Reading I Dt 26:4-10 Moses spoke to the people, saying: “The priest shall receive the basket from you and shall set it in front of the altar of the LORD, your God. Then you shall declare before the Lord, your God, ‘My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt with a small household and lived there as an alien. But there he became a nation great, strong, and numerous. When the Egyptians maltreated and oppressed us, imposing hard labor upon us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and he heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm, with terrifying power, with signs and wonders; and bringing us into this country, he gave us this land flowing with milk and honey. Therefore, I have now brought you the firstfruits of the products of the soil which you, O LORD, have given me.’ And having set them before the LORD, your God, you shall bow down in his presence.”
Ps 91:1-2, 10-11, 12-13, 14-15. R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, say to the LORD, “My refuge and fortress, my God in whom I trust.” R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble. No evil shall befall you, nor shall affliction come near your tent, For to his angels he has given command about you, that they guard you in all your ways. R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble. Upon their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone. You shall tread upon the asp and the viper; you shall trample down the lion and the dragon. R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble. Because he clings to me, I will deliver him; I will set him on high because he acknowledges my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in distress; I will deliver him and glorify him. R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
Reading II Rom 10:8-13 Brothers and sisters: What does Scripture say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart —that is, the word of faith that we preach—, for, 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. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. For the Scripture says, No one who believes in him will be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all, enriching all who call upon him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Mt 4:4b One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.
Gospel Lk 4:1-13 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. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.” Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It is written You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.” Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you, and: With their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It also says, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.
WORDS OF THE HOLY FATHER During the 40 days of Lent, as Christians we are invited to follow in Jesus’ footsteps and face the spiritual battle with the Evil One with the strength of the Word of God. Not with our words: they are worthless. The Word of God: this has the strength to defeat Satan. For this reason, it is important to be familiar with the Bible: read it often, meditate on it, assimilate it. The Bible contains the Word of God, which is always timely and effective. Someone has asked: what would happen were we to treat the Bible as we treat our mobile phone? Were we to read God’s messages contained in the Bible as we read telephone messages, what would happen? Clearly the comparison is paradoxical, but it calls for reflection. Indeed, if we had God’s Word always in our heart, no temptation could separate us from God, and no obstacle could divert us from the path of good. (Angelus 5 March 2017)
FAUSTI - The fullness of the Spirit has come down on Jesus in prayer, after Baptism, and in this Spirit He is led into the desert. Here the people who, having come out of the slavery of Egypt, are on their way to the promised land are formed. A land of the already and not yet, of nostalgia for the past and distrust in the future, it is arid, unlivable, threatened by the enemy (everything is an enemy in the desert!). But we must pass through it, guided by the Word of God and provided by His faithfulness. The desert is a figure in the real life of the baptized person, with all the dangers and fears through which the Spirit leads him. Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit; His Spirit also fills us, who are and walk in Him, in solidarity with Him in struggle and in victory. "For forty days tempted by the devil" is an allusion to the 40 years of the generation of the desert, to all life that is threatened by the divider that wants to separate us from God and from His promise. It is the true protagonist of evil, against it is the struggle and the victory of Christ. The divider is the god of this world, the prince of this world, in whose hands is placed all power on earth. The root through which evil can implant itself in man and produce its poisonous fruits is selfishness, which has its ground in the distrust produced by the lie that led to not listening to God. Thus, from His children, we became children of the murderer and the untruth from the beginning. Temptations have as their bait the three fundamental hungers of man, in relation to things, to people and to God respectively. They present the possibility of guaranteeing their satisfaction through possession - the things with having, the people with power, God with will - instead of through gift. Every sin repeats that of Adam: to take possession of the gift, detaching it from the source. Jesus came to show to the world the Face of the Father, living as a Son. He is tempted in His mission to show Himself as the Son of God. Jesus does not show Himself as Son by working miracles for His benefit; He does not bend God to the fundamental need of man. Bread, the sign of life, is man's first need, man who is poor in everything. To bend God to one's own life or one's own life to God? The bread or His Will, man or God? This is the false alternative that Jesus rejects as the first temptation. It is not a question of an alternative, but of priorities. The force with which Jesus rejects temptation is the recourse to Scripture. In obedience to the Word of God one experiences that the first bread, source of Life, is God Himself in His Love. The first bread is obeying to God and trusting in Him.
