The First Sunday of Lent 02-10-08

Reality versus Priority

Scripture Readings
First: Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7
Second: Rom 5:12-19 or 5:12, 17-19
Gospel: Mt 4:1-11

Prepared by: Fr. Jonathan Kalisch, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• Temptation seeks to set the reality of God aside, so that he seems to be a secondary
concern compared to the urgent priorities in front of us.
• The question is about God – “is he real, reality itself, or isn’t he? Is he good, or do we have
to invent the good ourselves?” (Jesus of Nazareth)
• The temptations of Christ can be seen as occasions to doubt 1) one’s identity – are you really
who they say you are? 2) one’s mission or vocation – will you persevere?; and 3) one’s
relationship to the Father – whether He will be with you?

2. Exegetical Notes
• Mt 4:1-11 The temptations faced by Jesus are temptations to a false power – to rely on his
sonship in self-serving ways that would lead him disobediently from the way of the cross.
The first temptation is to use miraculous power for ordinary physical needs. The mission of
Christ is fulfilled by the proclamation of the word that is life. The second temptation is to give
a spectacular sign that will compel belief. But this would impose a demand on God that he
has not promised to fulfill; this is not how He has chosen to reveal himself. The third
temptation is to make an idol of power to accomplish the ends of the mission.
• Mt 4:1-11 should be seen in the light of Deut 6-8 as the “testing of God’s Son.” Jesus’
responses to the temptations come from Deut 8:3, 6:16, and 6:13. Deut has Moses
challenge Israel to learn from their mistakes while wandering in the desert, and to act
faithfully as they enter the promised land. Moses speaks of God’s love for and election of
Israel: “The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession…because
the Lord loves you” (Deut 7:6-7).
• Deut 6:4-5: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love
the LORD, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” In
Mt 4:1-11, Jesus refuses to make bread in self interest (heart), to capitalize on the divine
protection of his life (soul) and to worship Satan for possession of the whole world (might).
3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church
• # 2135 "You shall worship the Lord your God." Adoring God, praying to him, offering him the
worship that belongs to him, fulfilling the promises and vows made to him are acts of the
virtue of religion which fall under obedience to the first commandment.
• # 2083 Jesus summed up man's duties toward God in this saying: "You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This immediately
echoes the solemn call: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD." God has loved us
first. The love of the One God is recalled in the first of the "ten words." The commandments
then make explicit the response of love that man is called to give to his God.
• # 2847 The Holy Spirit makes us discern between trials, which are necessary for the growth
of the inner man, and temptation, which leads to sin and death. We must also discern
between being tempted and consenting to temptation. Finally, discernment unmasks the lie
of temptation, whose object appears to be good, a "delight to the eyes" and desirable, when
in reality its fruit is death. God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings....
There is a certain usefulness to temptation. No one but God knows what our soul has
received from him, not even we ourselves. But temptation reveals it in order to teach us to
know ourselves, and in this way we discover our evil inclinations and are obliged to give
thanks for the goods that temptation has revealed to us.
• # 2848 "Lead us not into temptation" implies a decision of the heart: "For where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also.... No one can serve two masters." "If we live by the Spirit, let
us also walk by the Spirit." In this assent to the Holy Spirit the Father gives us strength. "No
testing has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you
be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape,
so that you may be able to endure it."
• # 2849 Such a battle and such a victory become possible only through prayer. It is by his
prayer that Jesus vanquishes the tempter, both at the outset of his public mission and in the
ultimate struggle of his agony. In this petition to our heavenly Father, Christ unites us to his
battle and his agony. He urges us to vigilance of the heart in communion with his own.
Vigilance is "custody of the heart," and Jesus prayed for us to the Father: "Keep them in your
name." The Holy Spirit constantly seeks to awaken us to keep watch. Finally, this petition
takes on all its dramatic meaning in relation to the last temptation of our earthly battle; it asks
for final perseverance. "Lo, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is he who is awake."

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities

• Hilary: He was “hungered," not during the forty days, but after them. Therefore when the
Lord hungered, it was not that the effects of abstinence then first came upon Him, but that
His humanity was left to its own strength. For the Devil was to be overcome, not by the God,
but by the flesh. By this was figured, that after those forty days which He was to tarry on
earth after His passion were accomplished, He should hunger for the salvation of man, at
which time He carried back again to God His Father the expected gift, the humanity which He
had taken on Him.
• Gregory: If we observe the successive steps of the temptation, we shall be able to estimate
by how much we are freed from temptation. The old enemy tempted the first man through his
belly, when he persuaded him to eat of the forbidden fruit; through ambition when he said,
 "Ye shall be as gods;" through covetousness when he said, "Knowing good and evil;" for
there is a covetousness not only of money, but of greatness, when a high estate above our
measure is sought. By the same method in which he had overcome the first Adam, in that
same was he overcome when he tempted the second Adam. He tempted through the belly
when he said, "Command that these stones become loaves;" through ambition when he said,
"If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence;" through covetousness of lofty
condition in the words, "All these things will I give thee."
• Jerome: Christ's purpose was to vanquish by humility; hence he opposed the adversary
rather by testimonies out of the Law, than by miraculous powers; thus at the same time
giving more honor to man, and more disgrace to the adversary, when the enemy of the
human race thus seemed to be overcome by man rather than by God.

