We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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One of the great consolations Christians have is that we worship a God who has himself wrestled with temptation. At the Judgment, we will face not an Olympian abstraction who breezed through on his looks and money, nor a severe and icy critic who eyes us coldly and says, “Why can’t you just not be tempted, like me!” but by a man who himself has faced and struggled through every temptation the world ever had to throw at our miserable species. God, it is true, asks a lot from us and I, for one, have to admit that I sometimes resent it. But the fact remains that he doesn’t ask anything of us to which he hasn’t subjected himself. Hunger, thirst, misunderstanding, rejection, bitter hate, betrayal, torture, and death are all things he has faced, right along with the accompanying temptations to selfishness, self-pity, pride, lust, resentment, grudges, vengefulness, bitterness, and despair. And the temptations he faced occurred, not by accident, but by his own divine plan. Before he begins his mission, Jesus is described by Mark as being “driven” into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil. He fought and beat them all, and he tells us he will give us his Spirit in order that we may do likewise.
It is notable that the Catechism tells us (CCC 2846) that this petition against temptation “goes to the root of the preceding one” (i.e., “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”). Partly that’s because temptation is where sin is conceived, but also it is because perhaps the greatest temptation we feel in this life is the temptation to refuse forgiveness to others. After all forgivenness is, by definition, for people who don’t deserve it since they really sinned against us and we really are their victims. Because of this, we can feel an enormous temptation to “stand on our rights” instead of standing on the grace of Christ. Like the proud ghost in C.S. Lewis’ wonderful little book The Great Divorce we want to say, especially when we are really wronged, “I only want my rights, I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.” To which our Guardian Angel replies in Lewis’ immortal words, “Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity.”[1]
It is curious that we pray to God, who has already put himself through Hell to win us our salvation, to “lead us not into temptation.” It seems as odd as praying to a lifeguard to not deliberately drown us. Why on earth are we asking God to not do what he would never ever do? Part of the problem is that the Greek contains more ideas than can be adequately rendered in English. The Catechism (CCC 2846) tells us, “It is difficult to translate the Greek verb used by a single English word: the Greek means both “do not allow us to enter into temptation” and “do not let us yield to temptation” (cf. Matthew 26:41).
Jesus is not teaching us that we worship a capricious deity who might suddenly take an irrational dislike to us, herd us into temptation, and try to damn us for fun. He is teaching us to worship his Father, the God of Israel who “cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). That God is absolutely consistent and is not about to suddenly and whimsically betray us like a fairy, sidhe or sprite in some pagan myth. He is not perverse and mercurial. His purpose is from age to age. He means to set us free from sin, death and the devil. But part of his purpose can only be fulfilled with our cooperation. So just as we ask the Father to give us what is good, so we ask him to protect us from temptation by helping us to avoid and escape it.
And brother do we need the help. We want to turn salvation into a legal game in which we seek, not to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, but rather to see how much we can get away with and, as the saying goes, “still be saved.” We have numerous elaborate strategies for attempting to offer as little of ourselves as we can to God, while trying not to appear as though we are basically seeking our own way. We see this in the sort of questioning which asks things like, “How far can I go with my girlfriend before it’s technically, you know, ‘fornication’?” The very question reveals a corrupt will and intellect before the sin has even been technically, you know, committed. In the final analysis, it boils down to the not-yet-converted Augustine’s prayer “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!”[2] And we see the identical pattern with whatever other favorite sin we are trying to sidle up to. So we are taught to ask God to guard us from the way that leads to sin for the same reason we ask him for our daily bread: because grace is as necessary for our spiritual life as bread is for our physical life. We are locked in combat between the flesh and the spirit and we need all the help we can get to know how to discern what God is doing with us in the middle of this war zone.
Of which more next time.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2001), p. 28.
[2] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 7. Available on-line at http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/augconfessions/bk8.html as of March 3, 2011.
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One Response
God is wise, just and merciful. He is not trying to get us on a technicality. This legalistic view of Christianity, where God is out to blindside us with some “small print” is misguided.
We should try to do the right thing always. Sometimes we fall short. God knows us and loves us. So don’t worry.