-->This gives the life its light and its meaning. He, the Word of God, will become Bread for all, not through the privilege of miracle, but through solidarity with our brothers and sisters in obedience to the Father. The temptation of obtaining the Kingdom, all the kingdoms of the earth, with the means of power, by exchanging the thought of God with the thought of man. The Kingdom is for the Son, but He obtains it not because He adores the power, but precisely because He is free of it, and this elevates Him to the Cross. Right there He inaugurates the Kingdom. Using the methods of the enemy means working for him. One sins in idolatry when the means become objective and the creatures occupy the place of God Man is never an atheist. He is only an idolater and absolutizes his own needs out of fear, building a world very different from the Kingdom of God. Only if we worship God, and only God, man can overcome this evil situation. If he worships and fears God in all things, he realizes himself, image and likeness of God, in all things. If he does not worship and do not fear God, he loses himself in all things that he worships or fears. Principle of salvation is the fear of the Lord . The believer can tempt and provoke God in two opposite ways. - With security or religious presumption: I accept God's Grace and His promise, but I forget His Holiness and Justice. God is good! So I attribute forgiveness to myself even before sin, and I make His goodness the pretext for my debauchery. I am a son of God; with Christ on the cross I am safe, without danger or struggle! From this root comes laziness in prayer, in obedience to the Word and in service to one's brothers and sisters. I lose my fear of God. So I sanctify and justify my sin. With despair and distrust to save oneself: I respect the law, justice and holiness of God. Instead, I lose sight of His Holiness and Grace. God must be obeyed, not tempted. He must not exhibit the signs that I ask for my distrust in His Holiness or despair in His Goodness. My life is saved only if it is referred to Him, to His justice, to His goodness that sanctifies. The whole life of Jesus is included in this struggle with satan, between Baptism and the Cross.
Three Ways the World Misleads Us The three temptations point to three paths that the world always offers, promising great success, three paths to mislead us: greed for possession — to have, have, have —, human vainglory and the exploitation of God. These are three paths that will lead us to ruin….
These are the paths that are set before us, with the illusion that in this way one can obtain success and happiness. But in reality, they are completely extraneous to God’s mode of action; rather, in fact they distance us from God, because they are the works of Satan. Jesus, personally facing these trials, overcomes temptation three times in order to fully adhere to the Father’s plan. And he reveals the remedies to us: interior life, faith in God, the certainty of his love — the certainty that God loves us, that he is Father, and with this certainty we will overcome every temptation.
But there is one thing to which I would like to draw your attention, something interesting. In responding to the tempter, Jesus does not enter a discussion, but responds to the three challenges with only the Word of God. This teaches us that one does not dialogue with the devil; one must not discuss, one only responds to him with the Word of God.
Dear Brothers and Sisters, With the traditional Rite of Ashes last Wednesday we entered Lent, a season of conversion and penance in preparation for Easter. The Church who is mother and teacher calls all her members to renew themselves in spirit and to turn once again with determination to God, renouncing pride and selfishness, to live in love. This Year of Faith Lent is a favourable time for rediscovering faith in God as the basic criterion for our life and for the life of the Church. This always means a struggle, a spiritual combat, because the spirit of evil is naturally opposed to our sanctification and seeks to make us stray from God’s path. For this reason the Gospel of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is proclaimed every year on the First Sunday of Lent. Indeed, after receiving the “investiture” as Messiah — “Annointed” with the Holy Spirit at the baptism in the Jordan — Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit himself to be tempted by the devil. At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus had to unmask himself and reject the false images of the Messiah which the tempter was suggesting to him. Yet these temptations are also false images of man that threaten to ensnare our conscience, in the guise of suitable, effective and even good proposals. The Evangelists Matthew and Luke present three temptations of Jesus that differ slightly, but only in their order. Their essential core is always the exploitation of God for our own interests, giving preference to success or to material possessions. The tempter is cunning. He does not directly impel us towards evil but rather towards a false good, making us believe that the true realities are power and everything that satisfies our primary needs. In this way God becomes secondary, he is reduced to a means; in short, he becomes unreal, he no longer counts, he disappears. Ultimately, in temptation faith is at stake because God is at stake. At the crucial moments in life but also, as can be seen at every moment, we stand at a crossroads: do we want to follow our own ego or God? Our individual interests or the true Good, to follow what is really good? As the Fathers of the Church teach us, the temptations are part of Jesus’ “descent” into our human condition, into the abyss of sin and its consequences; a “descent” that Jesus made to the end, even to death on the Cross and to the hell of extreme remoteness from God. In this way he is the hand that God stretches out to man, to the lost sheep, to bring him back to safety. As St Augustine teaches, Jesus took the temptations from us to give us his victory (cf. Enarr. in Psalmos, 60, 3: pl 36, 724). Therefore let us not be afraid either of facing the battle against the spirit of evil: the important thing is to fight it with him, with Christ, the Conqueror. And to be with him let us turn to his Mother, Mary; let us call on her with filial trust in the hour of trial and she will make us feel the powerful presence of her divine Son, so that we can reject temptations with Christ’s word and thus put God back at the centre of our life.
