The Roots of Civility II: Love and the Temptation of Jesus

by Ron Mock

In The Roots of Civility I, I argued that faith in a loving, omnipotent God gives us hope there is always a way for every person to have means to meet their needs. This is a crucial point because, if we believe it’s true, followers of Jesus can bring to every conflict – including America’s current toxic polarization and the accompanying damage to our political culture – unquenchable hope in the existence of a loving, just outcome where everyone has access to means to meet their needs.

I never got around to civility in The Roots of Civility I. I intend to get there as fast as I reasonably can. But we will walk around its edges a little longer while I respond to two questions I noted at the end of the first essay:

We went millennia before we discovered penicillin in mold and polio vaccine in the form of dead polio viri. So many people suffered and died with the undiscovered cures right at hand. What went wrong?

Why did God hide the cures in plain sight like that? Why couldn’t God put all the cures we ever needed in a slice of pumpkin pie and ice cream?

A student once pointed out I was not much of a “systematic” theologian. He didn’t say what other kind of theologian I could be, but let’s cut straight to it: I am not any kind of theologian, other than at the rudimentary level any person with a living faith might attain, plus a gloss of uncertain quality that comes with being a trained lawyer – distant professional kin to those lawyer theologians Jesus was always arguing with.

So I will offer only part of a possible answer to the problem of human suffering, one which has not been peer-reviewed by a panel of real theologians. I invite you to give feedback about what I propose here by submitting a note on the Suggestion Box page of this Civility Project website.

The Temptation of Jesus

For starters, let’s reflect on the temptation of Jesus as recounted in Matthew 4 and/or Luke 4.

Jesus fasted for 40 days and was hungry. This was Satan’s big chance to turn Jesus aside from his redemptive mission. Presumably Satan was ready with his best temptations.

First, Satan urged Jesus to turn a stone into bread. Satan spends one of this three prime temptations urging Jesus to make a sandwich.

I suppose this might make sense if Satan thought Jesus didn’t know he could make stone into bread. Or maybe somehow making bread after Satan suggested it would be a betrayal, whereas Jesus making bread on his own initiative would have been an innocent act. But neither of these explanations impress me. I think something deeper was going on.

Satan and Jesus both knew he wasn’t the only person going hungry. If Jesus can make bread out of stones, why should he stop at satisfying his own needs? Jesus could feed anyone – possibly everyone – by turning stones into bread. Jesus had the power to end human hunger by fiat. Just like THAT!

But God had that power all along. If edible geology, or any other unlimited supply of food, were a good thing, God would have done it already.

My interpretation of the first temptation as having a global implication is buttressed by the next two temptations, which are explicitly large-scale.

Satan next tempts Jesus to take political power over “all the kingdoms of the world” so he could achieve his mission by ordering people to do it; and to make his divinity explicit by casting himself from the top of the Temple so people would know he was the Son of God. End political corruption and incompetence (and probably war, too)! End spiritual doubt! By the time he was done, Satan had encouraged Jesus to do in one lifetime – maybe one afternoon – tasks we still haven’t accomplished two thousand years later.

Yet Jesus rebukes Satan each time. Satan would win if Jesus did any of these things.

What is going on here? Isn’t this all upside down? Isn’t Satan supposed to be the one who revels in human misery? But here he propose to Jesus an impressive three-point plan to rid humanity of suffering. If Jesus does as Satan suggests, good-bye hunger (and probably poverty in general), anarchy, corruption, war, and unbelief. There isn’t much left out of that platform.

Isn’t God the one who makes us lie down in green pastures and leads us by still waters – giving us everything we need? Why does God reject Satan’s plan?

I can’t explain this. None of my answers tidily wrap this up. Perhaps if I were a real theologian, I’d come up with something better.

But such as I have, I pass along to you:

I suspect Jesus was protecting human moral agency and interdependence.

If all our needs were met without human effort, we’d lose our role in serving each other. Love would be impossible. Perhaps shallow romantic love would survive, but the more important version -- the one where we sacrifice our own security to provide for another’s, the one that not only deepens romantic love, but calls us to meet human needs wherever they are found -- would have no opportunity for expression.

If Jesus cleaned up our governance by fiat, we’d never learn to govern ourselves. If Jesus made his divinity inescapably obvious, we would never learn to launch out into live on faith.

But by leaving us the task of putting the pieces together, and sharing them with each other, God accomplished something for all of humanity – and for individual humans – worth the suffering. First, he preserved our opportunity to be human: to co-create with God, to build strong communities held together by the sinews of sacrificial love. And God set things up so our loving service and submission to each other, buttressed by faith tested in tribulation, would end the suffering anyway, piece by piece, in a process that would enhance our humanity.

Remember how I described providence in Part I: the loving act in creation, installing into the world everything God knew we’d need. For example, Jonas Salk’s discovery of how to make a polio vaccine using the polio virus enabled us to eradicate polio and end the suffering it had caused for millennia.

All the key ingredients were right there in the polio virus itself. It had been at our fingertips all along.

Finding the cure was conceptually simple, but it wasn’t easy. It took centuries of human effort to develop the scientific method, the universities and laboratories to teach scientists and conduct research, the economic development to create a modern capitalist economy with sufficient surpluses to support those labs and universities, and to create the scientific instruments Salk and his team used.

Even a janitor sweeping an English textile mill the 18^th century was doing his part to build the thriving economy that made all these institutions and practices possible, leading up to the polio vaccine.

Remember: Janitors sweeping factories cure polio. Janitors sweeping better cure polio faster!

That got out of hand quickly, didn’t it? I was writing about the polio vaccine discovered in the mid-1950’s, and leapt all the way to a janitor working in a textile mill on another continent two centuries earlier. But that is exactly how this works, a million times over.

Isaac Newton famously said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." But he also stood on the shoulders of uncounted others ranging from wealthy patrons, to janitors, to farmers who grew his food. Every business owner who expands the economy and supplies more surplus resources, some of which we can spend on research; every nurse who helps us stay healthy; every teacher who educates our young; every student who is being educated; every janitor who keeps workplaces clean and safe; all the parents who love their children unconditionally and make happy homes – exactly every one of us, not one of us left out – is meant to be a critical part of the vast innumerable team contributing to humanity’s work of discovering what God has already put in place, and using it to give every person access to the means to meet their needs.

God already miraculously provided all the resources we needed. But it is up to us to find the providence and figure out how to use it, and how to get it to everyone in the amounts they need.

This is the beautiful thing Jesus preserved by rebuking Satan: the possibility of loving, interdependent world built through the free will choices of independent, autonomous, morally responsibly humans-in-the-image-of-God.

I realize we still haven't gotten to civility. We have one more topic to go before we get there: how governments and political cultures are parts of God's providence. That will be the topic for Roots of Civility #3, coming up next.

© Ron Mock, January 2021