Faith, Leadership and Public Life. Preston Manning
God. A subtler interpretation is that the temptation was a devious and clever attempt by the forces of evil to influence in a very destructive way the entire direction and character of Jesus’ leadership and public influence—to get him on the wrong track—at the very beginning of his public ministry. It is this interpretation that is particularly relevant and instructive to anyone contemplating and preparing for spiritual or public leadership today.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Perspective
and Interpretation
The interpretation of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness that I (and many others with political interests) have found most illuminating and helpful is that of the famous Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as described in his last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov.21
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in 1821, nine years after Napoleon’s ignominious departure from Russia. He died in 1881, thirty-six years before the Communist Revolution, the character and evils of which he predicted with great insight. His father was a military doctor and serf owner, extremely cruel and constantly drunk, who was murdered by his serfs when Fyodor was eighteen years of age. Fyodor then joined the army and served in it for four years, where he acquired many bad habits—in particular excessive drinking, womanizing, and gambling—vices that plagued him for the rest of his life and kept him in constant trouble and poverty.
Dostoyevsky lived at a time of intellectual and political turmoil in Russia. He joined a socialist group agitating for reform and at age twenty-nine was arrested and charged with sedition. He was sentenced to death by a firing squad, but at the very last moment the tsar commuted the sentence to exile and hard labour in Siberia. He spent the next nine years there, mainly in the company of murderers, robbers, and other criminals. As he grew older he was subject to violent epileptic attacks, while his gambling and drinking habits kept him constantly on the brink of personal disaster. Some of his best writing was done in a fevered frenzy to pay gambling debts.
For all of his character flaws, however, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a literary genius with an extraordinary interest in and insight into the nature of good and evil, especially evil.
This interest and insight is particularly evident in his four most important novels, the last and greatest of these being The Brothers Karamazov, completed just one year before he died.22 It is the story of a dysfunctional family headed by an alcoholic and lecherous father (likely modelled after Dostoyevsky’s own father) who has four sons, all of whom become involved in a murder. The four brothers are Dimitri, who symbolizes the flesh; Ivan, who represents the intellect; Alyosha, the youngest, who represents the spiritual; and Smerdyakov, the illegitimate son who represents the insulted, the injured, and the disinherited.
In a famous chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor” the intellectual Ivan challenges the spirituality and Christian commitment of his younger brother Alyosha by telling him he is working on a poem set in Spain in which Jesus returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. In the poem, Ivan imagines that Jesus is immediately arrested and imprisoned by the church authorities on charges of heresy—of adding to what he had said of old, which in the opinion of the church he has no right to do. One dark night, the Grand Inquisitor himself visits the Christ to interrogate and lecture him, arguing that Jesus’ greatest mistake was to ignore the advice of that “wise and dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence” (Satan) when he met with Jesus in the wilderness.23 If only Jesus had heeded that advice (“the temptation”) and based the direction and tenor of his leadership upon it, the work of the church would have been so much more successful, and humanity would have been so much happier and more fulfilled.
The First Temptation: Feed Them and They Will Follow
And so the tempter comes to Jesus and says, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”24
From Dostoyevsky’s perspective, what Satan is really saying here is that if you, Jesus, really want human beings to give you their allegiance and follow you, you should only appeal to their most immediate and urgent physical needs. Feed them! Give them bread—real, tangible, edible bread that they can see with their eyes, hold in their hands, and put in their mouths. Do that and they will follow you by the thousands. But don’t go offering them some kind of “heavenly bread,” which it is apparently your intention to do. Don’t go talking to them about deliverance from spiritual hunger and offering them spiritual freedom and nourishment—they won’t have the faintest idea what you are talking about and will reject rather than accept your leadership.
In the picturesque language of the Grand Inquisitor, Satan’s meaning was
“Thou wouldst go into the world … with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand … But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient.”25
The Grand Inquisitor says, “Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?”26
Jesus’ Response to the First Temptation
So what was Jesus’ response to the first temptation? He did not deny that humanity has tangible and immediate needs that the would-be leader must recognize and address. He himself was deeply moved by human want and acted with compassion when confronted with the needs of the poor, hungry, oppressed, and sick. He knew all about the need for bread, teaching his disciples to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.”27 In fact, he was several times so moved by the immediate physical hunger of those who came to hear him that he resorted to the miraculous in order to feed them.28
But to the tempter in the wilderness, who sought to influence the direction and principal thrust of his public ministry at its very outset, he responded by saying, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”29 In other words, he rejected the first advice of the tempter, who would have had him focus his public work solely on meeting the most immediate physical needs of humanity, by declaring that human beings have deeper spiritual needs that cannot be satisfied by bread alone or the products of business and industry alone or the services of governments alone—important as these may be in their place.
There are needs that the would-be spiritual, business, or public leader must recognize as being beyond his or her ability to satisfy, needs that cannot be satisfied by the products of industry or politics or governments, even if those outputs were supernaturally blessed. These needs ultimately can only be satisfied in a different way and from another source—the full range of grace and truth (“every word”) emanating from God himself. It is necessary that human beings’ need for bread—for the products of industry and the services of governments—be met, but that is not sufficient in itself to give us the abundant life that Jesus came to offer.
The Grand Inquisitor vehemently insists that Jesus made a huge mistake by failing to take this initial advice offered by the wise and dread spirit. “Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven.”30
Later during Jesus’ public ministry he encountered this temptation again, this time not in the wilderness but in