Pope Saint John Paul II 29, 2 , 2004 Jesus’ Victory Over the Evil One Today, the First Sunday of Lent, the Gospel presents to us Christ who, after having received Baptism from John in the Jordan, withdrew into the desert, led by the Holy Spirit, where he remained for 40 days. The Gospel account once again brings to our attention the three well-known temptations that are an echo of the ancient deception whereby Satan caused the fall of our first parents. But Christ, the new Adam, overcomes them, decisively rejecting the tempter: “It is said, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God‘” (Lk 4: 12). Jesus’ victory over the Evil One assures us that we will not succumb at the moment of trial as long as we remain united to the Lord. In this perspective, Lent invites us to make a special commitment to the process of spiritual growth.
First Sunday of Lent
RispondiEliminaLectionary: 24
Reading I
Dt 26:4-10
Moses spoke to the people, saying:
“The priest shall receive the basket from you
and shall set it in front of the altar of the LORD, your God.
Then you shall declare before the Lord, your God,
‘My father was a wandering Aramean
who went down to Egypt with a small household
and lived there as an alien.
But there he became a nation
great, strong, and numerous.
When the Egyptians maltreated and oppressed us,
imposing hard labor upon us,
we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers,
and he heard our cry
and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
He brought us out of Egypt
with his strong hand and outstretched arm,
with terrifying power, with signs and wonders;
and bringing us into this country,
he gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.
Therefore, I have now brought you the firstfruits
of the products of the soil
which you, O LORD, have given me.’
And having set them before the LORD, your God,
you shall bow down in his presence.”
Ps 91:1-2, 10-11, 12-13, 14-15.
R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
say to the LORD, “My refuge and fortress,
my God in whom I trust.”
R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
No evil shall befall you,
nor shall affliction come near your tent,
For to his angels he has given command about you,
that they guard you in all your ways.
R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
Upon their hands they shall bear you up,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.
You shall tread upon the asp and the viper;
you shall trample down the lion and the dragon.
R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
Because he clings to me, I will deliver him;
I will set him on high because he acknowledges my name.
He shall call upon me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in distress;
I will deliver him and glorify him.
R. Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.
Reading II
Rom 10:8-13
Brothers and sisters:
What does Scripture say?
The word is near you,
in your mouth and in your heart
—that is, the word of faith that we preach—,
for, 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.
For one believes with the heart and so is justified,
and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.
For the Scripture says,
No one who believes in him will be put to shame.
For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek;
the same Lord is Lord of all,
enriching all who call upon him.
For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Mt 4:4b
RispondiEliminaOne does not live on bread alone,
but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.
Gospel
Lk 4:1-13
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.
He ate nothing during those days,
and when they were over he was hungry.
The devil said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
command this stone to become bread.”
Jesus answered him,
“It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”
Then he took him up and showed him
all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant.
The devil said to him,
“I shall give to you all this power and glory;
for it has been handed over to me,
and I may give it to whomever I wish.
All this will be yours, if you worship me.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It is written
You shall worship the Lord, your God,
and him alone shall you serve.”
Then he led him to Jerusalem,
made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
throw yourself down from here, for it is written:
He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,
and:
With their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It also says,
You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”
When the devil had finished every temptation,
he departed from him for a time.
