The second of the temptations Jesus faced (Matthew 4:5–7) was the challenge to throw himself off a high building and trust God to keep him safe. The taunt, ‘if you are the Son of God’, underpins the Devil’s goading.
Every time I read these verses, I have a couple of thoughts. First, years ago I went up into the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and recall being terrified by the height and the drop to the ground below. Being vertiginous by nature, even to contemplate looking down from a high building is terrifying, let alone throwing myself off. Tragically, there are people for whom the fear of life is greater than the fear of death, and such places become an inescapable lure.
At around the same time, we went on a family outing to the relatively newly opened London Eye. From there, the perspectives were all different, and Saint Paul’s looked small beside other nearby structures. That day, it seemed as though any sense of immediate risk was greatly exaggerated.
Perspective is everything in the tussle between Jesus and the Devil. In the situation described, the urgency of the Devil’s appeal to trust God is abused by urging him to put recklessness ahead of all common sense and the natural sense of self-preservation that is innate in us, even if subconsciously.
A significant part of what we prepare for in Lent is the death and resurrection of Jesus, which alters the relative merits of the preservation of mortal life and immortality. Immortality, the gift of God made available because of Jesus’s death and resurrection, begins with the resistance of the temptation to succumb to short-termism, which is at the heart of the second temptation. Yes, it would have been miraculous for Jesus to survive a fall from the Temple roof, but beside his survival of the cross and rising from the dead, it is nothing. Short-termism means avoiding death by a miracle, while immortality comes about by Jesus’s breaching and breaking of death’s hold.
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, we find it tricky to work out what we should wish for and where our hopes begin and end. As you walk with us, we pray that you will help us to see the long-term gifts of faith as far more real and desirable than the short-termism of worldly, mortal survival. As we rejoice in your withstanding of temptation, so may we have the faith to wait for eternal life with you. Amen.