1st. Sunday of
Lent (A)
(Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12, 17-19; Matthew 4:1-11)
In our first reading, the Serpent,
speaking to the woman in the Garden of Eden, directly contradicted God’s
warning against eating fruit from the forbidden tree:
You will not die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it
your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God knowing good and evil.
However, when speaking with Jesus in our
Gospel passage, Satan considered it wiser not to openly contradict the words
spoken by the Father at Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan:
This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well
pleased. (Matthew
3:17.)
Was He indeed God’s Son? Satan was hesitant, certainly not out of
respect for this possible Son of God, but out of a desire to proceed
appropriately and attain his ends.
Therefore, instead, of directly contradicting what the Father had said
as he had done when speaking with that foolish woman Eve in the beginning, he
turned to his favourite weapon, serpentine cunning and subterfuge, wanting to
settle his own doubt by insinuating some little seed of distrust into the mind
of this quite ordinary-looking man:
If You are the Son of God, command that
these stones become bread.
Jesus’ period of testing in the desert had
gone on for a full forty days and nights, and the devil apparently thought that
a few carefully chosen words of his at the end of it, when Jesus was human
enough to be feeling exhaustion, might cause Him to wonder whether His visionary
experience at His baptism by John in the Jordan had been as real as He had
first thought. Satan hoped that Jesus --
having been very much alone for forty days and nights and now feeling extremely
weak -- might be unable, at this moment, to deal with a suspicion he, Satan,
might possibly be able to ‘slip in’ to the back of His mind. It would have amused Satan hugely if Jesus
were to try secretly to satisfy this most stealthily inserted, slightly
nagging, doubt – a fruit of Satan’s very best sowing – while outwardly proclaiming Satan to be totally wrong in
having expressed such a doubt!
If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.
However, Jesus’ mind and conscience was no
fertile ground for any seed of Satan’s sowing, no gnawing root of suspicion of
His Father could find sustenance there.
Jesus had nothing to prove to Himself and He most certainly had no
intention whatsoever of giving Satan the satisfaction of receiving an answer to
his question. Throughout His ministry
Jesus would never allow evil spirits to testify concerning Him, and He had no
inclination now to reveal His personal identity to their master. And had Satan also thought that an
opportunity for Jesus to secretly satisfy His natural hunger might
influence Him, he was soon disabused of any such thought by Jesus making it
supremely clear where He found His true nourishment:
He answered and said, "It is written,
'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the
mouth of God.' "
Jesus, the Son of God, sent as Messiah to
save God's People from their servitude to sin, was being tempted just as the
early Israelites had been tempted when crossing the desert towards the Promised
Land under the guidance of Yahweh their God and the leadership of Moses their
prophet. On that journey, Israel of old
-- sinful children of their sinful mother Eve -- had behaved as she did:
feeling the pangs of hunger, they would not trust God and complained bitterly
to Moses that God was planning to kill them in the desert, openly expressing a
longing to return to the slavery of Egypt for the food that was plentiful
there. Later on Moses reminded them of
their behaviour saying:
Remember that the LORD your God led you
all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to
know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or
not. So He humbled you, allowed you to
hunger. Do not forget how you provoked the LORD your
God to wrath in the wilderness.
(Deuteronomy 8:2-3; 9:7)
Jesus had shown Himself to be in no way
subject to that over-riding solicitude for self, so characteristic of
fallen humanity; therefore, Satan turned his attention from Jesus’ human
make-up to His ‘supposedly’ divine mission, homing in, so speak, on Jesus’
desire to be recognized and accepted as Israel’s Redeemer and Saviour.
Satan had noted Jesus’ reference to the
Scriptures and so, continuing his attempt to find out just Who Jesus might be,
he took Him to the Holy City, Jerusalem, set Him on a pinnacle of the Temple,
and said: ‘Here, on this pinnacle of the world-famous Jewish temple is just the
spot to prove yourself and win your people.
Here, you can do something that would resound throughout Israel and be fully
in accordance with the Scriptures you quote so lovingly; it would be something
whereby the whole Jewish nation could easily recognize that the Lord has chosen
and appointed you, therefore:
If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself
down. For it is written: 'He shall give His angels charge over you,' and, 'In
their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.'
Whether by suffering or by trial Jesus
could in no way be induced to suspect His Father or to abuse His own gifts, and
so He replied, once again quoting the words of Scripture:
It is written again, 'You shall not tempt
the LORD your God.'
Thwarted for a second time, Satan showed
persistence for he was beginning not only to despise, but also to fear this
unknown Jesus of Nazareth. Who was
He? What the hell (a most suitable word
for Satan!) was He up to? Today we who
have, as St. Paul says, ‘the mind of Christ’ know that Jesus had not come for
His own human aggrandisement or satisfaction, nor had He entered upon His
divine mission for the well-being of Israel alone: He had been sent by His
Father, to save the whole of mankind.
Although Satan knew neither Jesus nor His mission fully, nevertheless,
his temptations were diabolically cunning shots in the dark: he seems to have
thought that any human-being could be tempted successfully, providing the
stakes were high enough. Therefore he
made one further and final attempt to derail Jesus’ mission:
The devil took Jesus up on an exceedingly
high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their
glory. And he said to Him, "All
these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.
