:: Faith Today: Lent 2010 ::
First Sunday of Lent
Sunday Feb. 21, 2010
rst.gsfc.nasa.gov "Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days ... "
News and Inspiration :: Today's Mass :: Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours) :: Saintly Example :: Holy Father's and other Prayer Intentions
News & Inspiration
+ Saints News: Saint Bonaventure: A Man of Action and Contemplation - Pope Benedict XVI
+ Lent: Catechism of the Catholic Church
+ Lent: Papal Message for Lent 2010
+
Bioethics: Human Dignity and Natural Moral Law
+ Abide in God and Keep His Commandments: Pope Benedict on John Chapters 15-16
+ Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes: Pope Benedict tells Church to evangelize and care for the sick in body and spirit
+ Saint Anthony of Padua: Example to preachers, one of most popular Saints ― Pope Benedict XVI Audience
News Links
:: USCCB: Bishops Call For Extension Of Trade Preferences For Haiti As Part Of Long-Term Recovery Support
:: USCCB: Bishops Call for Bipartisan Action to Advance Health Care Reform That Protects Human Life and Dignity
:: USCCB: Series of Seminars Slated to Introduce Revised Translation of Roman Missal
:: USCCB: Archbishop O’Brien Speaks At Summit Aimed At Eliminating Nuclear Weapons
:: CNS: Pope expresses sorrow over murder of Christians in Iraq
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Today's Mass
Readings: usccb.org/nab/022110.shtml
+ "Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil."
+ "Jesus said to him in reply, 'It is written: You shall worship the Lord, your God, and Him alone shall you serve."
+ "Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble."
+ "'Therefore, I have now brought You the firstfruits of the products of the soil which you, O LORD, have given me.'"
+ "... if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved."
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FIRST READING: Deuteronomy 26:4-10
wheat.pw.usda.govMoses instructs the Israelites to each bring the firstfruits of their harvest as a gift to God, recognizing that all they have comes from His Providence.
They are to proclaim a recollection of their nation's humble origin, out of which God lifted them. Their ancestor was a wandering Aramean with a small household who went to live in Egypt, only for the resulting descendents to be enslaved. God then delivered them, brining them into a new life as a free nation in a new land of milk and honey.
Having reminded themselves of how the present came to be, and all they owe to God, they are to bow down in worship before God, and honor Him.
PSALM 91:1-2, 10-11, 12-13, 14-15.
Psalm 91 proclaims: "Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble."
The psalmist beseeches God for help and protection in time of distress. God provides and strengthens and sends Holy Angels to help, when we acknowledge God's Holy Name, Who He Is, and cling to Him.
SECOND READING: Romans 10:8-13
Perhaps echoing the psalmist, the Apostle Paul teaches us if we call upon the Name of the Lord we will be Saved, and that "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be Saved."
He does so in the process of explaining that God is for all persons, from his previously Jewish perspective, saying there will be no distinction between Gentile and Jew as all are called to become Christian.
What does it mean to confess that Jesus is Lord? What follows from that reality? And what does it mean to truly "believe in your heart" that God the Father raised Christ from the dead? How does the belief, that acknowledgement of the reality of the Resurrection, bear fruit in what we become, and how we bear fruit in our actions as Christians? Christ conquers death and Frees us from sin and death, in order than we may love and forgive and so follow Him, through God's Mercy and Love, into Eternal Life.
GOSPEL: Luke 4:1-13
rst.gsfc.nasa.govJesus goes into the desert where He fasts and prays for forty days before conquering the devil by repudiating temptations, invoking the Word of God.
His Witness to the Truth, His Being the Truth, makes the experience unbearable for the devil, by reminding the latter of the reality the devil already is aware of but struggles feebly to ignore -- it is the devil who must worship Jesus and, indeed, cannot escape hell because he cannot escape his hatred and arrogance, hatred and arrogance that overcome the devil's superhuman intelligence and led him to lose Paradise.
Recall the Epistle that points out that, because Jesus was willing to take on human form, True God and True Man, and experience temptation, we have a High Priest sympathetic to us in our human frailty, in His Love and Mercy.
Pope Benedict XVI observed on Ash Wednesday:
"That long time of silence and fasting for him was a complete abandonment to the Father and to His plan of love. (...) Going into the desert (...) meant voluntarily exposing himself to the enemy's attacks, to temptation" (...) and "entering into battle with him on the open field, defying him without any weapon other than his infinite trust in the Father's omnipotent love".
