202 "HIS SNARES ARE BROKE"

John the Baptist, one of the most charismatic figures of his age, slammed into first-century Palestine's cauldron of religious and soeial agitation with shattering force. The role he played in the onset of Jesus' ministry was profound. John's effect on Jesus' awareness is summed up in the first words John speaks in the New Testament. Preaching in the outlying regions of Judea, John prodaimed: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is dose at hand." Upon his own return from a period of desert solitude, one probably modeled on John's, Jesus repeated these words virtually verbatim.

When Pharisees and Sadducees carne to John for baptism, he rebuked them: "Do not presume to tell yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father,' because, I tell you, God can raise children for Abraham from these stones" (Matt. 3:7-9). For John, the religious pedigree was next to worthless as an amulet for warding off the historical reckoning he sensed was about to occur. Just as Israel's great prophets of an earlier age had appeared at a time of crisis to challenge the religious and so­eial routines of their age, so John stood as an unmistakable rebuke to the conventional Judaism of his day. "Implicit ... in John's whole move­ment," writes Edward Schillebeeckx, "is an unprecedented disavowal of the Jerusalem TempIe cult and propitiatory sacrifices.,,2 To pious fellow Jews - whether of the TempIe cult, the sectarian, or the politically zeal­ous variety - John's dismissal of Jewish distinctiveness represented a vehement attack on the centerpiece of their religious lives.

In the physical isolation of the desert, John had been far enough removed from the routine social fascinations to see how ultimately meaningless were the social and religious melodramas for which these fascinations served as the thematic warp and woof. Immediately after his baptism by John, Jesus headed straight for the lonely wilderness from which John had so recently returned with his vision of another reality.

The Devii and Satan

There can be little doubt that the most profound religious experience of Jesus' early ministry - the one that brought that ministry into existence and into public view - was Jesus' baptism by John at the Jordan. As embarrassing as it was for the early Christian community to have to ad­mit that the man they claimed to be the messiah had so publicly deferred to another popular religious reformer, we can be sure that the story was not fabricated. Most likely, Jesus later reminisced with his friends and followers about the baptism and how it figured in his subsequent mis-

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sion, and the evangelists worked these reminiscences into the narrative accounts of Jesus' baptism as they now appear in the Gospels. Were Jesus to tell his listeners that it was at the Jordan baptism that he first felt the power of God's call, it would be quite natural for Matthew to express it the way he did:

As soon as Jesus was baptized he carne up from the water, and suddenly the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him. And a voice spoke from heaven, "This is my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on him." (Matt. 3:16-17)

Practically while these words calling him God's son were still echo­ing, the Gospels tell us that Jesus went to the desert to be alone, to pray, and to struggle with the practical implications of the profound experi­ence that accompanied his baptism in the Jordan. Since Jesus was alone during his desert retreat, had he not later spoken of it to his friends and diseiples, nothing would be known of it. Furthermore, both Jesus and his disciples would have tended to understand his desert experience in terms of its religious and scriptural reverberations. Jesus' forty-day pe­riod of trial, for instance, obviously parallels the Israelites' forty years of Exodus wanderings and the numerous scriptural echoes of it. And yet, as we shall now see, it is as much with the book of Genesis as with the book of Exodus that the wilderness story coineides. Matthew's version of Jesus' trials in the wilderness begins:

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to be tempted by the deviI. (Matt. 4:1)

According to the synoptic accounts, at his baptism Jesus experienced being called "God's son." The deviI begins each of his temptations with the words: "If you are the Son of God .... " The deviI tempts Jesus in preeisely the same way that the serpent tempted Eve in the Gene­sis story. Just as Adam and Eve - made in God's image - were lured into envying God and striving to acquire that which would make them God's equal, Jesus is tempted to "grasp at divinity" by a dazzIing display of messianic power. The deviI in the wilderness and the serpent in the garden both advertise their alluring offerings in the same way. In both stories, the "tempter" tempts by mimetic suggestion, and both stories revolve around whether or not one can remain God-centered enough in the presence of these mimetic decoys to be able to resist them.

In the desert, Jesus was tempted by the deviI, the diabolos in Greek. This was a fairly common term for the demonic force in New Testa­ment times, but it is a particularly apt one for understanding the forces

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against which Jesus contended throughout his public ministry. The pre­fix dia means across, and bollo means to throw or cast. It means one who maIigns, or sianders, or sows discord and division. The devil breeds animosity; he sows resentment. The New Testament personifies the dia­bolic force, and there is a good argument for doing so. By personifying the diabolic, we can better appreciate the autonomous way in which it actual1y functions. Since, however, demonizing is one of the devil's most devious tricks, the me re fact that we personify the demonic involves certain dangers. Care must be taken. If, according to André Gide, the greatest ruse of Satan is to convince us that he does not exist, according to René Girard his second greatest ruse is to convince us that he does. In any case, one gets closer to the reality of this strange and compelling force by speaking and thinking of "the deviI," as the New Testament often does, than by trying to account for it in abstract terms or by invok­ing the familiar sociological or psychological idioms of our time. I wilI therefore foHow the New Testament and personify the demonic force.

There is an unmistakable link between the caH Jesus experienced at his baptism and his solitude in the desert that immediately folIowed the baptism. The story of the "temptations" is a story about Jesus wrestling with the nature of his vocation. It is as valid an affidavit as we wilI ever have for the mental and morai breakthrough that was to set Jesus' ministry apart from that of other religious reformers of the time. In the desert, he rejected the temptations to turn his vocation into a religious sideshow, or to undertake yet another campaign of social or religious re­formo He was tempted to turn stones into bread, to throw himself down from the parapet of the TempIe, and to worship the deviI in return for "all the kingdoms of the world."

Matthew and Luke relied on the same source in constructing their respective accounts of the wilderness temptations. In Luke's version of the temptations, we read that "leading him to a height, the devii showed him in a moment of ti me aH the kingdoms of the world" (4:5). Luke understood that what appears as a "very high mountain" in Matthew's Gospel was a metaphor, not for a panoramic vista, but for a moment of lucidity. He used the Greek word stigme, which comes from the verb meaning "to prick" or "to pierce," and is often translated as "in a moment of time." I feel that Luke provides the better account of the mo­ment of clarity with which the triai by diabolic suggestion was brought to an abrupt end, while Matthew provides the better account of the repIy that explodes out of the mouth of Jesus at that moment.3

If it is not just a frivolous figure of speech, what might the gospel mean when it says that Jesus saw ali the kingdoms of the world in an

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instant? Since Luke has replaced a spatial reference with a temporal one, the reference to "aH" kingdoms implies alI that have ever existed and aH that ever will. To see all such kingdoms in an instant of time can refer only to one thing, namely, a flash of insight into the nature of these kingdoms, a revelation about the nature of human culture itself. With the sketchy accounts of the wiIderness temptations as a hint and with the whole of Jesus' public ministry as a ramification of that hint, one can say that in the desert Jesus decoded the metaphysics of power and carne to understand the demonic mechanisms by which culture it­self is convened and perpetuated. Please note: this revelation need not have been a conceptual one in order to have been decisive for the life of the man to whom it was revealed. It wasn't so much that Jesus had a concept, but rather that he apprehended the illusory and beguiling na­ture of the pre-conceptions upon which aH cultures depend. AlI that the Gospels tell us of this revelation is that the kingdoms with which Jesus was "tempted" were at the disposal of the deviI. Whatever the "king­dom of God" meant - and it was Jesus' centraI proclamation - it did not mean a more magnificent or more Jewish version of the kingdoms of "this world."

There was nothing in Jesus' subsequent ministry to suggest the kind of Gnostic contempt for the material order that some later Christian sects adopted, but neither did Jesus concede any ultimate significance to conventional human culture. As Marcus Borg writes, "the Teaching of Jesus is world denying; indeed, the world of culture as the center of exis­tence comes to an end.,,4 According to Borg, "J esus caHed his hearers to a life grounded in Spirit rather than one grounded in culture."s The poet W. H. Auden remarked wryly that culture was one of the things that be­long to Caesar. Like nature, it is to be given its due, and one ought to be grateful for its blessings, but the worship of culture is just as pagan as the worship of nature, and just as likely to le ad to the sacrifici al altars.

What was reaHy at stake in the wilderness comes to the surface at the end of the temptations. In Matthew's version, the last temptation evoked from Jesus a powerful repudiation:

Then Jesus replied, "Be off, Satan! For scripture says:

You must worship the Lord your God and serve him onIy."

