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 Luke 4.1-13:

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tested by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread."

Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours."

Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"

Then the devil led him to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'"

Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

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

Luke reports that the Enemy’s first temptation targets Jesus’s hunger.

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: