants a son without a father, a Son of God without God. For the devil, power per se is divine, power in the sense of an unfettered personal authority. Power of that kind is present everywhere in the world, and this is why, in the Lukan variant of the temptation narrative, the devil can justify his offer to Jesus of lordship over the world by saying that all the kingdoms he is offering him have been “given over” to him (Luke 4:6). The bloody tracks of this kind of power run through the whole of the New Testament canon, from the first book, with Herod’s power-driven murder of children in the Gospel of Matthew’s infancy...