Gospel according to Saint Luke 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 by 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 their 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,i he departed from him for a time.

The devil, basketball and fasting

Luis CASASUS President of the Idente Missionaries

Rome, March 09, 2025 | I Sunday of Lent

Deut 26:4-10; Rom 10: 8-13; Lk 4: 1-13

 There are many things that we do not understand and will never be able to understand completely. About our existence, about creation and about eternal life. But one of the best hypotheses for understanding our erratic and discordant behavior is… the action of a being who is often called the devil. There is no need to detect his presence with the senses. Indeed, things continually happen to us that fit perfectly with the intention of someone who wants to separate us from God and from our neighbor.

If we read the text of Saint Luke carefully, without being dazzled by the three strange temptations that are included in this story, we see that Jesus was tempted in the desert all the time and, furthermore, as the last verse states, the devil used all kinds of temptation.

If Jesus himself could be subjected to the temptations of the devil, what is the worst temptation that can challenge one of us? Is it lust; money or power; insincerity or betrayal or self-justification? The answer may not be very obvious, but we only have to remember the first temptation that was forged by the devil in Paradise. Despite the fact that God had given Adam and Eve dominion over all creation, a unique authority granted only to man among all of God’s creations, they were still susceptible to the devil’s lie, who tempted them with the possibility of becoming little big gods. In other words, they tried to usurp God’s power as if it were their own.

It is no coincidence that, since the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor had adopted a divine status. On his death, the emperor was deified and proclaimed a god, while his successor in life was declared the son of a god (divi filius). Sacrifices and incense were offered in public worship to the emperor gods. They were invoked and treated as “lord” (dominus).

The great temptation, the one that led Adam to sin, consists of rewriting the rules, of telling God when he can and cannot tell us what to do, and thus, of living as our own god. As Benedict XVI points out in his book Jesus of Nazareth:

At the center of all temptations, as we see here, is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and a nuisance, compared to all the seemingly much more urgent matters that fill our lives.

This is at the heart of the three temptations and all the temptations we face. It is basically about taking the place of God. We are constantly tested in our trust that God sustains us, protects us and, indeed, sets us free. We prefer to rely on our own strength, experience and resources rather than trust in God and his Providence. But, ultimately, as Chesterton (1874-1936) said, when man stops worshipping God it is not that he stops worshipping, but that he worships everything: material possessions, power, the approval and affection of others.

The temptations recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are three manifestations of the same mother of all temptations: to be like gods. Instead of doing the Father’s will, Satan tempts Jesus to follow his own path and his own way.

In reality, the devil uses our instincts (which we certainly cannot free ourselves from) and also amplifies the powerful attraction of our judgments and desires. Complementarily, he tries to support the mechanisms of justification that our ego handles in a regrettably effective way: attributing guilt to others; minimizing the seriousness of our actions; dehumanizing our victims, considering them as cruel and heartless.

It is worth insisting that, with this, the devil does not push us to commit evil actions (for that we have enough “capacity”, since out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies…), but to ignore the evil we do, thus eliminating God from our horizon, making conversion or any kind of repentance seem unnecessary.

We can illustrate our folly in seeking excuses and justifications with a story of Nasrudin, the mythical Sufi character.

Nasrudin loved to point out to people the endless path of human weaknesses. Once, he was sitting in the market on a busy day. Next to him was a basket of hot peppers. Nasrudin put one in his mouth, then a second and then a third. By the time he’d put in the fourth, his forehead was starting to sweat. He began to perspire a little and his face turned red. His mouth was open and his tongue was out. Then he started to scream: Oh, my God, these peppers are killing me!

Then he took another pepper and put it in his mouth and screamed: Oh, I can’t stand it! These peppers are killing me! Sweat began to drip down his face. His clothes were soaked with perspiration. But he put another pepper in his mouth and screamed again: I can’t take it, I can’t anymore! He put another hot pepper in his mouth and continued to put hot peppers in his mouth one after another, while screaming in pain: My God, these peppers are killing me! A crowd of people had gathered around him and finally asked him: Nasrudin, Nasrudin, why don’t you stop eating those peppers? He said: I hope to find a sweet one.

