First Sunday of Lent
The season of Lent is essentially a time of purification. Purification from sin. A purification that includes the strong resolve to avoid sin in the future. This is the reason for today’s Gospel in which we see Our Blessed Lord lowering Himself to being tempted by the devil. Imagine the King of Glory humbling Himself to being tempted by the Devil himself! He did this out of love for us, for in His bout with the Enemy of the human race, we learn how to fight our own spiritual battles, and with His grace to overcome and win.
These three temptations, as St Matthew (4:1-11) presents them, include all possible forms of enticement to satisfactions which run counter to God’s law and therefore to our own God-given nature. In the first temptation to change the stones into bread are included all forms of illicit carnal delight, and it is most enlightening that the Enemy waits until Our Lord is extenuated and famished in order to draw Him into His perverse designs. Indeed, we know from St Luke (4:2) that Our Lord ate nothing at all for forty days. Who could be more eager for food than someone who has eaten nothing for that space of time? By allowing the temptation to come at a moment when Jesus is at His weakest, God is trying to help us to understand that the vehemence of a temptation has nothing to do with our capacity to reject it. Sometimes we undergo temptations that seem to drag us down in spite of ourselves, and we feel helpless to resist. That is normal, because we are so terribly weak when left to our own resources. What is not normal is to give in. And here we have a strange paradox. People think sin is normal because everybody does it, but sin is not normal because sin contradicts our very nature. It’s actually sin that is abnormal. This is not hard to understand. It’s easy to see that getting intoxicated destroys a person, as does excessive overeating. It’s also easy to understand – and we have before our eyes frequently – the irreparable damage caused by passions of the flesh – broken families, diseases, profligate lifestyle, etc. The great lesson of this first temptation is that we need to be constantly aware of our weakness, and thanks to this awareness, we must plead for the grace to stand firm and not consent, no matter how hard our flesh might cry out. With God’s grace – and this is the point of Our Lord using Holy Scripture to overcome the Tempter – we can always resist. Without it, we are lost.
We cannot fail here to evoke a surprising similarity between the cheap miracle the Devil tries to get our Blessed Lord to perform – say a word and change the stones into bread – and the way sin today is at our fingertips. “Just click this button, and you will get a thrill. Tap here, and you will have 5 minutes of ecstasy”. Sin is so easy to commit when one has no moral principles to resist. Due to Original Sin, we are furthermore prone to falling for these traps. Our lower passions are immediately aroused by the sight of certain persons or objects, and these passions drag us down a hole. In a person who seeks to do good, the intellect will immediately intervene and say, “No, that’s bad, keep away!” It is then that the will must intervene and decree: “No, we will not be going that path, but rather we are going to divert our attention here in order not to offend God”. The problem is that the will has been weakened by Original Sin, and of its own, it cannot possibly resist all the temptations, though it can resist some. This is why you will find people who seem to be morally upright in many ways. There are certain things they will never do, and they may have a heart of gold for helping people. But there are other areas where they are easy prey to the Tempter. It does not matter how many good things a person does, one must keep all the commandments, otherwise one becomes disqualified, as St James makes clear: Whosoever shall keep the whole law, but offend in one point, is become guilty of all (James 2:10). The truth of the matter is that unless one makes use of the means God has given us to obtain His grace, namely constant prayer and the sacraments, one cannot resist the devil. In the present state of fallen nature, this is the only way to avoid falling into mortal sin, and it works for those who sincerely put it into practice. As St James once again stresses: Resist the devil, and he will fly from you (James 4:7).
