First Sunday of Lent – February 18, 2024

02-18-2024Weekly ReflectionFr. Randy Hoang

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

I do not know about you, but a temptation that I face every Lent is to refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that Lent can be complete if, for example, all I do is give up snacking or listening to music in the car. The first big hurdle that we need to get over is to hear Christ’s voice from the desert saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31) and respond to it.

Every Lent, the same Holy Spirit whom drove Jesus into the desert wants to drive us into the desert in order to renew and deepen our relationship with God. While God is not calling us all physically to go to the Sahara Desert, he is calling us to remove ourselves from the distractions of life, so that in doing so, we can clearly hear and see him.

Let us now turn to the Gospel. The three temptations in the Gospel are temptations that every one of us faces. Learning how Jesus responds to them, we learn how to respond to them in our own lives.

In the first temptation, the devil disordered our relationship with God the Father. The devil seeks to tempt us to tempt God, jump off various cliffs of sin and then blame God for letting us suffer. Jesus shows that the proper response is never to put the Lord our God to the test, but to love him and throw ourselves into his arms rather than from dangerous cliffs into sin.

In the second temptation, the devil disordered our relationships with others. The devil promised that he would give Jesus rule over all the cities, if only he would take the bargain of falling down before the devil in worship. Jesus resisted the temptation toward this type of diabolical tyranny by quoting Scripture about worshipping and serving the Lord our God alone. And when we do so, we seek to serve others made in that God’s image and likeness, reverencing the Lord in them, seeking to serve them with love rather than be served and ultimately to lay down our lives for them as Christ himself did.

And in the final temptation, the devil disordered our relationship with ourselves, using what God has given us for our own purposes rather than for God and others. This is shown in the temptation the devil gave to Jesus to change stones into bread after forty days of hunger. Jesus replied that we live not on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. We’re supposed to use our talents not selfishly, but for God and others.

In response to these three fundamental temptations, Jesus not only shows us how to resist but also prescribes for us on Ash Wednesday the medicine we need through the traditional practices of prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Prayer helps us die to our own ego in order to put on the mind of Christ. Almsgiving has us think of others’ needs and act to help them. Fasting helps us to control our fleshly hungers and makes it possible for us to hunger for what God hungers.

These three practices are the means by which we enter into Jesus’ prayer, fasting for 40 days in the desert, and his total self-giving and resist the temptations of the devil.