🙏 SUNDAY INSIGHTS - THE FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT 🙏

First Reading - Genesis 2:7-9,3:1-7

Second Reading - Romans 5:12-19 

Gospel - Matthew 4:1-11

A bartender notices that every evening, without fail, one of his patrons orders three beers. After several weeks of noticing this pattern, the bartender asks the man why he always orders three beers. The man says, “I have two brothers who have moved away to different countries. We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond.” Several weeks later, noticing that the man only ordered two beers, the bartender said, “Please accept my condolences on the death of one of your brothers. You know, the two beers and all…” The man replied, “You’ll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well… It’s just that I, myself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent.”

Lent is primarily the time of intense spiritual preparation for conquering our temptations, using the means Jesus used during his forty days of preparation in the desert for his public life. It is also the time for repenting of our sins and renewing our lives for the celebration of Easter with our Risen Lord who conquered sin and death by his suffering, death and Resurrection. Today’s readings teach us that we are always tempted by the devil, by the world, and by our own selfish interests. So, we need to cooperate actively with God’s grace to conquer our temptations and practice prayer, self-control, and charity.

The first reading, taken from the book of Genesis describes the “Original Temptation” – “You will be like gods, knowing what is good and what is evil.” Adam and Eve were given the possibility of making a choice to live for God, dependent upon and obedient to His will, or to say no to God. The temptation to evil led Adam and Eve to an act of faithlessness and sin. 

St. Paul, in the second reading, describes how the disobedience of Adam who fell to Satan’s Original Temptation brought him and us death and a broken relationship with God. He presents Adam who did not resist temptation with its evil consequences for humanity, and Christ, who did resist temptation. and so gave humanity the promise of new Life. Paul reminds us of the social consequences of sin. Sin is never a private affair, affecting only myself. When we sin, all our relationships are affected: our relationship with our inner self, our relationships with our brothers and sisters, our relationship with our God and our relationship with nature and the world in which we live. Paul says that just as sin and death came through Adam, salvation and life come through Christ. Paul compares human sin and its consequences to Christ’s saving action and its restorative effects on humankind. Christ regained for us a right relationship with God that Paul calls justification, which comes to us as undeserved grace. Thus, Paul’s words to the Romans describe humanity’s rehabilitation by grace. The first Adam brought disobedience, sin, condemnation, and death. The new Adam has brought obedience, righteousness, justification, and eternal life. (St. Paul uses what theologians call typology to help us understand exactly what Jesus has done for us and how he established for us a new life, overcoming what Adam and Eve wrought for us. He sees Adam as a type or foreshadowing of Christ).

Today’s Gospel teaches us how the “desert experience” of fasting, praying, and soul-strengthening was a kind of spiritual “training camp” for Jesus which enabled him to confront his temptations successfully, and then to preach the Good News of salvation. The Gospel also prescribes a dual action plan for Lent: (1) We should confront our temptations and conquer them as Jesus did, by fasting, prayer and the Word of God. (2) We should renew our lives by true repentance and live the Good News of God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness.

The graphic descriptions of the temptations of Jesus given in Matthew and Luke are sometimes interpreted as the dramatic presentation of a single temptation Jesus experienced throughout his public life. The devil was trying to entice Jesus away from his mission to die for all of us, so that he could become, instead, a political messiah of power and fame according to the Jewish expectation, while using His Divine power to avoid suffering and death. In this account, we are given a glimpse of the inner struggle of Jesus as he faced the question of how to accomplish his mission. Matthew presents Jesus as conquering the tempter and beginning his preaching in Galilee. We always encounter temptation in its three major forms: power, prestige, and prosperity with two qualifying terms: “more” and “control.” We want “more” of everything and “control” of our destiny, feeling that only we know what is best for ourselves. Jesus’ temptations remind us of the temptations Israel experienced in the desert. The first temptation recalled God’s gift of manna to Israel in the desert (Exodus 16:4-8) and tested him in his capacity as the Son of God. The second temptation was a test of Jesus’ authentic sonship and it recalled the wilderness incidents wherein Israel complained against God and demanded Him to show His power by providing for their needs. Then in the third test, Jesus is offered a vision of all the world’s kingdoms in their splendor, to be entirely his for his worship of Satan. Jesus was shown those kingdoms, just as Moses atop Mt. Nebo surveyed the promised land (Dt 34:1-4), and as the Responsorial Psalm (Ps 2:6-8) describes God giving his Messiah-son-king the nations of the earth as an inheritance. The first temptation has to do with Jesus’ own need for food. The second temptation involves a wider circle in Jerusalem and the Temple. Finally, the third temptation takes in the whole world. Matthew saw the sequence of the three temptations as significant in that they moved to greater heights, from stones on ground level, to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, and finally to a mountain top from which all the kingdoms of the earth could be surveyed. The progression was also greater in intensity and scope, from personal food to power in Israel and then to rule over the whole world.

The three temptations – turn stones into bread (4:3); jump off the Temple pinnacle (4:6); worship Satan (4:9) – demonstrate three kinds of control: material, spiritual and civil. They correspond to three wrong evaluations: 1) those who have material resources are blessed by God; 2) those who have spiritual powers are blessed by God; 3) those who have national power are blessed by God. These, in turn, correspond to three human-divine bargains: 1) I will worship You if you make me rich; 2) I will worship You if You endow me with magical powers; and 3) I will worship You if You give me political power. These temptations of Jesus are traditionally treated as archetypes of the temptations we experience: the temptation to satisfy personal needs by material possessions, the temptation to perform miraculous deeds by spiritual power, and the temptation to seek political power and social influence by evil means. But Jesus dismisses all three temptations using the Word of God. He quotes the Law from Scripture itself: “One does not live by bread alone” (Dt 8:3); “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (6:16); “Worship the Lord, your God” (6:13). Each time the devil tempts him Jesus responds with a quote from the Book of Deuteronomy which describes the experience of Israel during her forty years in the desert.

Dear friends, every one of us is tempted to seek sinful pleasures, easy wealth, and a position of authority, power, and glory, and to use any means, even unjust or sinful ones, to gain these things. Jesus serves as a model for us in conquering temptations by strengthening himself through prayer, penance, and the active use of the Word of God. Temptations make us more powerful warriors of God by strengthening our minds and hearts. By constantly struggling against temptations, we become stronger. Each time one is tempted to do evil but does good, one becomes stronger. Further, we are never tempted beyond our power. In his first letter, St. John assures us: “Greater is the One Who is in us, than the one who is in the world (1 Jn 4: 4). We may be strengthened by St. Paul’s words in 1 Cor 10:13: “No testing has overtaken you, that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and [God] will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing [God] will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” Hence, during this Lent, let us confront our evil tendencies by prayer (especially by participating in the Holy Mass), by penance, and by meditative reading of the Bible.

We can set aside a place and time to be alone daily with God, a time to distance ourselves from the many noises that bombard our lives every day, a time to hear God’s word, a time to rediscover who we are before God, and a time to say yes to God and no to Satan as Jesus did.