WORDS OF THE HOLY FATHER
During the 40 days of Lent, as Christians we are invited to follow in Jesus’ footsteps and face the spiritual battle with the Evil One with the strength of the Word of God. Not with our words: they are worthless. The Word of God: this has the strength to defeat Satan. For this reason, it is important to be familiar with the Bible: read it often, meditate on it, assimilate it. The Bible contains the Word of God, which is always timely and effective. Someone has asked: what would happen were we to treat the Bible as we treat our mobile phone? Were we to read God’s messages contained in the Bible as we read telephone messages, what would happen? Clearly the comparison is paradoxical, but it calls for reflection. Indeed, if we had God’s Word always in our heart, no temptation could separate us from God, and no obstacle could divert us from the path of good. (Angelus 5 March 2017)
FAUSTI - The fullness of the Spirit has come down on Jesus in prayer, after Baptism, and in this Spirit He is led into the desert. Here the people who, having come out of the slavery of Egypt, are on their way to the promised land are formed. A land of the already and not yet, of nostalgia for the past and distrust in the future, it is arid, unlivable, threatened by the enemy (everything is an enemy in the desert!).
RispondiEliminaBut we must pass through it, guided by the Word of God and provided by His faithfulness.
The desert is a figure in the real life of the baptized person, with all the dangers and fears through which the Spirit leads him. Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit; His Spirit also fills us, who are and walk in Him, in solidarity with Him in struggle and in victory.
"For forty days tempted by the devil" is an allusion to the 40 years of the generation of the desert, to all life that is threatened by the divider that wants to separate us from God and from His promise.
It is the true protagonist of evil, against it is the struggle and the victory of Christ. The divider is the god of this world, the prince of this world, in whose hands is placed all power on earth.
The root through which evil can implant itself in man and produce its poisonous fruits is selfishness, which has its ground in the distrust produced by the lie that led to not listening to God.
Thus, from His children, we became children of the murderer and the untruth from the beginning.
Temptations have as their bait the three fundamental hungers of man, in relation to things, to people and to God respectively.
They present the possibility of guaranteeing their satisfaction through possession - the things with having, the people with power, God with will - instead of through gift.
Every sin repeats that of Adam: to take possession of the gift, detaching it from the source.
Jesus came to show to the world the Face of the Father, living as a Son.
He is tempted in His mission to show Himself as the Son of God. Jesus does not show Himself as Son by working miracles for His benefit; He does not bend God to the fundamental need of man.
Bread, the sign of life, is man's first need, man who is poor in everything.
To bend God to one's own life or one's own life to God? The bread or His Will, man or God?
This is the false alternative that Jesus rejects as the first temptation. It is not a question of an alternative, but of priorities. The force with which Jesus rejects temptation is the recourse to Scripture. In obedience to the Word of God one experiences that the first bread, source of Life, is God Himself in His Love. The first bread is obeying to God and trusting in Him.
-->This gives the life its light and its meaning. He, the Word of God, will become Bread for all, not through the privilege of miracle, but through solidarity with our brothers and sisters in obedience to the Father.
RispondiEliminaThe temptation of obtaining the Kingdom, all the kingdoms of the earth, with the means of power, by exchanging the thought of God with the thought of man. The Kingdom is for the Son, but He obtains it not because He adores the power, but precisely because He is free of it, and this elevates Him to the Cross.
Right there He inaugurates the Kingdom.
Using the methods of the enemy means working for him. One sins in idolatry when the means become objective and the creatures occupy the place of God Man is never an atheist. He is only an idolater and absolutizes his own needs out of fear, building a world very different from the Kingdom of God.
Only if we worship God, and only God, man can overcome this evil situation. If he worships and fears God in all things, he realizes himself, image and likeness of God, in all things.
If he does not worship and do not fear God, he loses himself in all things that he worships or fears.
Principle of salvation is the fear of the Lord .
The believer can tempt and provoke God in two opposite ways.
- With security or religious presumption: I accept God's Grace and His promise, but I forget His Holiness and Justice.
God is good! So I attribute forgiveness to myself even before sin, and I make His goodness the pretext for my debauchery. I am a son of God; with Christ on the cross I am safe, without danger or struggle! From this root comes laziness in prayer, in obedience to the Word and in service to one's brothers and sisters. I lose my fear of God. So I sanctify and justify my sin.
With despair and distrust to save oneself: I respect the law, justice and holiness of God. Instead, I lose sight of His Holiness and Grace. God must be obeyed, not tempted. He must not exhibit the signs that I ask for my distrust in His Holiness or despair in His Goodness.
My life is saved only if it is referred to Him, to His justice, to His goodness that sanctifies.
