Water Into Wine. Tom Harpur
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knows what is probably the most familiar passage in the entire Bible. Nearly every wedding one attends these days has it as a primary reading. It is Paul’s famous Hymn to Love in 1 Corinthians:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13)
What must be realized is that, while Paul never met a historical Jesus, he had in his heart and teaching a vivid portrait of the Christ within—the goal of all human striving. In other words, this is not just a hymn to love, it’s an explicit, detailed picture of what God intends us to become. Anyone can talk about “beings of light,” but this sculpts out the steps we need to take to get there.
How long does this “wilderness” testing go on for? Well, the text of Mark says Jesus was there in the wilderness for forty days. But, as was described more fully in The Pagan Christ, in the Bible this is a fully symbolic number. Here it refers to the whole of life. Our entire life is a “test in the wilderness.” Forty always types, or represents, a period of incubation—as of seeds prior to blooming, or of a birthing process of some sort. A human fetus takes forty weeks to develop fully from conception. Jesus, acting out here the drama of the soul of every one of us, is then put to the test by Satan. It should be understood that Satan too is symbolic. He represents the necessary, opposing force in the yin and yang of life. Without the tension of opposites—Satan on one hand, “the fallen angel of light” or Lucifer, and the Spirit together with the “good angels” on the other—the soul would have nothing to push against, nothing to develop its spiritual muscle on.
It is worth pondering that much that we consider evil in our lives frequently has to be seen and understood in a far deeper and broader context. Without it, without the struggle with pain and suffering, we would be greatly weakened and impoverished.14 That’s why St. Paul could say that when he was “weak,” he found he was being made stronger by the enabling or “grace” of God.
Throughout the entire spectrum of evolving forms of life on this planet, you can witness this fundamental principle at work. All advancement and gain comes through the “pain” of the clash of opposites. Without this, everything would turn literally and figuratively to a kind of mush. Carl Jung said about this basic inevitability of human living: “The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil . . . Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”15 That’s why not only Jesus but Zoroaster, Horus, Hercules, the Buddha, and every hero ever known has had to pass through a series of tests or trials, from killing dragons to slaying giants. You can see the same process working in the saga of Frodo’s trials in Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, or in the story of Luke Skywalker’s adventures in the well-known Star Wars series of films. The adventures of Harry Potter echo the same theme. It is worth noting that Horus had three “fights” with his uncle and enemy Seth, just as there are three temptations from Satan in the Jesus story. The Buddha also had a threefold temptation to meet and overcome. His tempter, in the tradition, was the Kama Mara, the Sanskrit words meaning “lust” and “death.”
Two observations are important before we move on to the fuller and later accounts in the other two Synoptic Gospels. Firstly, there is an echo of a very familiar Old Testament narrative in the mention by Mark that angels ministered to Jesus. In chapter 19 of 1 Kings there is a story of the prophet Elijah going into the wilderness and, experiencing a deep depression in which he actually asked that he might die, we are told he was ministered to by an angel. Mark could well have expected those familiar with the Septuagint (Greek) version of the story to see the parallel.
Secondly, in reference to Satan or the Devil, Lord Raglan in The Hero makes a powerful argument that the general public is almost wholly unaware of the extent to which past figures of note, almost universally regarded as “real” or historical, are in actuality the product of ancient myth and drama. He writes: “The history of the Devil affords an interesting example of this process [whereby a dramatic figure in a ritual of some kind becomes historicized]. Originally, it would seem, he was a ritual character who wore the horns of a bull or goat . . . and so the Horned Man became the antagonist of the Hero. Eventually he stepped out of the ritual into real life, and became what to millions he still is, a figure far more real than any historical character has ever been to anyone.”16 Extreme literalists would do well to read Raglan’s book. For example, speaking of the Jewish traditions embodied in the Old Testament, he writes: “It is a necessary part of the thesis I am putting forward in this book that whoever regards the Old Testament as a historical work, in the sense in which we understand history, entirely misunderstands its character.”17 These words precisely describe the situation reflected in the New Testament as well.
Matthew’s and Luke’s Accounts
Matthew, like Luke, expands upon the scant two-verse version of the Temptation in Mark by giving us the nature of the wilderness testing in a highly stylized, three-act drama. Again there is no hint of any specific time or place other than an immediate connection with Jesus’ baptism by John and his new awareness of having an adult relationship as a beloved “Son” with the ultimate ground of all being we call God.
Both these authors mention that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit and that the actual testing came at the end of forty days of fasting. Both attempt to bring a little reality—not to say a ray of humour—by saying that after such a long time without food “he was famished.” Both agree on the first “temptation” about turning stones into bread, but they reverse the other two. Matthew places the pinnacle-of-the-temple ordeal first, followed by the offer of “all the kingdoms of the world,” while Luke does the opposite. Apart from this and the fact that Luke, whose theology lays a greater stress than the others’ upon the work of the Holy Spirit, says that Jesus returned from the Jordan “full of the Holy Spirit,” the two accounts are virtually identical.
Certainly anyone at all familiar with myth will recognize instantly that that’s precisely what we are encountering in these familiar stories. Again there is no hint of any witnesses or of “he told us” or “we were later told.” Besides, the vignettes themselves are wholly otherworldly, supernatural and visionary in feel and texture. There is no real suggestion of these being biographical details or historical facts. However, the mythical formation of the temptations as it has been developed in these two Gospels seems at a surface glance so obvious and, as it were, even heavy-handed that the inner meaning has been lost to millions of literalizers down the centuries. What, we can well ask, is the relevance of the temptations for the evolution of our own souls in today’s world?
I’d like to preface the answer to that question with a personal observation from my own life and from my observations of the lives of others. It is almost always just after my most exalted moments of highest spiritual experience or insight that sudden testing or temptations to doubt, to fear, to entertain negativities, can strike. The same can happen after a moment of high accomplishment. Life, it seems, wants to level us out or block us in some way. It’s a