Wow!!  I have always struggled with the belief that Jesus was fully human and fully divine.  To be fully human to me means having seriously scary struggles with temptations without any guarantee your better side will win.  The recap of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness doesn’t describe any struggle.  But the sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane does.  And so do some of his first responses to being asked to heal people who are not Jews, in fact even the child of a soldier of the hated Roman conqueror. I think the story of his face off with Satan in the wilderness is a recap, a summation of his winning battles against the unfinished side of being human. Being fully human is not a bad thing, it’s living up to our potential for good even in the face of all sorts of human idols like power, comfort, pleasure, and accumulating things.  Jesus had supernatural power which had to be the strongest temptation of all when he faced the suffering and death described in the temptation in the garden.  It wasn’t an easy choice, even if foreordained.  Ultimately, Jesus chose love over power.

As a Charismatic(Pentecostal) Catholic, I witnessed and experienced humans having supernatural power through the Holy Spirit. But after a decade, I also began to see that spiritual renewal movement begin to become about power, not love. That doesn’t mean I am against being open to the gifts of the Spirit in us. Most of us do not have worldly power, so the spiritual gifts enable us to make a difference in this world for good. But it means that ultimately, unless we have grown past a love of things of this world, including power, we will fail to make the choice that Jesus made that was summed up in the wilderness, but fleshed out in the garden. It is the power of Love that saves.