it a realization that he was the Messiah. This is conceded by most writers on the subject, for it was in accord with Old Testament usage. In the Old Testament the king was the Messiah, the Anointed one, and the king is several times called "son of God"; cf. 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 82:6. While the statement of Sanday is no doubt true, that for Jesus the term is far from being exhausted by the holding of a certain office, or the fulfilling of certain functions, such as those of the Messiah that it means for him the perfection of sonship in relation to God — it doubtless included the Messiahship, and at the moment of the experience the functions of the Messiahship appear to have been uppermost in the thought of Jesus. It was necessary for him to adjust himself to these hoary expectations of the Jewish people before he could center his thought upon the other far-reaching implications of the term. For this purpose he withdrew alone into the wilderness to. think. At first his thoughts were so absorbing that he forgot entirely the demands of the body. From this intense reverie he was at last awakened by the rude pangs of hunger. At first the fact that he could still hunger startled him. Apocalyptists had pictured the Messianic age as a time of unimaginable material plenty. It was to be inaugurated by a great feast. Could he who, alone in a barren wilderness, was famishing without even a scrap of food really be the Messiah? Such was the meaning of the first temptation. Then came the suggestion, "Command this stone that it become bread." Every wilderness in Palestine is full of stones. The Messiah was a heavenly being. The age in which Jesus lived believed that every real prophet, even, could work miracles. Natural laws were hardly known; men lived in an Arabian-Nights 8 Cf. N. Schmidt, "Son of God," Encyclopædia Biblica; W. Sanday, Son of God in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible; J. Stalker, "Son of God" in Hastings' Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels; B. W. Bacon, Jesus The Son of God, New Haven, 1911, p. 29 f. world. The suggestion was most natural. With this insight into the heart of things that characterizes Jesus always, he repelled this suggestion. His mind reverted to the statement of Deut. 8:3: "Man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of Yahweh." In other words Jesus centered his thought in this initial meditation upon his Messianic mission, not on material things bread, feasts, material miracles - but upon the fact that real sonship consists in doing the will of God. The Messiahship, as he viewed it, consisted, not in miraculously escaping the common lot, but in doing the will of God. The Messianic mission was not to enable men to escape the common lot by living in a world where on one vine would be a thousand branches, and each branch would produce a thousand clusters, and each cluster would produce a thousand grapes, and each grape would produce a cor of wine," but to enable them to do the will of God in the world of perplexity, difficulty, and struggle in which they now live. When these thoughts had passed through the mind of Jesus, there was presented to him, according to the Gospel of Luke (I believe the order of the Temptations in Luke is the true psychological order), a further problem as to the kind of Messiah he would be. According to the Messianic expectations of his race, the Messiah was to rule a worldwide domain. Before the mind's eye of Jesus the kingdoms. of the world passed in review. The graphic language of the Gospel represents the devil as saying to him: "To thee will I give all this authority and the glory of them: for it hath been delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall be thine." What does this language mean? We shall not, I believe, go far astray, if we understand it to mean that the temptation was presented to Jesus to proclaim himself the 9 Apocalypse of Baruch, 29:5. kind of Messiah the Jews were expecting, and to seek worlddominion by force of arms. The ancient world had been for centuries a scene of slaughter and plunder. There were no international ethics. However much some Babylonian and Egyptian kings may have sought to establish justice within their own borders, the invasion and plunder, the subjugation and pillage of other countries had been a praiseworthy procedure for every monarch whose energy demanded an outlet. To some, such pillage had been a regular trade. The cruelties practiced on such raids were limited only by the fertility of the imaginations of the conquerors and the scientific knowledge at their disposal. Force had ruled. Might made right. All the great empires had been built up on this basis. What that means for mankind, the Germans have, in these past years, made us vividly to realize. For his Messianic kingdom, the Jew had conceived no other basis than force. Such justice as it would mete out was probably in his thought usually limited to members of his own race. this the kind of kingdom for Jesus to establish? He knew that thousands of Jews would gladly rally to his standard, if he would but unfurl the banner of the Messiah, and that they would shed their last drop of blood to win world-empire. This was the natural, the easy way. Along this path lay popularity, glory, and revenge upon century-old enemies. Was The vision tempted even Jesus for one brief moment, then he put it aside. Such unethical employment of force would be serving Satan. It could establish no kingdom of God. At the best it would but gain the mastery over the bodies of men, while every soul worthy of the name would seethe with hatred and rebellion. "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only thou shalt serve," was the thought that prevailed in his mind. That is, Thou shalt love and reverence justice, kindness, unselfishness, or rather the One who embodies all these. Thou shalt give thy life to establish kindness, fairness, unselfishness, and love in the hearts of men. Thou shalt be a Messiah to establish a spiritual kingdom, in which the souls of men shall be attached to their sovereign by the adamantine chains of affection, not by force of arms. It shall be a little heaven of peace; not a hell of hatred and intrigue. This choice on the part of Jesus banished the possibility of a career of outward glory, and imposed upon him the humbler rôle of an ethical teacher. We can now see that ultimately it involved the choice of the cross, though there is some reason to think that the cross was not then consciously present to the mind of Jesus. The last of the temptations of Jesus the temptation to cast himself down from a pinnacle or wing of the Templehas been considered by some scholars as too fantastic to be historical. Grant if you please, that the form in which it is stated seems fantastic to us, the temptation was, if we are not mistaken, a very natural one, and the most subtle of all. Half of the pleasure of holding a prominent position is, to most men, the fact that their fellows know it and honor one for it. Closely interwoven with the Messianic expectations was the conception that men would honor the Messiah and stand in awe of him. He was to come on the clouds of heaven; every eye was to see him. The choice that Jesus had just made put all that behind him, but, if we may believe the record, Jesus was human enough so that for one brief moment human admiration and applause made an appeal even to him. Might he not, after all, do something spectacular, that would give God an opportunity publicly to show in a miraculous way that Jesus was his Son, so that men might marvel, stand in awe, and do reverence? This is what the temptation really means. Jesus, however, repelled the thought with another, again taken from Deuteronomy, "Thou shalt not tempt (or make trial of) the Lord thy God." The appropriateness of this Deuteronomic quotation may not at first be obvious to every reader. Its aptness lies in the fact that to go into unnecessary danger that God might deliver him was really to create an artificial situation to put God to the test. Some of us have known people who were always putting our friendship to the test by such means. For example, in walking with us they may drop behind to see whether we care enough for them to stop and wait. They are always creating artificial situations in order to put our friendship or love to the test. They are constantly putting us to trial, or, in the good old English meaning of the word, "tempting" us. The mainspring of all such conduct lies in part in an exaggerated self-consciousness, and in part in lurking doubts of one's friends. When for one brief moment the desire for spectacular fame and applause tempted Jesus, he repelled the thought by a recognition of its real character. He did not doubt God; he would not put God to the test. He would take the prosaic, even the tragic path of humble duty, and leave God to vindicate his choice to men in his own time and way. Thus his mystic insight into the nature of God and his communion with him led him to an appreciation of values that would make uniquely appropriate to him the words of Alexander Smith: I've learned to prize the quiet lightning-deed, I have dwelt thus long on the experience of Jesus at his Baptism and Temptation, because it illustrates most clearly the reality of his mystic experience, and also the fundamental way in which inrushes of conscious correspondence with the "Beyond" shaped the course of his choices, his ministry, and his teaching. Such an interpretation of these narratives is, for our time, analogous to that which, for his time, St. Paul made. In Phil. 2:5-11 he makes a running comparison between the |