Certainly Jesus Christ never experienced an identity crisis in the sense that he failed to appreciate the full meaning of his divine personhood.
The Father and the Son were always a perfect union of loving interaction. Jesus’ sonship did not have to mature or ripen. Jesus Christ as man however did have to wrestle with the notion of how to live out this perfect union with God as a human being. Christ certainly knew what it meant to be God; he had been the second person of the Blessed Trinity for all eternity. But now the young man Jesus Christ had to discern the most appropriate way to display his divine sonship in human terms. The familiar triple temptations of Jesus Christ by the devil in the wilderness are a synopsis of the challenges that the man Jesus faced throughout his life.
The young boy Jesus Christ was challenged in the Jerusalem temple when his love for his heavenly Father conflicted with his love for his earthly parents. The adult Jesus was certainly challenged on the cross when his fidelity to the Father endangered his own life. What it meant to be the Son of God in human terms was a lifelong challenge for the Word made flesh.
Satan knew exactly where Jesus was vulnerable in his earthly existence. Satan knew precisely the question with which Jesus was struggling during his wilderness retreat. Cleverly and insightfully, the evil one poses his challenges to Jesus’ self-understanding with the prefacing words, “If you are the Son of God. …” These words are the key to the whole episode of the temptations. “The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” And again, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you and with their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
In the first temptation, the devil is challenging Jesus to take things into his own hands and turn stones into bread. The temptation is to ignore God’s fatherly providence by declaring his independence from the Father. He no longer needs to be a son; now he can be his own man. He can play God instead of being the Son of God. Conversely, the second temptation is to take advantage of his divine sonship and presume upon the fatherhood of God. By throwing himself down from the temple tower, Jesus would be tempting God, flying in the face of God, mocking God. Instead of ignoring God’s fatherhood as in the first temptation, now Jesus would be testing God’s fatherhood – telling God to put up or shut up, so to speak. If God’s really a father then he won’t let him crash!
The third temptation in the wilderness was an invitation by the devil to abandon God’s fatherhood altogether and make Satan the object of his devotion and commitment. Offering Jesus all the nations of the world, Satan promises, “All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.” Jesus is tempted to forsake God’s divine providence and rely on the wiles of Satan to accomplish his mission of winning the nations of the world. Again, Jesus opts for the authentic fatherhood of God and resists the false promises of the devil. Jesus’ divine sonship, unassailable through all eternity, now expresses itself infallibly in human terms. Jesus remains the dutiful Son of God in time as well as in eternity. And of course Christ sets an example for every future Christian who must trust in the supreme fatherhood of God whenever tested to deny it, mock it or abandon it. The victorious Jesus is mankind’s enduring example of perfect sonship and the church’s abiding hope in its struggle with sonship.
Readers should also note carefully that in answering the devil, Jesus quotes three times from the Book of Deuteronomy – the Old Testament book that narrates the efforts of the Jews who struggled for 40 years in the desert to be worthy of God’s call to sonship. More often than not, the Jews in the wilderness failed in their task of sonship. They trusted too much or too little or not at all. In Jesus, their faults have been amply corrected.
