I really get Mae West's view of enticing things: I can resist everything but temptation! To resist temptation is seen to be a noble enterprise. To be tempted, however, is to be alive and breathing, and to succumb to temptation is to be fully human.

Compared to Mark's short account, the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John offer elaborate versions of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. In Mark, John the Baptist preached, Jesus was baptized and went into the wilderness for 40 days where Satan and beasts tested him as angels cared for him, and then he started his ministry.

I have a theory about the years between the time Jesus was a boy teaching in the synagogue and his adult experience at the Jordan, a period of some 15 years. In theory, Jesus, as each of us, met two levels of temptation: one common, the other ultimate. A person does not go into the wilderness to be tempted in every way. Life lived in the reality of day-to-day existence -- the workplace, on the street, at home, in relationships -- is where people meet their temptations. The wilderness, however, contains the ultimate temptation, but hold that thought.

My theory is that in the years between adolescence and age 30, Jesus went out and experienced life, lived it as we all do: tempted by everything from jumbo-double- decadent chocolate chip cookies to sexuality, from wealth to poverty, from compassion to power, from individuation to intimacy. Some temptations spice up life, but harmful ones move people to such prayers as Psalm 51, which David may have written after Nathan confronted him with his sin (II Samuel 12:1-23), and caused him to dramatically change his life.

Having tasted temptations and lived life fully, Jesus came to his transformative moment when he listened to the inner voice that called him to new life with God. He came to the Jordan with scores upon scores of everyday folk. He heard John's call to repentance, but listened to people confessing rather than repenting of their sins; big difference.

Jesus distinguished himself from the crowds by repenting, presumably of the temptations to which he had succumbed in the unrecorded years, rather than merely confessing them. As he emerged from the water the heavens opened, a dove descended, and the voice said, "You are my beloved child; with you I am well pleased."

Having lived fully, pen-ultimate temptations and all, Jesus went into the wilderness to face the ultimate temptation: to choose or deny his identity, to accept or reject his chosenness and God's call to be fully human and fully divine.

In our wildernesses we open to the ultimate questions: who did I become, who shall I become, who am I, and whose am I? Satan and wild beasts tempted Jesus, which is to say by offerings of power that would define Jesus' being. Were the wild creatures not the beasts of existence that reside in every soul: the diminishment of un-resisted harmful temptations, the personal, relational and professional failings that hold people back, the grieving that can eclipse life, the betrayals that isolate, the beasts of the soul's longings, the wild lusts that howl in the mind, and the potentials yet unrealized?

In the wilderness, Jesus transformed his life and self-perception, and finally chose to live into the words from heaven, "You are my beloved child, with you I am well pleased." He accepted his true being, his divinely human identity, and God's call.

Jesus chose to be fully human and divine, not to be God, as Satan offered, nor to be just another guy. He chose intimate presence with God, a life of grace, compassion, values, and peace. That choice is what makes Christ's call to each of us simultaneously compelling and frustratingly challenging. It is also what makes Christ refreshingly real and trustworthy: to paraphrase the description in Hebrews, "We have One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, but did not sin" (4:15), which is to say that he emerged from the wilderness fully human, himself, and filled with divine light and essence.

Every day life delivers up some great temptations, some irresistible and some not. And, from time to time, there are moments when we transcend routine temptations to embrace the seductive questions from the wilderness of self-knowing and introspection about who and whose we are, about who we will become and what we will do.

Let us use this Lenten season as one of those moments when we transcend the ordinary in order to embrace the big questions that define our identity and being. In these 40 days before the morning light of resurrection day, come, just as Christ came, to the transformative moment when you listen to that inner voice inviting you to new life as an adult of God; to heaven's voice calling you, "my beloved."