The second temptation includes all forms of pride and vain glory. The feat the Devil tries to get Our Blessed Lord to perform – letting himself fall from the pinnacle of the temple so that the Angels can catch Him and thus show off to the people – depicts a thirst for applause, for approval, for words that make us feel bigger and more important than we are, and therefore this temptation includes all sins that have as their purpose the obtaining of approval, such as wearing certain things that make us appear in a light other than what we truly are, or saying things about ourselves or others that make us look good and them bad or less good, or taking credit for something we did not do, or telling lies to cover our tracks, etc. The capital sin of pride is here evoked, with its legions of sins, venial and mortal, that people commit every day because they thirst for approval. Our Lord’s rebuttal of Satan’s offer – who you will note Himself uses Sacred Scripture, thus monkeying our Lord – includes a great act of confidence in God: Thou wilt not tempt the Lord Thy God, that is, put Him to the test. In other words, we must be convinced that God has much more concern for our welfare than we possibly could. If He put us in a particular situation, that is good for us and will do us no harm, so long as we consistently ask for the grace to acquit ourselves of our task without sin. Most sins of pride come from a distorted view of what real grandeur is. We cannot possibly be greater than what God has planned for us. Let’s also keep in mind that the Devil will do anything to keep the servants of God from accomplishing God’s will, even for a few minutes. He will go out of his way to lead us astray, even a little bit, and so we must be ever vigilant and interior-minded so as not to fall into the traps he lays for us each day.
The third temptation is about power and influence over others. Satan shows Our Lord all the kingdoms of the world and offers them to Him on the sole condition that they fall down and worship the Tempter. This most insidious form of temptation is one that leads gifted people to sell their souls to Satan in exchange for a few years of political power. Only a fool would strike such a bargain with Satan! What are a few years of power on earth compared to an eternity burning in Hell? But for the less gifted among us, the Enemy seeks to draw us into his snares by infecting us with a desire to influence others around us in various ways, to deflect orientations in such a way as to show our capacity to dominate. The Lord’s answer to this temptation is peremptory: Begone Satan. The Lord Thy God shalt thou worship and Him only shalt thou serve, giving us to understand that every search for power is ultimately a form of idolatry; it is the refusal of being a creature; it is the demonic sin par excellence.
All this was summarised by St John in his first epistle: Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God, abideth for ever (1 Jn 2:15-17). Every sin is reduced to the triple concupiscence because everything that man desires is either for his sensual gratification or the promotion of his ego.
This is no doubt why today’s epistle gives us the opposite picture. If we take up the arms of the spiritual combat, this is the picture that we will draw of ourselves. This is the portrait that we will sketch day by day: In all things let us exhibit ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in tribulation, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in prisons, in seditions, in labours, in watchings, in fastings, in chastity, in knowledge, in long-suffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Ghost, in charity unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God; by the armour of justice on the right hand and on the left; by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastised, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as needy, yet enriching many; as having nothing, and possessing all things (2 Cor 6:4-10).
People will mock and say that we are as good as dead, but we know all too well that we take part in a life that is unending; people will think we are sad, but there will always be a joy that is not of this world in our hearts, that joy that no one can take away, for it knows that nothing can take God from us. People will think we are poor – and we may be in terms of earthly goods –, but we are the ones who will enrich the world through our love of God and our practice of all the virtues that give joy to God and men. People will say that we have nothing at all to offer, and yet we will know that all things belong by right to us, and that we belong to Christ who belongs to God (cf. 1 Cor 3:22-23).
And that brings us to our final word. If we are in the state of God’s grace, this means that Jesus Christ Himself dwells in our heart, not only by the fact that we think of Him every now and then and pray to Him. He Himself is there, and our entire life and sanctity consists in this one thing: allowing Jesus Christ to take over in our life, in such a way that our thoughts are no longer ours but His only, that our words are no longer ours but His only, that our actions are no longer what we want to do, but only what He Himself achieves in us. In this way, not only does the resistance to temptation become easy and second nature, but even the practice of all those virtues that constitute the perfection of the Christian life.
All this will come about through Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace, who stands at the foot of the cross, and teaches us to embrace the cross of her Son at each moment, never doubting for a second that the Christian life goes of necessity through the cross, but does not end there. It ends in the Resurrection, to which may she lead us ever more.