The whole life of Jesus is included in this struggle with satan, between Baptism and the Cross.
Pope Francis
RispondiElimina10,3, 2019
Three Ways the World Misleads Us
The three temptations point to three paths that the world always offers, promising great success, three paths to mislead us: greed for possession — to have, have, have —, human vainglory and the exploitation of God. These are three paths that will lead us to ruin….
These are the paths that are set before us, with the illusion that in this way one can obtain success and happiness. But in reality, they are completely extraneous to God’s mode of action; rather, in fact they distance us from God, because they are the works of Satan. Jesus, personally facing these trials, overcomes temptation three times in order to fully adhere to the Father’s plan. And he reveals the remedies to us: interior life, faith in God, the certainty of his love — the certainty that God loves us, that he is Father, and with this certainty we will overcome every temptation.
But there is one thing to which I would like to draw your attention, something interesting. In responding to the tempter, Jesus does not enter a discussion, but responds to the three challenges with only the Word of God. This teaches us that one does not dialogue with the devil; one must not discuss, one only responds to him with the Word of God.
BENEDICT XVI
RispondiEliminaANGELUS
Sunday, 17 2 2013
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
With the traditional Rite of Ashes last Wednesday we entered Lent, a season of conversion and penance in preparation for Easter. The Church who is mother and teacher calls all her members to renew themselves in spirit and to turn once again with determination to God, renouncing pride and selfishness, to live in love. This Year of Faith Lent is a favourable time for rediscovering faith in God as the basic criterion for our life and for the life of the Church. This always means a struggle, a spiritual combat, because the spirit of evil is naturally opposed to our sanctification and seeks to make us stray from God’s path. For this reason the Gospel of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is proclaimed every year on the First Sunday of Lent.
Indeed, after receiving the “investiture” as Messiah — “Annointed” with the Holy Spirit at the baptism in the Jordan — Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit himself to be tempted by the devil. At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus had to unmask himself and reject the false images of the Messiah which the tempter was suggesting to him. Yet these temptations are also false images of man that threaten to ensnare our conscience, in the guise of suitable, effective and even good proposals. The Evangelists Matthew and Luke present three temptations of Jesus that differ slightly, but only in their order. Their essential core is always the exploitation of God for our own interests, giving preference to success or to material possessions. The tempter is cunning. He does not directly impel us towards evil but rather towards a false good, making us believe that the true realities are power and everything that satisfies our primary needs. In this way God becomes secondary, he is reduced to a means; in short, he becomes unreal, he no longer counts, he disappears. Ultimately, in temptation faith is at stake because God is at stake. At the crucial moments in life but also, as can be seen at every moment, we stand at a crossroads: do we want to follow our own ego or God? Our individual interests or the true Good, to follow what is really good?
As the Fathers of the Church teach us, the temptations are part of Jesus’ “descent” into our human condition, into the abyss of sin and its consequences; a “descent” that Jesus made to the end, even to death on the Cross and to the hell of extreme remoteness from God. In this way he is the hand that God stretches out to man, to the lost sheep, to bring him back to safety. As St Augustine teaches, Jesus took the temptations from us to give us his victory (cf. Enarr. in Psalmos, 60, 3: pl 36, 724).
Therefore let us not be afraid either of facing the battle against the spirit of evil: the important thing is to fight it with him, with Christ, the Conqueror. And to be with him let us turn to his Mother, Mary; let us call on her with filial trust in the hour of trial and she will make us feel the powerful presence of her divine Son, so that we can reject temptations with Christ’s word and thus put God back at the centre of our life.
Pope Saint John Paul II 29, 2 , 2004
RispondiEliminaJesus’ Victory Over the Evil One
Today, the First Sunday of Lent, the Gospel presents to us Christ who, after having received Baptism from John in the Jordan, withdrew into the desert, led by the Holy Spirit, where he remained for 40 days. The Gospel account once again brings to our attention the three well-known temptations that are an echo of the ancient deception whereby Satan caused the fall of our first parents. But Christ, the new Adam, overcomes them, decisively rejecting the tempter: “It is said, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God‘” (Lk 4: 12).
Jesus’ victory over the Evil One assures us that we will not succumb at the moment of trial as long as we remain united to the Lord. In this perspective, Lent invites us to make a special commitment to the process of spiritual growth.