Matthew’s gospel (4:1-12) reverses the order of the second and third temptations as you find them in Luke. In Dostoevsky’s famous discussion of the temptations in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ from The Brothers Karamazov, this temptation (placed second) is read more with an emphasis on the miraculous aspect. Christ’s refusal of the third temptation, i.e. to bow down to Satan himself, makes the Grand Inquisitor angry because the Church has had to make up the power difference for humankind by intervening.

Barth’s reading differs markedly in that he points out that the scene is not played out on a public stage but has only the two actors. The temptations for him are more about Jesus and his fitness for his task than they are about what humanity will observe.

As if to underscore the invitation to intertwine the holy with the secular, the setting of the third temptation is given as the temple of God in Jerusalem: he stands upon its pinnacle, looking down. In this temptation, Satan plays at piety by quoting the words of Psalm 91 to Jesus. What he invites Jesus to do, apparently, is merely to trust the God in whose name such words of confident hope were uttered. To step off the peak is to pitch headlong into the promise of God himself; but to do so in a very curious way. Taking this step would be an attempt to take with his own hands of what God has promised. It is the making of faith into something which forces the hand of God. As Barth writes:

In an act of the supreme piety…He would have betrayed the cause of God by making it His own cause, by using it to fulfill His own self-justification before God.

It is ‘supreme piety’ perhaps, but this supremely pious leap would have been a leap away from the will of God. This temptation is rejected by Jesus on the grounds that it is a putting of God himself to the test.

It is treating divine power as the wheel that must turn your way, if only you can act upon it with the right amount of force...