[click here for more coverage of the Holy Father's remarks]
Just prior to the events in this passage, at Jesus' Baptism, God the Father declared audibly that Jesus was His Beloved Son and the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus like a dove. Jesus now leaves the River Jordan "[f]illed with the Holy Spirit" and is "led by the Spirit into the desert" where he spends forty days fasting and in prayer.
As the forty days concludes, Jesus is physically hungry. He encounters the devil who, in his blind arrogance, attempts to subject the Son of God to temptation.
Now, recall that the devil was an angel who, despite superhuman intelligence, was so deranged in his character as to be stupid enough to give up Heaven. Despite knowing that God is real, and that Heaven is real, the devil was so overcome with arrogance and other character flaws as to rebel against God and thereby choose to give up Paradise.
As has been pointed out in the past, when tempting someone good, the devil tries to distort something good. In the case of Jesus, the Word of God Made Flesh, the devil tries to tempt Jesus by distorting Holy Scripture. As also has been pointed out, the devil reveals that he is willing to quote Holy Scripture in order to attempt to twist it.
In the first temptation, the devil dares Jesus to prove Jesus' superhuman abilities, taunting Jesus to turn a stone into bread. Note that the devil is appealing to a material need to meet a physical necessity, namely food to satisfy hunger and the need for nourishment.
He tempts Jesus to not experience being human, and instead to cut corners by using Divine Power to serve Himself. But in the process, the devil foreshadows the taunts of Herod, who did not recognize Jesus' Divinity by Jesus' Words, and taunted Jesus to prove Himself through a miracle-on-demand.
He foreshadows the evils which, perhaps he himself will instigate, at the Passion when onlookers taunt Jesus to prove He is Messiah and lift Himself off the Cross.
In this case, however, the devil knows Who Jesus is, and knows what He can do, and taunts him anyhow to prove it. In other words, the devil, the father of all lies, aggressively promotes a falsehood, an implied insult he knows is a lie. Perhaps this is one way evil attempts to attack good, by saying or implying something evil knows is a complete lie, to offend ears that welcome truth.
The taunt also is a disrespect to the Will of the Father, and a feeble attempt to goad the Son of God into disobeying the Father. Jesus undertakes the fasting in the desert filled with the Spirit, and takes on human frailty to fulfill His Mission. He goes to the Cross out of obedience to the Father.
Jesus does not respond tit-for-tat with the devil. Instead he shifts to a more appropriate perspective, making the positive statement: "It is written, One does not live on bread alone." One lives, Jesus has explained, by every Word that comes from the Mouth of God.
Second, the devil tries to tempt the Son of the All-Powerful Creator of the Universe with earthly power. He alleges that he has been given dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth, which he shows to Jesus in a single instant. These kingdoms, at the time, would have consisted of less than 20 million people world-wide, living in very primitive conditions, mostly in ignorance, violence, and some degree of squalor. The devil refers to the impoverished collection of sheep without a shepherd as power and glory.
He alleges that he will give this to Jesus if Jesus worships him.
So note two temptations. One temptation is the allegation that the devil will give to Jesus the kingdoms of the earth.
Another is the temptation to believe that these dirty, soggy, primitive societies, undoubtedly ruined further by the devil's hatred and arrogance-induced incompetence, represent power and glory.
Another temptation is to cut corners. The devil tries to tempt Jesus to avoid His Passion and Death, and perhaps to doubt His Resurrection, by promising a false kingship without those things to take the place of His True Kingship based upon Loving Obedience to His Loving Divine Father.
Jesus responds: "It is written: You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve."
Now, recall several things. First, the father of all lies was permitted power on earth temporarily, and Jesus came to redeem humanity by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and be handed by the Father all Kingship, Power, and Glory.
Second, the devil, who already knew the Truth of God's Goodness and the Ineffable Beauty of Heaven but rejected Paradise and was cast out, had the power to help make the earth into a loving Paradise but did not. He could have introduced running water, and good laws, and good health care, and bountiful crops, but he chose to lash out against the human beings whom he hated. In addition to his entrenched evil, some have observed that the devil's hatred of humanity is, at least in part, because, if and when the human beings answered the invitation to God's Love and Mercy, those very human beings the devil so despised as inferior would, in the end, be given the very thrones in Heaven that the devil and his minions were thrown off of. God rejected the fallen angels as unworthy of heaven and is replacing them with human beings who answer God's Invitation to Eternal Life and cooperate with God's Desire to Redeem them.
Now here rises another point. The devil supposedly could not stand humanity, thinking them inferior. In the process, he doubted God's Power. He apparently was unable to accept, or perhaps in his deranged character, unable to comprehend, that God's Love and Power, were sufficient to Redeem humanity despite human limitations and imperfections.
And here the devil faces a reality that he cannot stand.
Jesus Christ is True God and True Man. This combination is what the devil, in his arrogance overcoming his raw intelligence, became too stupid to comprehend and too pompous to accept.
Note the multiple meanings of the Writing that Jesus quotes. He says "you are to worship God, and Him alone" to rebuke the devil's false statement, that someone should worship the devil. It is a general statement, aimed at all beings, all humans as well as all angels, both Holy Angels and fallen angels, who must bow before God.
But Jesus also speaks literally when he says "you." He is speaking directly to the devil. Jesus points out to the devil, how the devil is supposed to worship God and God alone.
The devil is required to worship Jesus.
The devil's failure to worship God has resulted in the devil running around causing trouble on earth, expending all sorts of time and energy among the very human beings the devil thought himself too important to deal with.
And here the devil comes face to face with Jesus, True God and True Man, incapable of sin.
The devil is required to worship Jesus.
The devil finds himself presiding over a population of confused, dirty human beings and required to worship someone with the appearance of a human being, and in some Mysterious way, characteristics of a human being in all things but sin, in that Jesus Christ is True God and True Man. And those sin-dirtied human beings he makes trouble for will be Redeemed by Jesus, and if they answer "yes" to God, they will take the thrones in heaven that the fallen angels were dumb enough to give up for all eternity.
Because Jesus is God, the devil must worship him. As the Apostle Paul points out in an Epistle, at the Name of Jesus, every knee must bend -- every knee -- in the Heavens, on the earth, and under the earth.
There is a seemingly uncontrollable foolishness in the devil seeking to tempt Jesus.
The devil is seeking to tempt the Son of God, Who is Himself God, a Person of the Holy Trinity. It is difficult to comprehend the hatred and disobedience, and the foolishness to think there is a limit upon God's Power, that somehow God cannot also be True Man while remaining True God. God is All-Powerful, and can do whatever He wills.
In the third temptation, the devil once again taunts Jesus to prove His Divine Power.
Standing on the parapet of the temple in Jerusalem, he quotes psalm 139 about Holy Angels protecting someone so they will not even dash their foot against a stone.
Once again, as with the idiotic taunt about the stone and a loaf of bread, the devil begins with the Herod-like taunt, "If you are the Son of God ..."
At a later point in time, Jesus would multiply the loaves, feeding the five thousand, and feeding the four thousand, in response to the loving concern of Apostles, who interceded for the needs of the people who came to follow and learn from Jesus.
Here Jesus refuses to respond to evil demanding a sign for something evil already knows. Evil knows who Jesus is and what He can do and does not ask for a sign because it actually needs a sign or would benefit from it, but to disrespect and distract.
Recall how later Jesus encounters the role of evil in the hypocritical powers -that-be demanding a sign, when He says only the sign of Jonah will be given. To the contrary, when the earthly powers-that-be are given signs, it does not satisfy them, but only prompts them to hate Jesus even more. It is after Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead that his persecutors are even more determined to try to kill Him.
King Herod likewise demands a sign, and Jesus remains silent.
Does the fact that the devil taunts Jesus for a sign mean the devil has exposed himself and his tactics? Does this help expose the fact that perhaps it is merely the devil active again at those later times when evil men demand a sign? It is revealed that even in suffering this temptation seizes the bad thief, who demands a sign, taunting Jesus, earning the rebuke of the good thief. The good thief responds with his own humility, contrition, and bearing witness to Christ, receiving the Promise of Paradise by Christ in response.
The devil reveals that he is willing to quote Scripture for a bad purpose. As mentioned in the past by at least one Priest analyzing this passage, this fact is consistent with illustrating how evil will try to tempt someone who is good by twisting something that is good into a temptation.
Recall how, in our present time, there are those who promote evil, arguing that they are being loving to those enslaved by it, arguing that they are being accepting and inclusive of the victims by accepting their being lost within the evil.
Recall how, in our present time, there are those who seek to twist the Holy Scripture about not judging, arguing that this passage should be used to strike down right judgment about evil acts, while ignoring that admonishing a sinner and inviting him to New Life is a Fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Similarly, there are those who seek to twist Holy Scripture about removing the plank in one's own eye to remove the speck in the eye of another, to strike down right judgment about anything wrong, rather than noting that this passage, itself, calls both the speck and the plank bad, and calls for both the speck and the plank to be removed.
Note also the style of argumentation, and how it resembles the voice of evil in the present day. The devil attempts to define the agenda, to draw his target into a direct tit-for-tat response to his twisted focus. Jesus responds by rebuking and shifting focus by asserting Truth that creates a realistic perspective rather than the devil's pathological focus that even he knows is not helpful.
Here one sees that evil knows what it says is a lie, and utters the lie not only to mislead, but to be perverse to aggravate one who understands the truth.
Saint Augustine points out in a Divine Office Reading how Jesus acts in Solidarity with us, so that we are strengthened to overcome temptation with Him.
Jesus, True God and True Man, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, invites us to be freed from slavery to unending lies of sin and temptation, to join Him in the true freedom of Love that God has for us.
Resource Links
:: "Facing temptation like Jesus, the triumphant second Adam" - Father Dan Gallaugher
Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament © 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C., at times enhanced to provide additional capitalization. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
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Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours)
The beginning of the Invitatory includes a verse from the Letter to the Hebrews:
Encourage each other daily, while it is still today.
Invitatory, The Ordinary of the Liturgy of the Hours, The Liturgy of the Hours, According to the Roman Rite, e.g., Vol. III, Ordinary Time Weeks 1-17, Catholic Book Publishing Co., New York, 1975, at 649, quoting The Letter to the Hebrews 3:13.
At some point, today will be gone, and we should be certain to have taken advantage of all the opportunities today offered for our Sanctification and true growth as human beings on the Path of Discipleship along which God beckons us to Eternal Life.
In today's Office of Readings, Saint Augutine notes how life on earth includes trials as part of our Journey of Discipleship:
Our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. We progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial, or receives a crown except after victory, or strives except against an enemy or temptations.
* * *
... Christ chose to foreshadow us, who are His Body, by means of His Body, in which He has died, Risen, and Ascended into Heaven, so that the Members of His Body may hope to follow where their Head has gone before.
* * *
If in Christ we have been tempted, in Him we overcome the devil.... See yourself as tempted in Him, and see yourself as victorious in Him.
Saint Augustine, Office of Readings, First Sunday of Lent, The Liturgy of the Hours, According to the Roman Rite, Vol. II, Lent - Easter Season, Catholic Book Publishing Co., New York, 1975, at 87, 88.
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Saints of February
+ "Saint of the Day" by the USCCB
+ "Saint of the Day" by AmericanCatholic.org (Franciscans; on rare occasions, slightly different than the official feast day)
+ Saints of the Day, from St. Patrick's Church, Washington, D.C.
+ Saints with Feast Days in February
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Prayer Intentions
Pope Benedict's Prayer Intentions for February 2010
+ General Intention: scholarly sincere search for truth enhancing understanding of God - "That by means of sincere search for the truth scholars and intellectuals may arrive at a[ better] understanding of the One True God."
+ Mission intention: Church being Faithful to Christ, universality of Gospel Mission: - "That the Church, aware of Her own Missionary Identity, may strive to follow Christ faithfully and to proclaim His Gospel to all peoples."
Additional Faith Central Prayer Intentions
+ For additional support and guidance for the development of Faith Central
+ For the elderly and infirmed, their protection by the Blessed Mother, and that they be treated with respect, dignity, and love.
+ For respect for human life and the dignity of the human person, from their creation
prior to conception, to natural death.
+ That God's Will be obeyed by all actions of government and all government-related actions of the populace
+ For an end to the recession, and for all humanity to work together to bear fruit in service to the needs of all
+ For those of means to divert resources to help those in the human family, locally or abroad, who are hungry, starving, or homeless
+ For peace in the world, and the conversion of the hearts of terrorists.
+ For peace in the world in families, especially for women and men facing crisis pregnancies, their preborn children, and those assisting them, especially their relatives and those volunteers and professionals dedicated to prolife work.
+ For the conversion of the hearts of sinners.
+ For the Faithful Departed, especially the relatives of those
praying and those they have met or have known.
+ For the Faithful Departed, especially those with no one praying for
them.
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Keywords: Jesus Christ, Temptation in the Desert, Catholic, Gospel of Luke, Psalm 31, Saint Paul Letter to the Romans, Saint Augustine, Divine Office, Liturgy of the Hours, Daily Readings, Mass, Catholic Faith, Christian, Pope Benedict XVI, Holy Father, Prayer Intentions, Catholic News
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