“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after He has fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry. And the tempter came...”So often we Christians fail to see the pivotal nature of this chapter of our common history. It becomes just another part of the story instead of what it truly is: the Temptation of the Christ— the Hero upon Whom rest all our hopes for the future, a plot twist to match anything Tolkien or Lewis or Rowling or Homer can throw at us. At His weariest, at His tiredest, He must physically and emotionally stand fast, holding to His integrity with cracked and dirty nails more than Job held fast to his, for He knows what is at stake where Job did not. This is Galadriel forswearing the Ring. This is Shasta running back to defend Aravis from the Lion. This is Luke refusing to join Vader. This is Gary Cooper keeping a date at high noon, Atticus Finch taking off his jacket and loosening his collar, David Balfour joining the Highlanders against the English. It's every hero in every epic not giving up, standing on their righteousness, making us all wish we had a chance to do the same and the “stuff” to carry through.
Only in Matt. 4:1-11 the weapons are not steel or strength of arm, and the stakes are higher than any myth can conjure. Jesus stands as the physical fact in front of the fiction. The true Face of legend. Every eucatastrophe from here on out, every archetypal turning of the tide towards good, must date from this moment. If we want to encourage ourselves towards greatness with tales of heros who have gone before, let us begin here.
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