The Real Temptation of Christ

Our Blessed Lord possesses both a moral union with His Father and the Holy Ghost as well as a hypostatic union both with the Father and the Holy Ghost, and with our own humanity: He is of one substance with the Father concerning His Divinity and is of one substance with us as concerning His Manhood. Because He is perfectly one with His Father, not only morally, but ontologically, it is not possible for Our Lord to reject the Will of God, although He possesses in His human nature a full, perfect, free and totally human will. This debate led in part to the heresy of Monothelitism, 'one-will-ism,' a doctrine related to the error of Eutyches and the Monophysites, which held that Our Lord had only one will, which was Divine. The Lord Jesus has in the order of nature the only truly sinless perfect human free will, a will in human nature completely untainted and uncorrupted by sin. We become by grace what Christ is by nature. The Logos became Man in order to heal, restore, save, redeem and divinise our will injured and impaired, but not destroyed, by Original Sin. In Christ, the totality of human nature, including our will, is restored to communion with God and is made to participate in the Life of the Holy Trinity. Our wills, defective and broken as they are, are redeemed and raised because of Christ's assumption of human will. 'Only that which Christ assumed did He redeem.' And He assumed our human will to redeem it.

For this reason, for the purpose of redeeming us, Our Lord willingly and voluntarily subjected himself to temptation, in order that through His obedience to the Father in temptation he might do for us what we cannot do for ourselves; His sacrifice consists in the obedience of His will to the Father and the utter and unconditional love with which He loves the Father - all in our human flesh. He reconciles us to God through the gift of Himself, His self-donation, His self-oblation, His kenosis, His self-emptying in our flesh for the sake of the Father's will. Our Lord was truly tempted as all men are, but never sinned, because He would not and could not sever His communion with His Father through disobedience. Our Lord brings through His Incarnation into the temporal sphere and the realm of humanity that perfect communion and love, called perichoresis, that mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost within the Life of the Godhead which has existed from all eternity. Jesus Christ reproduces in our human flesh, conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary, a perfect life of love and communion which He, the Eternal Word, has always enjoyed and has always rendered to God the Father. What happens for all eternity in God has been brought into the bosom of mankind through the hominisation of God. The heart of God is now manifested and expressed in and through our humanity.

Our Lord did not sin in His human nature because sin is contrary to the circuminsession, the personal and mutual indwelling of the Hypostases of the Blessed Trinity which is God Himself, for God is a Communion of Persons united ontologically in the Father and inseparable from one another. The Holy Trinity is a Family, the Family, a Communion of relatio, of interdependent relationship.The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father - the Persons of the Holy Trinity mutually interpenetrate and indwell each each other; they cleave together in one Essence, one Life, one Being. Sin, from this point of view, is a human and angelic activity, an act for which only a created being is capable. Our Lord possesses a true created human nature, yes, but He is not a human person - and that is the key. Being a Divine Person with a human nature, Our Lord simply does not sin, although He has experienced in His mortal life the full horror and torment of human temptation and weakness. Hebrews 4 is one of most profound and mysterious truths of divine revelation, for it declares that the God-Man has genuinely experienced the full range of all human temptation and moral suffering and yet was perfectly obedient to the Father, that is, He remained in perfect love and communion with His Father in our human nature. Our Lord's temptation was real and personal, as was His response to it - His living out the Divine Life in our flesh now means that, transformed in Him, our human flesh is the location, the arena, in which we may personally overcome temptation and enter into the Life of God.

And that is the moral basis of our salvation, as the ontological basis is the Incarnation of the Word, the union of God and Man in the Person of Jesus Christ, which translates our human nature through theosis into the mean whereby we become Trinitarian. 'God became humanised so that humanity may become divinised.'