1. Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
2. Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
3. Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
4. Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?
How would you answer those questions? The Government is saying that our sense of well-being comes from our sense of being satisfied, feeling our life has worth, feelings of happiness and low levels of anxiety. Do you agree?
We tend to expect that most people, if asked, will say that money, fame or power are the things that they really want. Here’s a fairly typical statement from one online blogger about this question: "Most people would list money as the most wanted thing in the world … We can't deny the fact that money forms an essential part of our life, and without money, people generally are miserable and live miserably … The other primary things that humans desire and seek (fame, happiness, success, etc.) also are connected to money and mostly are a direct result of being financially well-off. So, in my opinion, money is the thing people want most in the world."
Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who wanted to understand what really motivates people. He devised a model called the hierarchy of needs which suggests that we are all motivated to achieve certain needs but that our basic needs have to be satisfied before we will be motivated to achieve our higher needs. On his five stage model our most basic needs are physiological i.e. for air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, and sleep. Next come safety needs - protection from the elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, and freedom from fear. After that come social Needs - belongingness, affection and love, - from work group, family, friends, and romantic relationships. Then come esteem needs - achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, self-respect, and respect from others. Finally, come self-actualization needs - realizing our personal potential, self-fulfilment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs gives a broader perspective on the question of what we really want as human beings but it doesn’t fully accord with what we see Jesus saying and doing in today’s Gospel reading which is also an exploration of what we really need, want or think is most important in life.
The temptations Jesus faces in the wilderness are threefold; food, fame and power (or on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - basic needs and esteem needs). Jesus has been fasting in the wilderness of forty days and forty nights. He is very hungry but he resists the temptation to meet his basic needs by turning stones into bread. He quotes scripture to argue that receiving from God is more fundamental to human well-being than food itself. Jesus keeps his focus on God. Hearing from God is what is most important to him. God’s word is his food, his breath - the thing he needs more than anything else in this world.
Then Jesus is tempted to achieve celebrity or fame by a public act of self-aggrandisement - jumping from the highest point of the Temple and surviving. The result would be that everyone would know how wonderful Jesus is because God would not allow him to die. Jesus responds by quoting again from scripture - "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." He knows who he is and doesn’t need to adulation of other human beings in order to feel confident in his relationship with God.
Finally, he is tempted by power - "all the kingdoms of the world in all their greatness" all to be given to Jesus if he follows the way of the world rather than that of God. Again he quotes from scripture in replying: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him!’
This is what is at the heart of the matter for Jesus. In responding to these temptations, he is fulfilling the Law by keeping the greatest and the most important commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind’ (Matthew 22. 37).
The temptations he faces are, as Tom Wright writes in ‘Matthew for Everyone’, all ways of distorting his true vocation: "the vocation to be a truly human being, to be God’s person, to be a servant to the world and to other people". Jesus is "committed to living off God’s word; to trusting God completely, without setting up trick tests to put God on the spot. He is committed to loving and serving God alone. The flesh may scream for satisfaction; the world may beckon seductively; the devil himself may offer undreamed-of power; but Israel’s loving God, the one Jesus knew as father, offered the reality of what is meant to be human, to be a true Israelite, to be Messiah."
"When Jesus refused to go the way of the tempter he was embracing the way of the cross. The enticing whispers that echoed around his head were designed to distract him from his central vocation, the road to which his baptism had committed him, the path of servanthood that would lead to suffering and death. They were meant to stop him from carrying out God’s calling, to redeem Israel and the world.
The temptations we all face, day by day and at critical moments of decision and vocation in our lives, may be very different from those of Jesus, but they have exactly the same point. They are not simply trying to entice us into committing this or that sin. They are trying to distract us, to turn us aside, from the path of servanthood to which our baptism has commissioned us. God has a costly but wonderfully glorious vocation for each one of us. The enemy will do everything possible to distract us and thwart God’s purpose …
But, as God’s children, we are entitled to use the same defence as the son of God himself. Store scripture in your heart, and know how to use it. Keep your eyes on God, and trust him for everything. Remember your calling, to bring God’s light into the world. And say a firm ‘no’ to the voices that lure you back into the darkness."
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Rosanne Cash - What We Really Want.
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