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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist and heard a voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." He has accordingly consented to hitch his personal destiny to the living out of a text, specifically, the first Servant Song of the Book of Isaiah as cited by Matthew 12:8: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles."
Before that can happen, though, Jesus must be tested. Like all who attempt to live by a book, he must receive a second baptism, that of fire and Spirit. It is only thus that he, the Son of God, can fully identify with human weakness while still embodying the Word.
So Jesus fasts in the desert for forty days, led or driven there by the Spirit of God, and is tempted thrice by Satan. Satan first tempts him by seeing whether, in his grievous hunger, he will easily abandon the Word in order to assuage his nagging appetite by turning the very stones into loaves of bread. Jesus passes this test: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."
Changing tactics as befits his role as spiritus vertiginis, the spirit of confusion, Satan then tempts Jesus to do the exact opposite: to dismiss the reality of the physical world in which bread is necessary at all. Satan recommends that Jesus be like an angel and soar across the sky. But Jesus rejects the implicit bifurcation of his bodily experience: "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."
Jesus is in danger of being torn in two by competing extremes — fidelity to the Word, and giving in to the necessities of life in the material world. The sciences of chaos have shown that bifurcation, pressed to the extreme, can in fact turn order to chaos.
King is spot on here: "The mind becomes a whirligig of identities: at one moment one is a bodily appetite and the ideal does not count, then one identifies with the ideal and the body does not count. The mind is caught in a witch's dance — a dance wherein one does not know if he is there and the witch is absent, or if the witch is there and he is absent. Half-real identities alternate with increasing rapidity." Such is the run-up to total chaos, science shows.
Satan's third temptation is thus his most cunning: cynical acquiescence in the chaos of a whirligig world. Satan urges Jesus to, as his worshipful viceroy, seize power over the nations. Instead of proclaiming a single justice to the Gentiles — to the "nations," in the Jewish term — he will merely rule them, one and all, in their disunited multiplicity.
But the science of chaos also shows that there is a hidden new order that can emerge out of sheer chaos, if it is pressed to extreme — a third way between the horns of the dilemma of Word versus world, as it were. Jesus found that way when he refused to kneel to Satan: "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve."
Hence Jesus, having passed the third and last test, "would give first place to the Word of God; secondly, he would understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world," whose legion competing injustices sow chaos (p. 120).
Chaos is accordingly a stand-in for the devil's own confusion as the enemy of not only order but final divine justice. We in our human weakness live in a world that turns whirligig too easily, yet in which a not-quite-yet rule of divine, uniting justice is always "at hand." It behooves us, King writes, to experience the two baptisms Jesus experienced: the first of water and Word, and the second of fire and Spirit.
It admittedly seems a tall order, in a cynical and chaotic world. Yet faith tells us that justice will prevail.
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