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• The German Jesuit Alfred Delp actively advised Kreisau Circle on Catholic Social teaching –
which informed the July 20th plot against Hitler. Delp was arrested by the Gestapo and found
guilty of high treason. The Gestapo offered Delp his freedom in return for his leaving the
Jesuits, but he rejected it. Of all prisoners, only Delp had to wear chains and leg irons up to
his execution. He wrote: “Bread is important, freedom is more important, but most important
of all is unbroken fidelity and faithful adoration.”

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “The temptation story summarizes the entire struggle of Jesus: it is about the nature of his
mission, but at the same time it is also about the right ordering of human life, about the way
to be human, about the way of history. Finally, it is about what is really important in the life of
man. This ultimate thing, this decisive thing, is the primacy of God. The germ of all
temptation is setting God aside, so that he seems to be a secondary concern when
compared with all the urgent priorities of our lives. To consider ourselves, the needs and
desires of the moment to be more important than he is – that is the temptation that always
besets us. For in doing so we deny God his divinity, as we make ourselves, or rather, the
powers that threaten us, into our god.”
• “The image of the desert is a very eloquent metaphor of the human condition. The Book of
Exodus recounts the experience of the People of Israel who, after leaving Egypt, wandered
through the desert of Sinai for 40 years before they reached the Promised Land. During that
long journey, the Jews experienced the full force and persistence of the tempter, who urged
them to lose trust in the Lord and to turn back; but at the same time, thanks to Moses'
mediation, they learned to listen to God's voice calling them to become his holy People. In
meditating on this biblical passage, we understand that to live life to the full in freedom we
must overcome the test that this freedom entails, that is, temptation. Only if he is freed from
the slavery of falsehood and sin can the human person, through the obedience of faith that
opens him to the truth, find the full meaning of his life and attain peace, love and joy.”
• “At the heart 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 annoying, in comparison with all
the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own
 lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the
reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion –
that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.”
• “We often have the oppressive feeling that the manna of our faith will be enough only for the
present day – but God gives us that manna new each day if we allow him to do so. We must
live in a world in which God is seemingly to be found only as One who is dead – but he can
strike living water even from dead stones.”
• “The issue, then, is… God has to submit to experiment. He is ‘tested,’ just as products are
tested. He must submit to the conditions that we say are necessary if we are to reach
certainty…The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory
conditions upon him is incapable of finding him. For it already implies that we deny God as
God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior
listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we can experimentally test
and grasp. To think like that is to make oneself God. And to do that is to abase not only
God, but the world and oneself, too.”
• “The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He
merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a
planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have his place as a private
concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes.”
• “To the tempter’s lying divinization of power and prosperity, to his lying promise of a future
that offers all things to all men through power and through wealth – he {Jesus} responds with
the fact that God is God, that God is man’s true Good. To the invitation to worship power,
the Lord answers …God alone is to be worshiped.”
• “This is the authentic and central program of the Lenten Season: to listen to the Word of
truth, to live, speak and do the truth, to reject lies that poison humanity and are the door to all
evils…Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life and in this way to know the
fundamental truth: who we are, where we come from, where we must go, what path we must
take in life.”

7. Other Considerations

• Note how the other moments of temptation faced by Jesus also heighten the aspect of the
reality of His mission and relation to the Father versus the pressing priorities: when the
crowds want to make him King after the miraculous feeding (John 6:15); the temptation to
identity himself with his miracles over the mission of preaching (Mk 1:35-39); the temptation
by Peter to have him avoid the path of suffering (Mk 8:33); and during the Passion – in the
Garden and from onlookers at the foot of the Cross.

Recommended Resources
Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI ed. Peter John Cameron, Ignatius Press, 2006.
Gundry, Robert H., Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1982.
Harrington, Daniel J., S.J., The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina Series, vol. 1, ed. By Daniel J
Harrington, Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991.
Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, and Roland Murphy,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Adrian J. Walker, New York: Doubleday, 2007.
http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_fra.html