The Seven Deadly Sins:
Pride
Lent 1 25 February 2007
After his baptism, Jesus was directed by the Spirit to go off into the wilderness for a Lenten regime of prayer and fasting. During that time, he was tempted by Satan. Do we sometimes think of the temptations as only coming at the end? Not so; the devil was trying to get at him the whole time, but it seems as if he saved up his best attempts for the last. These final temptations are what our Gospels record for us. Can we imagine for ourselves what Jesus’ temptations might have been like? I think we can. It was his vocation that was being tested. Note how Satan taunts him with the words, “If you are the Son of God.” Temptation in the sense that we often use it is not what was happening here, however. That is, Jesus was not being tempted to particular sins, specific violations of the commandments, for example. As we pray in our new translation of the Our Father, “save us from the time of trial,” so was Jesus not spared from the time of trial, of testing. His sense of who he was, his understanding of his relationship with the Father, his messianic vocation—all of these were relentlessly put to the test. We can well suppose that every argument, every trick the devil could think of was used in his attack on our Saviour, in order to make Jesus doubt that he understood rightly who he was and what he was supposed to do. ‘Maybe John the Baptist was wrong; maybe it was not really a voice from heaven he had heard; maybe his reading of Isaiah all those prayerful years in the carpenter’s workshop had led to the wrong conclusion.’
But at the end of this time of testing, Jesus emerged from the wilderness with his vocation and his sense of identity intact and strengthened. And then, with one last trick, the devil tried to corrupt his vocation by trying to get him to misuse his power.
He challenged Jesus to prove his identity, and incidentally satisfy his own physical needs, by turning stones to bread. This was a temptation not only to satisfy his own hunger; it was also a temptation to use his power to make disciples by satisfying people’s material needs by miraculous means. It would have made him an instant success. Jesus refused.
Then the devil took him to a place where he could see or imagine all the world’s nations and kingdoms. He offered to give them to Jesus if only he would make a bargain with him. In other words, the devil had a lot to do with how the world functioned—even if he was not quite honest when he said it belonged to him—and if Jesus was willing to work with him, to play the game according to the devil’s rules, then he would see to it that Jesus became CEO of everything. Jesus refused again, even though this would have been a short cut to world-wide success.
And finally the devil suggested that he perform a flashy miracle right in the religious heart of his people—the temple—where many folks were looking for just that kind of sign or wonder. They would not have seen through this kind of blatant self-advertisement, but would have basked in the glow of a miracle-working leader. A few of those kinds of displays and they would be eating out of his hand. Jesus again refused, not willing to use his power and vocation to simply thrill the crowds. And so the devil gave up for a while—Jesus was not buying his “bread and circuses” approach to bringing in the Kingdom of God. Or, as we might put it: he wasn’t going to market himself to be what the people already wanted.
All three of these temptations represent a corruption of what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah. They were all ways to be instantly successful, beating the powerful of the world at their own game. How could Jesus simply refuse without going into the details? How could he abruptly fend off the devil’s ideas without looking into them more deeply? Wasn’t there something attractive about a quick route to glory and power? It would be hard for us not to want to think about the offers for a little while. How could Jesus see where the sin lay so easily? I want to suggest that, unlike us, he did not have a false self to contend with.
Remember how we defined the false or sinful self? It is the person we are trying to be all by ourselves, on our own, in our own way, without much input from God. That doesn’t mean a person cannot be quite religious and still not be a false self. Even religion can be used to pursue a self-chosen personal project in which God is considered as an auxiliary to one’s own desires. The false self is the one trying to find its sense of identity outside of God’s call or will. It may not reject God or his will completely, but will try to bargain with it, not realizing that one cannot use God for one’s own purposes.
The false self has put itself in the position of judging good and evil, right and wrong, suitable and unsuitable, for itself and by its own lights. We all inherit this kind of predisposition when we are born into this world. It is the legacy of original sin. When Adam and Eve made this decision to judge good and evil for themselves, they placed themselves and the world in a false position from which it has still not recovered. As a result, they could no longer remain in paradise. Their falseness is our legacy. It is this falseness that makes the Sermon on the Mount, for example, so hard to grapple with. If loving the enemy and non-retaliation are the kinds of things people who are centered in Jesus simply do, then there are parts of most of us which are fairly off-center, that is, are the results of being in a false position with regard to God.
I don’t know how original sin propagates itself. I am inclined to think it is an environmental contagion. That is, we catch the infection by being born into a fallen and false world. Even if we are born into a Christian home and baptized as infants, we still grow up somehow finding it easy and natural to look out for ourselves, to compete with others, to want more than we need, to want more than others have, to think better of ourselves than others, and to manufacture an identity for ourselves that doesn’t take God seriously into account, at least in all parts of our lives. That doesn’t mean necessarily that we are wicked—although some go off in that direction. It does mean that the wickedness and evil we see in some around us is understandable on a trajectory from within our own hearts—there are tendencies in us which could result in such evil outcomes were they unchecked, unforgiven, or unhealed.