Then the deviI left him, and angels appeared and looked after him. (Matt. 4:10-11)

This is the first use of the term Satan in Matthew's Gospel. Until this moment, the tempter was referred to only as "the deviI," the diabo-

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105. The fact that the terms satan and diabolos are used interchangeably in the New Testament has tended to obscure the structural significance of their interplay in Matthew's account of the wilderness temptations. The force with which the exclamation "Be off, Satan!" exploded from Jesus cannot be explained merely as morai exasperation. For that matter, one could argue that morally exasperating temptations hardly qualify as temptations at alI. The force of Jesus' "Be off, Satan!" is not the result of exasperation or morai revulsion alone. lt is the result of a sudden recog­nition. It is spoken by one who has just fully recognized the identity of his interlocutor.

As I said earlier, Satan is a Hebrew term that means "the accuser." The two terms - diabolos and satan - can be seen as the two comple­mentary manifestations of the forces of delusion, despair, and violence. The diabolos sows discord by arousing mimetic passions and then ex­acerbating the soci al tensions and the psychologicai apprehensions that accompany such passions. The diabolos produces all the psychosodai complications for which Girard's mimetic theory so ably accounts. The fundamentai tool of the diabolos is what the author of the book of Wisdom called "the devil's envy," the mimetic incentives that generate the delusions and distractions of the sodal melodrama. At the criticaI moment, when these passions have sown enough frenzy and reduced a society to pandemonium, the diabolos changes its modus operandi. The diabolos becomes the Satan. Suddenly, the accusing finger points, and a violent avalanche is set in motion, the end result of which is a pile of stones, a glorious memory, and the rudiments of yet another of the kingdoms of "this world." What Hamerton-Kel1y calls the Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism - a synonym for diabolos/satan­"generates" such kingdoms, but if its spellbinding myths were ever shat­tered, "this generation" would have to account for alI the blood it shed since the foundation of the world.

What the diabolos divides, satan unites, minus the victim that makes the union possible. lt makes sense, then, to say that in the desert Jesus discovered that sociai division and social unanimity had the same source, and that it was demonico By recognizing both the essential link between the diabolos and satan and the subtle difference in their roles, Jesus of the synoptic Gospels accomplished an unparalleled anthropo­logical breakthrough, and much of his ministry can be understood in light of it.

The English poet John Milton wrote of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness in his Paradise Regained. For Milton, it was in renoundng the temptations in the desert that Jesus destroyed the satanic power. For

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Milton the crucifixion was the public exposé of the perverse truth of human sinfulness that Jesus had dedphered and conquered in the wilder­nesso After Jesus renounces Satan, the narrator in Milton's poem simply adds: "his snares are broke."

As I said, however, the breaking of these snares is by no means an intellectuai feat. It was not Jesus' superior understanding that made it possible for him to repudiate the tempter and his gaudy lures; rather it was his God-centeredness. Girard's groundbreaking examination of the centraI role of mimesis in human experience may be the most im­portant contribution to our understanding of the doctrine of "originaI" or uni versaI sinfulness since Augustine, but the mimetic hypothesis do es not replace the traditional idea that sin is alienation from God; rather it demonstrates the anthropological validity of that notion.

When the Christian tradition insists that Jesus was like us in all things but sin, what are we to think? As I have said, Jesus was no doubt a mora I paragon, but as long as we understand the sinlessness of Jesus only on the Ievei of behavior, we do not go to the heart of his unique­ness, which was his God-centeredness. As the story of the wilderness temptations shows, the essence of his sinlessness was his immunity to the contagion of desire. His triumph over demonic snares in the wilderness was a triumph over the glamour of mimetic suggestion, but it was an achievement made possible, not by Jesus' strength of will, but by the su­perior strength of another mimetic desire: the desire "to do his Father's will," to become the image and likeness of the One in whose image and likeness he knew himself to have been made. The temptation to emulate another's desire - the devil's - was unable to Iure him away from his desire to imitate the God of powerless love in rapport with Whom he lived and moved and had his incomparable Being.

Scandal

As I have shown, throughout the Oid Testament the renundation of sac­rifice always took piace sacrifidally. If we are to take seriously the New Testament's proposai for a new anthropos - an alternate way of en­gendering sodai and psychologicai stability - the text that proposes it will have to teach us how to avoid the trap into which the prophetic tradition felI from Moses to John the Baptist. It will have to decode and decommission the mechanism by which the old anthropology of sacrifice turned its fieri est critics into its most faithfui perpetuators.

As illuminating as it is, it is not enough to recognize how the same

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