Holy Nights, 2015 - 16, Appearance and Illusion

Holy Nights

December 27, 2015

Luke 4: 1 – 14

And Jesus left the Jordan valley, his soul filled with the Holy Spirit. And he followed the guidance of the Spirit into the loneliness of the desert. There he remained for forty days, during which he had to withstand the temptation by the Adversary.

Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Wikimedia

During this time he took no food at all, and when the days came to an end he felt hunger. Then the Adversary said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, speak to this stone so that it becomes bread.’  But Jesus answered him, ‘Scripture says: Man does not live by bread alone.’

And the Adversary led him up, showed him all the realms of the world in a single moment, and said to him, ‘I will give you power over everything that you see, the earthly and even the forces beyond the earthly. For the power belongs to me, and I can give it to whom I will. If you will kneel in worship of me, the whole world shall be yours.’ But Jesus replied, ‘Scripture says: Let all your worship be for the divine Lord, let your service be for Him alone.’

Then he removed him to Jerusalem and set him on the parapet of the Temple and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. For it says in the scriptures that HE has commanded his angels to protect you and bear you up on their hands, so that not even your foot shall strike against a stone.’ But Jesus answered him, 

‘Yet it also says: You shall not make your heavenly Lord become a servant of your arbitrary wishes.’

And when the Adversary had put him through all temptation, he departed from him to bide his time. And Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, returned to Galilee.*

Holy Nights

December 27, 2015

Luke 4: 1 – 18

This season of the year is filled with highs and lows. There is joy and excitement, and there is irritation and sadness. What was so promising can be followed by disappointment.

The Baptism, Ninetta Sombart

Before this incident in the reading, there is the spiritual high point of Jesus’

Baptism, when the heavens open and the Spirit of Love descends into him. Yet this is followed immediately by the approach of the Adversary. The main thrust of all the temptations is for the soul to give more weight and value to the earthly than to a proper relationship to the divine. This is a universal temptation, one that all human beings face. And all three temptations are based on an illusion, the illusion that the worldly adversarial forces can offer us more than can God. By maintaining the strength of his relationship to the Father, Christ could later incorporate this experience of human temptation in his universal prayer to the Father: Lead us not into temptation. One could expand this line of the prayer as follows:

The Temptation, William Blake

You do not allow the tempter to work in us beyond the capacity of our strength. For in your being, Father, no temptation can survive, since the tempter is but appearance and illusion….**

This is the key for us: to see through the illusory nature of whatever tempts us to put our faith and trust in worldly power and worldly goods. We are encouraged instead to direct our souls, our clear thinking, the warmth of our feeling, the devotion of our will toward the guidance of the Father of All and toward the angel he gave each of us to guard us.

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*from The New Testatment, a rendering by Jon Madsen. To purchase, go to Steinerbooks.com or Amazon.com 

** from The Esoteric Lord’s Prayer, Rudolf Steiner.