All of this is the legacy of sin which we make our own by our own choices and for which we must be pardoned and from which we must be delivered. This kind of falsity, or sin, our Lord never knew. He knew that his identity was to be the Son of his Father. He knew that his self-worth, his calling, his success, his life and death, were all hidden in the Father’s love and will. And that was fine with him: this is who he was. Resting secure in his identity, he waited for the Father to lead him into action.
After 40 days of testing, he was hungry, of course. But proving his identity by changing stones to bread did not seem to him to be something which would come from the Father. So he entrusted his hunger to the Father, waiting for him to take care of him in his own time. Later, of course, angels came to take care of his needs; later still he fed 5000 with only five loaves and two fish; later still, he made bread and wine to become spiritual nourishment for countless generations. He did these things because the Father directed him so.
We might think it absurd that the devil could have expected Jesus to worship him in order to get worldly success, but we know of some and suspect other movements—even religious ones—in this world to have made a bargain with the devil in order to be successful. The story of Faust continues to be necessary reading in a world like ours—where it is largely forgotten—where we now have such power to do so many things but in the way we are going about them stand to create more ruin than good. What kinds of demonic bargains are we going to make in order to treat our diseases, market our products, control the oil fields, exercise hegemony in the world, or simply to make a lot of money? Jesus knew that all things in the world belonged to his Father—so he was able to trust him even with the outcome of his vocation and mission. He didn’t need the devil to be his political handler, to run his campaign for Messiah.
The same with the temple: it was not for him to provoke little tests of the Father’s will or to presume upon his rights and privileges as Messiah. There would come times later when the Father protected him in the midst of crowds, when he walked on water and calmed the storms of the sea. He knew that his Father could have sent legions of angels to take him from the Cross. In all these things we see Jesus reposing confidently in the knowledge that he was the Son of the Father, and that his destiny, his life, his success, his self-esteem, his value in the sight of others, his possessions, his friends—all were in the Father’s hand and he would give Jesus what was needed, show him what to do, all in his own time. He had no need to be other than the Father wanted him to be—and so he was tempted like every man is, yet without sin.
I believe that this contrast between Jesus’ knowledge of himself in the Father’s will and our own experience of wanting to locate our identity somewhere else, points us clearly in the direction of an understanding of the root of all sinfulness and of the way to defeat sin at the same time.
This condition we are describing is, I think, what we mean by pride, traditionally the root of all sin. It is usually defined as an “inordinate love of one’s self.” I accept that definition, but it leads immediately to a discussion of what is “ordinate” or permissible; what legitimate self-love might be. That long and difficult discussion may be appropriate also—long and tedious discussions are often necessary—just imagine what negotiations are like between Americans and Iranians, or Americans and North Koreans. But I think there is a simpler direction in which to understand pride. Pride refers to our natural human tendency—natural, that is, after the fall—to pursue our self-interests without reference to God and to find our personal identity outside God’s will. Since we cannot really pull this off—that is, because we are mortal creatures and all life comes from the Creator—it is absurd to think that our pride can result in anything except our own frustration. Still, we carry on. And the falseness of our pride has led and still leads to the manifold ills of this world.
Pride, then, is this refusal to put oneself in a proper relationship with God and other people. And as a result we are pre-occupied with our own needs and evaluate others on the basis of how they impact our own desires. This generally doesn’t work well for us. For example, we accept an environment in which our sense of self-worth is determined by how well we compete with others on the basis of looks and wealth and prestige, and so most people in our culture suffer from low self-esteem. Why would we do this? Why pay such a personal price for a wrong-headed outlook on life? Because we are still addicted to our falsity. We still don’t want to accept that God knows who we truly are better than we do. Oddly enough, the cure for our low self-esteem is humility—which sounds like a symptom of it, yet is not.
Humility begins where pride goes wrong—that is, with submission to God and the quest for one’s true identity in God. In this way, humility is simply another word for truthfulness, an acceptance of reality. It is a cure for low self-esteem because we learn a true self-worth as we come to know God—through the sacrificial death and resurrection of his Son. None of us are less than precious and worthwhile because Jesus died for us according to the purpose of God. Of course, if we are proud, we don’t want to be valued that way. We want to be important because of something in and of ourselves rather than the love of God. But in that way we shall defeat ourselves in the end. We shall never find the true self which exists only in the love of God, we shall never find the life we are meant to live because it is our true life which only God knows.
Next Sunday, in our rooting around in the Seven Deadly Sins, we shall go on to consider Avarice, that is Greed, and will be able to see how pride, understood in the way I have presented it, makes it very difficult to handle rightly the ownership of the things of this world. There is a body of thought that actually considers Covetousness as the root sin—as St Paul put it, “The Love of Money is the root of all evil.” We shall see. I invite your comments and reactions to these sermons on sin. If not immediately here at Mass, then by phone call or email.
Let us pray: “Take away, O Lord, the sin that corrupts us; restore by grace your own image within us; give us the sorrow that heals and the joy that praises, that we may take our place among your people, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen”