If bread and wine can become the Body and Blood of Christ, then what is wrong with turning stones into loaves of bread? If Christ had the power to satiate his hunger in the desert, why was it one of the ‘temptations’ that we hear about every year on the first Sunday of Lent? (Matthew 4:1-11)
Why was it something Jesus refused to do? The answer is profoundly eucharistic.
It seems to me that the best way to begin looking at this question is to examine all subsequent temptations from the perspective of the very first one – Adam and Eve in the garden.
Immediately preceding the account of the first temptation and the fall of mankind in the Book of Genesis there stand the accounts of creation. And at the end of each newly created day it says, “And God saw that it was good.” And then, after the final acts of creation is says, “God looked upon all he had made and it was very good.” (Gen 1:31)
Very good – all of it.
Yet once Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit of the tree, suddenly they perceive evil.
Has that never struck you as odd? Where did that evil come from?
The answer is stated most succinctly by Dominican Father Simon Tugwell: “When man learns from the devil to know good and evil, this involves his coming to see good as evil; there is nothing but good for him to see or know. If he is to know evil, it can only be by a distorted vision of what is good.”
The outcome of the fall is a distorted perception of reality. What we think we see, what we think we know, might not necessarily be the case.
And so, when it comes to questions of temptation, experience teaches us that it often arises in the form of a perceived good.
Like turning stones into loaves of bread if you are hungry.
In the words of Pope Benedict XVI: “The moral appearance of temptation belongs to its very nature; temptation does not lead us directly to evil – that would be too clumsy.” Almost everybody would reject evil if it were demonstrably evil: as a result, it often does not appear in that way.
The reason temptation is so appealing, in many instances, is precisely because it seems to offer some sort of good – and in fact, it does contain some element of the created goodness that is inherent in all things.
Bread is a perfectly good and acceptable thing: ‘man lives not from bread alone’ but we do need bread to live. It is perfectly good.
And Jesus certainly possessed the capacity to turn the stones into bread – and no one would have necessarily been thereby harmed.
So why not do it?
Because God willed that the stones be stones. If Jesus were to transform them into bread at the prompting of the devil, then his will would not be in conformity with that of his Heavenly Father.
Jesus would then have been running contrary to the divine plan for redemption and salvation. And ultimately that is what all temptations and sins reveal about ourselves and our attitudes to life: whether we spend our time saying ‘my will be done’ or ‘Thy will be done.’
The word ‘eucharist’ means ‘thanksgiving’.
Each time we participate in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, we are reminded that our conversations with Jesus are not primarily supposed to be a shopping list of grievances and wants.
We ought always to begin by giving thanks, with gratitude for the gifts that have been given, whether or not those ‘gifts’ momentarily appear to be stones and notwithstanding the fact that we sometimes wish they were bread.
The traditional Lenten penances of prayer, fasting and almsgiving are intended to prompt deeper reflection upon precisely that truth. They are intended to incite a ‘conversion’ of heart – a turning from a focus on ourselves and our own wants and wills to the divine will.
Each Lent, we are exhorted to move from enjoying perceived goods – our own time, food and wealth – to an appreciation of the genuine good: love of God and neighbour.
And that is the work of a eucharistic lifetime, not just Lent.
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