Temptation & The Holy Spirit

Debbie at the Flying Cow Tavern was asking about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, and Matthew's assertion that the Spirit led him out there to be tempted.  (He borrows the assertion from Mark, an earlier gospel, but embroiders it considerably from other sources.)

My reply:

Don't try to answer this question without attending to the author's perspective on the gospel and the specific audience he's trying to reach, and when and why.

In other words, stop reading theologically and read "dialogically," with an eye on what he's trying to say to somebody who needs to hear it exactly as he says it.

Mark's gospel is the source for the forty-days story, and in his (earliest and most clearly Semitic) gospel, Mark is consciously impressing on the life of Jesus all the old images of Israelite history.

Here, he's "recreating" if you like the Exodus as well as the experiences of Elijah. (Later Mark will give to Matthew and Luke the story of Jesus' transfiguration, in which Elijah and Moses turn up.)

Matthew, writing at a later time (hint: after 70 A.D.) with a slightly different audience and a slightly different aim and a slightly different perspective on his subject, will incorporate some new things in here that make the Kingdom of God less conspicuously a Jewish revolution against Rome and a much more... spiritual one, where spiritual can be abstracted from the life of Israel itself. (Note that Mark never once uses the expression "Kingdom of Heaven." Matthew uses it 32 times.)

Not only that, but Satan in the earliest Hebrew literature is a member of God's court whose function was to accuse and provide "adversariness" when one needed it. His function is as an accuser. The idea of him being a "fallen angel" is a late exegetical move.

When Jesus sees him (in Luke, a whole 'nother animal)  "falling like lightening from heaven," the sense is that he is no longer succeeding as an adversary as the kingdom of God takes root. He's apparently failed at his job, says Jesus, and been downsized or made redundant, or sacked.

We really like (or think we like) our literature with no remainder, like a chemistry journal describing an experiment that balances with no remainder.  But that's not how the imagination works, and this literature finds its way into your life and spirit through the imagination.

They're trying to say something about Jesus, not about God, or Satan, or Temptation, and you have to zero in on what they're trying to say or you'll wind up all tangled up.