At that moment Satan -- in the fullness of
his maniacal pride and ambition -- overreached himself and Jesus, no longer
tolerating his presence, responded by a manifestation of His own outraged
authority:
Away with you, Satan!
before adding, yet once more, the words of
Scripture:
It is written, 'You shall worship the LORD
your God, and Him only you shall serve.'
‘Away with you, Satan!’ Words cannot express the loathing,
revulsion, and holy anger of Jesus’ reply, but we can recall that later -- at
the very end of His mission -- He relived once again, and once again rejected
with vehemence, this desert experience, on the occasion of Peter trying to
persuade Him to follow an easier path than that of the Cross:
He turned and said to Peter, "Get
behind Me, Satan! You are an offence to Me, for you are not mindful of the
things of God, but the things of men." (Mt 16:23)
In these temptations of Jesus in the
desert we recall, as I have mentioned, Israel’s trials in the desert of Sinai
on the way to the Promised Land, in particular the occasion when Moses told the
Israelites:
When the LORD your God brings you into the
land of which He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then
beware, lest you forget the LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from
the house of bondage. You shall fear the
LORD your God and serve Him. (Deuteronomy 6:10-14)
Now Jesus sums up, and fulfils in Himself,
the history and calling of Israel the Chosen People; but He is also preparing
for the future world-wide People of God, the Church that would be His Body and
Bride and of which He Himself would be both Head and Saviour. Consequently
these temptations of Jesus in the desert are for our instruction and
confirmation as His disciples.
In the first two of these temptations of
Jesus Satan starts off with the words, ‘If you are the Son of God’ endeavouring
to stir up suspicion of God’s love and providence. How many Christians, today, succumb to this
temptation! They fall away from God
because they begin to doubt that He is with them, they are not sure He is
hearing them, they are unaware of His helping, guiding, hand in their
lives. “I don’t feel anything; He makes
no sign. If only I could be conscious of
His presence, if He would only answer I would be satisfied.” In some such way they begin to demand a sign
from God to convince themselves of His Providence over them: some turn away
from the true Faith and seek refuge in religious sects which provide
them with all sorts of pseudo-divine signs; others try to stir up signs for
themselves by rashly setting aside reasonable behaviour and pushing themselves
to become neurotically excited and disturbed.
You will see some of these in ‘popular’ churches doing all sorts of
strange antics or excessive practices.
Many more, however, complaining that God is silent in their lives, fall
away from the Faith and, as it were returning to Egypt’s slavery, turn aside to
enjoy the pagan life-style of the surrounding society, trying to forget their
worries and even their conscience, in a maelstrom of worldly endeavours and
comforts, pleasures and distractions.
Let us learn from Jesus, People of God,
starving after 40 days and nights in the desert: He would in no way make
demands of God, nor would He divert His divine calling or abuse His divine
gifts in order to get earthly satisfactions for Himself; above all He would
never love Himself so much as to entertain any suspicion of His Father (John
8:29):
The Father has not left Me alone, for I
always do those things that please Him.
Finally, in the third temptation, notice
that Satan does not begin with the words, ‘If you are the Son of God’ because
this time at issue is the supreme sin of human, devilish, pride. Here we have the situation of those who do
indeed set out to do the work of God but allow themselves to be tempted to
accept just a little help (that is, initially, just a little
‘unscheduled’ help) from an apparently friendly source: they carry on,
apparently seeking to do God's purposes indeed, but gradually for reasons other
than God alone. Then, becoming
discouraged under difficulties or fearful in the face of opposition, they no
longer try merely to accommodate themselves but seek to win wider popular
acceptance and approval: they resort to making compromises and accommodations
in order to be in tune with popular tastes, with the aim of recording success
where previously there had only been apparent failure. From then on, all the high aims and loving
purposes originally proclaimed and pursued are increasingly subject to their
growing desire for results, good results, successful results, but above all, publicly
acceptable results.
The ultimate end for such victims of the
devil's deceits is that, far from serving God’s plans and the true good of
their fellows they serve, and end up promoting, first and foremost, their own
hypocrisy; and far from worshipping God as they started out, they end up
worshipping the devil in his very best clothes, those of human
respectability! They worship him who
will give them humanly appreciable and acceptable success in work done
apparently for God; they worship him who will enable them to taste the general
approval and personal self-satisfaction that comes from wearing easily
recognizable and generally acceptable tokens of pseudo-holiness! Inwardly, however, they dread the humility,
the waiting, trusting, hoping, and praying, involved in worshipping God
alone.
The variety of humanity’s life experience
and the vagaries of its response are multiform; and though, too often, they
show clearly its fallen condition, nevertheless our evangelist would have us
always remember that God-given, God-orientated, aspirations and endeavours are
-- despite the frailties of our human condition -- truly sublime, for when
Jesus had successfully overcome His trial on our behalf:
The devil left Him, and behold, angels
came and ministered to Him.
Who would want to lose such heavenly
consolation and fulfilment for this world’s passing pleasures and the
blandishments of worldly wise and wicked men?
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