Proper Arguments from Silence

In Matthew and Luke, Jesus fasts for forty days in the desert.  To say, as Luke’s gospel does, “he afterward hungered,” (4:2, KJV) is surely an understatement; Jesus would certainly have been at the limits of physical endurance.  In other contexts, Jesus does not present fasting as a grueling experience.  In Matthew 6:16-18, he cautions against making a show of fasting’s discomforts.

The forty days, then, is obviously no ordinary experience.  We cannot know all of the aspects of the fast in the desert, but it is undeniable that Jesus was in a depleted state, or at least was presented as such to the devil.  In the ensuing series of temptations, Jesus responds to the devil’s manipulations of Scripture by presenting Scriptures of his own.  In effect, Jesus does not answer the devil at all; he confronts the devil with the fact that his evils are diagnosed and catalogued in writings that the devil cannot refute.

A Jesus who does not provide his own answers to the devil is consistent with a Jesus who has been disarmed of all but his true nature as the son of God.  The physically and—as our understanding of physiology would indicate—mentally depleted Jesus would have been reduced to a conduit of truth straight from the divine.  Jesus here framed as an individual does not present an individual answer to the devil.

Of great importance, then, is the fact that the devil is presenting arguments that are doomed beforehand to fail against responses of which the devil is fully aware and which he cannot refute.  The depleted Jesus, being in truth fully divine, is uniquely empowered by the very fact of being disempowered—and is honest enough to invoke truths that stand in any circumstance.

What is simultaneously revealed is the fact that the devil, for the purpose of acting out the scenes in the desert, does not really need Jesus there at all.  The devil is merely arguing with himself.  And in this scene is the essence of our tendency to present arguments that, in truth, do not relate truth because we have not been truthful about what we are trying to accomplish.  We say we are arguing with someone else—someone with whom we are trying to communicate and with whom we are trying to forge an understanding—but that is rarely the case.

Most often we are trying to convince, not the person with whom we are arguing, but our image of that person.  Or we are trying to convince ourselves of something that we have to rehearse so often that it seems to assume an existence outside of ourselves.  (And it probably need not be said that we are particularly good at constructing communal truths that are not true.)

Jesus knew a better way to argue, but it is not always easy to spot in the gospels.  Though it is repeatedly said therein that Jesus was silent before his accusers, a critical observer might well remark that Jesus displays a distinctly verbose silence.  What is crucial is the extent to which Jesus offers non-responses, not quite silence.  To the elders, chief priests, and scribes Jesus says, “Ye say that I am” (Luke 22:70), and to Pilate he says, “Thou sayest it” (Luke 23:3, KJV).

Here Jesus is not arguing, as we understand it.  He is confronting his audience with reality and challenging them with what they know but would rather deny.  “Tell truth and shame the devil” is good advice from Shakespeare, but far too often arguing for the truth in order to shame the devil leads to behavior that delights the devil.