Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

This is Jesus’ answer to the devil who had proposed to him to give spectacular proof of his status as Son of God. Jesus responds to the devil not to tempt God. Jesus does not tell him not to tempt him, because being son of God is not a social status, which requires evidence and public manifestations. Jesus is a simple man that the first Christians will discover as God and, as such, he corrects the diabolical intention: you are not tempting me, but you are tempting the Lord God.

God – that is Yahwe himself – does not allow himself to be manipulated and enclosed within patterns and ways of thinking, even though holy or even documented in the Bible, in the doctrine of the Church, in Tradition, etc. etc.

God is God, He is the Totally other. I am speaking here of the other side of God – let us say – that is the infinite complement of the God who lives within us. The more we are full of schemes, of ways of thinking, of concepts, of ideas about him, the more we will run the risk of considering him as a kind of dispenser of favors. When this does not happen, one gets angry and, not infrequently, everything collapses. When this happens, only two roads can be chosen: going to the heart, to experience how much we are human, full of holy contradictions, desires and instincts; otherwise you can choose the most convenient way, that of hypocrisy, which allows you to say many things with your mouth, but nothing with the heart, because this will remain imprisoned behind the status of Catholic Christians who we cannot or we want to give up.

Jesus teaches us to tell those people who propose us a similar pattern of behavior: do not tempt the Lord your God; we have to treat them as he treated the dia-bolos. Because the dia-bolos does not tempt Jesus with the usual temptations, that is with the so-called desires of the flesh. The true diabolical temptation is to adhere to a creed, to be members of a religion and to claim to have a kind of distinction that differentiates us from others, saying that we have God on our side. He always will intervene to save us. Jesus warns those people that think: God is like us!

Instead, God escapes everything and everyone, as Jesus teaches us, and the way that leads to his discovery is that of the desert, or the (temporary) absence of points of reference. The absence of worn and useless practices, of all that prevents our most authentic and luminous evolution.