Nothing tempts us like our sense of self-importance.
In today's Gospel reading, Satan tempts Jesus by asking Him to turn stones to bread. After Jesus refuses, Satan asks Jesus to leap from a high place so God will send angels to rescue him, but Jesus declines. After failing to provoke Jesus into showing how powerful he was and how much God loved Him, Satan promised, I will give you the entire world, if you will just worship me. And, of course, Jesus declines, choosing instead to be rejected, tortured and killed by the very world that Satan offered to give Him. In short, Jesus chose humility and obedience over sin.
What a contrast comes from the Old Testament reading for the day!
Ahab, the King of Samaria, has a real problem dealing with disrespect. He offered to buy his neighbor's vineyard, where he wanted to plant a vegetable garden, but the neighbor refused to sell. Now, granted, the King of Samaria was hardly the most powerful man in the universe, but you would think that he could have moved on with his life and found somewhere else to cultivate vegetables. But no! He was overwhelmed with despair!
In fact, Ahab was so distraught that his wicked wife, Jezebel, was moved to take pity on him. In her own tender way, she got a couple of wiseguys to offer false testimony against the neighbor, who was consequently convicted of blasphemy and stoned to death. And guess who got the dead guy's vineyard? Ahab the gardner.
At every turn, we are impossibly eager to demonstrate our abilities, to prove our worth, to do anything that would give us some hope of trivial gain. Jesus's stark refusal to yield to these temptations demonstrates what God expects from us. Ahab's story, ridiculous though it may seem to a modern reader, illustrates the extent to which the sin that Jesus avoided is so otherwise ingrained in our natures.
Paul wrote about this sin in today's reading from the New Testament. He observed that some of the early Christians in Corinth claimed, Oh, I belong to Paul, while others said, I belong to Cephas? What has gotten into you, Paul asked? In other words, he wanted to know, since when has what I gave you become so trivial that you can make into some cause to gratify your ego, your sense of belonging, of being right?
What do we do about it? We can always strive to imitate Jesus's humility, and we can pray for the grace to do it. We can also do what the Psalmist does time and again, that is, to acknowledge our sense of being slighted, our anger, our fear, and our injured egos, but to do it as we pour out our hearts to God. After all, He knows our real nature: and while it is hardly uplifting to pour out all our anger against other people in prayers offered to God, doing so hardly hurts those who injure us and it certainly isn't news to God. It may even empty our hearts so that we can make room for the love that he would have us enjoy.
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