I ask the question because hardly any one seems to recognise any longer that there is such a thing as temptation. Nowadays our behaviour is attributed, not to temptation and yielding to temptation, but to our heredity or our environment. Either way we think we are not really responsible for the things we do wrong. It's in our genes, we say; or, like the politician I heard on the radio yesterday, who blamed crime on people being brought up in poverty, we blame our circumstances. So if we get ourselves in trouble it's not really our fault: Society is to blame. Maybe we were abused in childhood, or God made us the way we are, so He's to blame. We are victims, and we deserve compensation, or at least an apology, from someone in authority.
At the same time judges deliver rulings forbidding children in schools to say the Lord's Prayer, which includes words like, "lead us not into temptation", words that suggest that individuals do have a degree of personal responsibility for their actions.
It follows that if there is no such thing as temptation there can be no such thing as sin. That does away with the moral dimension to human life, so that the good comes to consist solely of what I want or what I like, or what we want want or what we like, and the bad consists of what I or we don't want or don't like. Good and bad become relative, there is no absolute good or absolute bad, and we lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and good and evil except in terms of our own convenience.
Science, which brings us great blessings in the realm of knowledge and technology, and which is so dominant today in shaping our attitudes, is notoriously amoral. If by Science we can learn how to do something that would appear to be contrary to the moral law as we have received it, there is nothing in Science that says we ought not to do it because it would be wrong to do it.
Science, for example, gave us the contraceptive pill; and now some people are into recreational sex the same way some people are into recreational tennis - and the scoring in recreational sex may have less love in it, by the way, than the scoring in tennis. And not only does love not enter into it, neither does reproduction - which is manifestly what we are made sexual beings for. It is this kind of amoral thinking that lies behind the failure by many today to see anything inherently wrong in homosexual or promiscuous sexual activity.
But there is nothing wrong in being tempted, to have the thought. Some people are terribly upset by their temptations, thinking it must be wrong to have the temptation. And some temptations are terribly strong. Jesus recognised that and so told us to pray, "Lead us not into temptation." But just to have the temptation is not to sin. It is when we give in to the temptation, when we act upon it, that we sin. Every time we yield we make it harder not to yield the next time. And each time we resist the temptation we make it a little easier to resist the next time. Ideally, the time for training in resisting temptation is in childhood. This is one reason why parenting is the most important thing any of us who have children have to do, along with loving the person to whom we are married.
It is my observation that it is not poverty per se that breeds crime so much as it is the failure to teach children that some things are wrong and must not be done. Children who never hear the word No, who get everything they want, children who are spoiled, are the children far more than the children who live in poverty who run the greatest risk of failure of character in later life.
The greatest temptation story, of course, is the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It sets before us the issue with which the whole of the rest of the Bible deals. Adam and Eve are not just our first parents, they are representative Man and representative Woman. They are us. We are they. St. John writes in his first Epistle, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." But just as the Lord's prayer encourages us to forgive those who sin against us, and to ask God to forgive us our trespasses against Him, so St. John adds, "but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
In the Collect for today we ask God for grace to withstand the
temptations of the
world, the flesh and the devil. This means that we are not alone in
wrestling with the
Tempter. Jesus faced down Satan in the wilderness: and, we are told in St.
Matthew's
Gospel, "then the devil leaveth Him, and behold, angels came and ministered
unto him."
Who knows? Maybe if we face down our demons we shall find them replaced by
angels.
- Canon Robert Tuck