What If Jesus HAD Made Bread from Stones?

Without His penitence, the destruction of the cosmos could not have been arrested

With Ash Wednesday tomorrow, the other purple season sets upon us. The lectionary Gospel passage for the first Sunday of Lent is Mark 1.9-15:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him."

You can listen to me discuss the passage for the first Sunday of Lent:

Mark’s account of the temptation in the desert is sparer than the other Evangelists, who specificy each of the three trials. For example, Matthew reports that the Enemy’s first temptation targets Jesus’s hunger:

“The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

The question that Satan raises of the Son is as simple as it seldom asked:

What would it have meant if Jesus had yielded?

In Volume IV.1 of the Church Dogmatics, paragraph §59, Karl Barth reflects upon this very question under the header, “The Judge Judged in Our Place.”

First, Barth observes that none of the Synoptic accounts of the testing involve the Adversary asking Jesus to break the Law:

“In none of the three temptations is there brought before us a devil who is obviously godless or danger or even stupid. And in none of them is the temptation a temptation to which we might call a breaking or failure to keep the Law on the moral or juridical plane.

In all three we have to do “only” with the counsel, the suggestion, that He should not be true to the way on which He entered the Jordan, that of a great sinner repenting.

He would have taken a direction which will not need to have the cross as its end and goal. But if Jesus had done this He would have done something far worse than any breaking of failure to keep the Law. He would have done that which is the essence of everything bad. For it would have meant that without His obedience the enmity of the world against God would have persisted, without His penitence the destruction of the cosmos could not have been arrested.”

Next, Barth reflects upon Jesus’s hunger strike and what it would have meant for Jesus to agree to Satan’s suggestion to turn stones into bread: