To understand the story, we need to note how Jesus got into the desert in the first place–into this lonely and heart-breaking place where he was to face the hardest challenge he had yet known. Surely it was the devil who took him there. But the story says that Jesus “was led by the Spirit through the wilderness, being tempted there by the devil for forty days.” How odd that God should seem almost in league with the powers of darkness in Luke’s rendering of this tale.

That, of course, is exactly how things work at these deep levels of life. In the midst of depression I once asked my spiritual director how I could be feeling such despair when not long before the depression hit I had been feeling so close to God? “Simple,” she said. “The closer you get to light the closer you get to darkness.”

The deepest things in life come not singly but in paradoxical pairs, where the light and the dark intermingle. The temptation story makes it clear that God’s Spirit is not safe but dangerous, that those who act on the Spirit’s urging will sometimes find themselves hungry and thirsty and filled with fear.

from The Active Life