—ooOoo—

The devil knows what he’s doing. He knows our weakest point and this is where he attacks. It is what he has to do.

When I played basketball at school, I remember very well that there was a team that always beat us. They had two very tall players who made it difficult for us to shoot from a distance and much more difficult to get the ball on rebounds. In our despair, our beloved coach, an unforgettable Marist Brother, said to us: Look at the way that team defends: one of their tall men is under the hoop and the other in front of the area (called the zone), blocking our best scorers. He went on to say: The best thing is not to shoot from far away and to enter the basket very quickly from both sides, one of you with the ball and the other ready to receive it in case the first is blocked.

He was right; our opponents’ weak point in their defense was at both ends of the court. The strategy worked and we proudly savored the victory.

But this is not the end of the story: in the next game, the opposing team learned their lesson, changed tactics and… massacred us by 30 points.

I am not sure this sports analogy is the best comparison, but it’s true that we can be more aware of our weaknesses thanks to these attacks from the devil, in the form of insinuations (not just temptations). That is why God allows diabolical signs to occur, the devil’s more or less subtle invitations, aimed at distorting our difficulties, our emotions… everything that is not God himself, with the perverse intention that what Deuteronomy says is fulfilled in a dramatic way: Be careful, lest your heart be deceived and you turn aside and serve other gods, and worship them.

In reality, only the chosen can be tempted. What need is there to tempt the wicked? Temptation is a privilege, which ends up bringing us closer to God. It is something that He had already foreseen:

God is faithful, and will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it (1 Cor 10:13).

Let’s note how today’s Gospel text begins: Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. That was the most important intention, to show us sinners that even from temptation (and even from sin!) we can emerge more convinced of the need for union with the Divine Persons.

—ooOoo—

With our own strength, we cannot keep our gaze fixed on the Father. We get distracted, we are seduced; our sins sweep us away like the wind (Is 64: 6) very easily. We are also fascinated by the beautiful and good things in this world (work, success, family, school, art…). Unfortunately, we love them to the point of idolizing them and making us their slaves. We end up losing control of our actions and forgetting the God who loves us and is waiting for us.

Christ used his power to perform miracles, but never for himself, always for others. He worked, he sweated, he suffered hunger and thirst, he spent nights awake and he refused privileges. The climax of this temptation was on the cross. There he was again invited to perform a miracle for himself; he was challenged to come down. If he had performed the miracle, if he had refused to accept “defeat”, Jesus would have been a winner in the eyes of the people, but he would have been a loser before God.

Let us live this Lent with the profound meaning of the forty days, which in the Bible signify not a measure of time, but a hard effort, “a long time”, symbolically represented in the days that Elijah walked to Mount Horeb for his encounter with God, or the forty days that Moses spent on Mount Sinai (Ex 34:28). Today we see Christ doing the same. This goes hand in hand with fasting; fasting from food, as an external sign that involves a dialogue with God, a message that we send to him with the meaning of wanting to be free from the world and – above all – fasting from our passions, which always

A book widely read by second-century Christians, the Shepherd of Hermas, explains in a very beautiful and practical way the link between fasting and charity:

This is how you fast: on the day of fasting you will only eat bread and water; then you calculate how much you would have spent on food during that day and you will offer the money to a widow, an orphan or a poor person; thus you deprive yourself of something so that your sacrifice helps someone else to be satiated. He will pray to the Lord for you. If you fast in this way, your sacrifice will be acceptable to God.

Finally, let us bear in mind that Lent and its penance are not an end in themselves. Easter is Christ’s triumph over evil and temptation. Our goal, and that of every human being, believer or not, is to live a full life. The difference is that we have the privilege of being able to savor that fullness from now on.

May we be willing, through fasting and penance, to fight for the true freedom of our neighbor, as Christ taught us: There are demons that can only be driven out by fasting and prayer (Mt 17:21).

_______________________________

In the Sacred Hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph,

Luis CASASUS

President