I will just give you an example of something I have been working on for someone else. I hope that it isn’t too personal for the internet, but it gives you a glimpse of my soul:
“LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL”
MISSING THE POINT
The above quote used to bother me considerably. Why, asked the author himself as a teenager, would God lead us into temptation, so that I would have asked him not to? In those days, around the end of the sixties, it was the normal thing in the UK to question everything that our parents hadn’t questioned, even if your family was still influenced by military service, like ours was. Questioning Christianity was an easy thing in our family, with my father being a staunch agnostic, although in some ways, in the wake of a traumatic experience on an amphibious tank during which he lost his entire crew, he seemed determined to be an atheist and anti-Christian.
We were a family that was very inquisitive but badly educated, which was not particularly unusual in those days. It meant that a lot of roads had to be travelled to get to areas where other people had reached earlier. Those educated people spoke a language that had us assuming that they were arrogant. However, even if some people were arrogant, it was our own ignorance that chose to slander others. My mother attempted bravely to open doors to education, taking me along to the “Classical Music Club” and watching me react with unconventional body movements to the fanfares and percussions, or the hitherto unknown emotional peaks and troughs of a musical evening.
I was fortunate enough to have attended a school that used dramaturgy as a means of teaching literature classics to an ignoramus like me – and succeeded to the point that I haven’t stopped learning since. It meant that I didn’t stop writing, filling portfolio after portfolio with lines from the books I had read, apparently unaware that they were not my imagination but the excited visualisation of previous inspiration. In this way I produced so much paper for the school magazine that thankfully only about a fraction of a per-cent got published – and I received an award for the biggest contribution, even if 99% of it was junk. This only stopped when I started reading books which stopped me in my tracks and made me realise that I couldn’t write anything that there wasn’t already a story about, and that I had been missing the point all that time.
Very often, when I see the excitement of young Christians and their missionary enthusiasm, I think about my enthusiasm in those last days of school and the following years. Not that it is reduced to young people, but in them, like in me, an excitement that misses the point becomes very apparent and causes me to write this piece. It is also the reason for my title. I could also have called it mis-lead us not into temptation. I know thousands of Christians, from various churches and traditions, whether strict or lenient, whether mainline or free, that I would not want to harm with this piece, since their enthusiasm is warm and friendly, but there is a time when things that should have been said a long time ago have to be said.
The petition above from the section of the Gospel from Matthew, which is endearingly called the Lords Prayer, is often badly misunderstood and misused to coerce the youth into submission and tends to push carnal desires into an area in our lives where they can only get worse. Temptation and Evil in one sentence – a source of horrific associations! Once, in Germany, an elderly spinster told me that the secret of circumcision was to cut the part of man from which the most sin came, thereby making him think twice. I think that I tried to answer humorously, “Well, it didn’t work well, did it!” But somehow we both missed the point again. Reducing temptation to sexual desire, and to the man, or to any aspect of human life that seems to be undesirable for some reason, is to completely miss the point.
GETTING TO THE POINT
To ask not to be led into temptation means to ask not be put to the test. Jesus is having us ask that we may not to have to prove our spiritual mettle, implying of course that we would fail. This causes two problems. First of all, there is something in us that rightly doesn’t want to be a hypocrite and it is our personal pride that would have us pursue spiritual goals and overlook this petition. Secondly, if we are in the business of evangelism, preaching or leading in the church, we soon notice how much people rely upon examples of piety and we can easily succumb to wanting to show people that we are “honourable”, or at least giving people the impression that we have what it takes. Therefore from inside and out, we want to be able to pray like the Pharisee (Luk 18:11), “God, I thank you that I am not as the rest of men …”
There is also a not so apparent opinion of ourselves that we only wink to in the mirror, or which receives the thud of our approving fist on a table, or becomes angry when someone does something we do not approve of. We do not see it as much as others do, but it is the reason why Jesus would have us ask that this and other skeletons in our cupboards may not dragged out and used against us. You see, the implication is that this should not happen to us publicly, so that we become ashamed and ridiculed – but in our chamber, in secret, this is where this request is of greatest importance, because it is here that we are called to know ourselves. This prayer, in secret, pulls out the skeletons itself, and confesses a need for redemption.
The most important thing about this request is not to make it a regular confession of a thorough malevolence of heart, implying the need for discomfort and scourging to overcome it, for Jesus is telling us here that God is merciful. It is more important to learn authentic humility because, as we have read elsewhere (Mat 11:29) “the meek and lowly in heart will find rest for their souls” which is a healing process. Everything else, as psychiatrists and psychologists will tell you, takes its toll of a stress-filled soul.
Shalom
