Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this
great and holy season of Lent, a time to get back
to spiritual basics, a time when the Church
looks at some of its most fundamental and spiritually
significant texts. We begin this First Sunday
of Lent with Luke's account of the temptation
of Jesus, the beginning of
his public life. A basic biblical
principle is: The best way to
disempower evil is to look at it
and to see it. Think of the bronze
serpent in the desert, so those who looked
at it were cured. So here's Jesus at the
beginning of his public life looking at three things
that might deviate him
from the path. Three temptations. And of course, to say
that Jesus is fully divine is not to deny for a minute
that in his human nature he felt temptation. Well, we can learn
from this too. Can we look honestly and
directly at those things that will cause us
to deviate from the path
the Lord has for us? The place for the temptation,
of course, is the desert. And that's very
important too, spiritually, isn't it? Blaise Pascal,
the great Catholic philosopher and writer,
said that we spend most of our lives with
“divertissements.” That means diversions. We divert ourselves from the
great questions of who we are, where we're going,
what's the purpose of life, what is eternal life,
who is God, the great questions. Well, they're
too much to bear, and so we divert ourselves. We distract ourselves. What's the desert but the place
where the divertissements, the diversions and distractions,
are set aside so I can come to terms
with the great issues, the great questions? So that's the setting for
this wonderful account. Now, what Jesus faces in
the desert would be three classical
substitutes for God. And by this I mean three
things that will come to reign in one’s soul
as the ultimate good. You want the basic
biblical message? There's only one God. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord
your God is Lord alone.” There's only one supreme
good, and that's God. If you make anything other
than God into the supreme good, you will always have,
spiritually speaking, trouble. So look at this story now
of the temptations as three levels of temptations,
three types of diversions from the ultimate good. And the topography's important. We begin on the desert floor. Then we move to
a higher place, and then to a
still higher place. So we're looking
at three grades, if you want, of temptation. So let's begin on
the desert floor. “The devil said to him,
‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone
to turn into bread.'" So now, if you've been to
that part of the world, to the Judean Desert,
you'll see it's to this day littered with stones that
look for all the world like little loaves of bread. I can see how someone who's
been fasting for days and days looking out at that scene
would imagine those stones as loaves of bread. And so the devil
begins by saying, "Look, you're the Son of God.
Turn those stones into bread. Satisfy your physical hunger." Well, here's the first
great temptation: to make the satisfaction
of sensual desire the highest good in my life. Are there lots of us
who fall into this trap? You bet. And sometimes, everybody,
the most sophisticated people, people that seem, “wow, that person
really is accomplished. They've really attained
the highest . . .” But see, all they're
interested in, finally, is the satisfaction of
their desires for sex and for food and for drink
and the pleasures of the body. Think of someone whose
life is all about money. Billionaires. My whole life's
about getting money. Well, what do you
use money for? You use money to buy the
physical things of the world that satisfy my basic,
sensual desires. It's not just a house,
but a gorgeous house. Not just a car,
but the best possible car. Not just food, but the
best possible food and drink. Well, all I'm doing with
all this money is basically satisfying this desire. Turn these stones into bread. Make the satisfaction
of sensual desire the central good
of your life. Now, during Lent, everybody,
we are meant to take a good, hard, long look at this
tendency in ourselves. Have I made this low-level pleasure
the highest good in my life? If I have, I got trouble. I think here of
Thomas Merton, the great spiritual writer,
who said the sensual desires
are like little kids. If a parent is dealing
with little kids —and they want what they
want when they want it. "Give me.
Now, now, now. Give me something to eat. I want that ice cream cone. Give it now, now, now"— well you don't satisfy
every single desire of your kids
every minute. You'd make them sick. Well, in a similar way,
Merton says these desires for sensual pleasure
are like that. They're insistent. They want what they
want when they want it. But if we give into them,
listen now, we never open ourselves to
deeper and higher goods. Think of the good
simply of friendship, the good of knowledge,
the good of science, the good of searching
out spiritual truth, the good of God. See, I never find those
things if I'm preoccupied all the time with
the desert floor, which is why now,
in response to the devil, what does Jesus say? “Man does not live
by bread alone, but by every word that comes
from the mouth of God.” He's not denying for
a moment that we do indeed live by bread. We're embodied people. We need sensual
pleasure and so on, but that's not
the whole story. We don't live by bread,
sensual satisfaction, alone, but by every word that
comes from the mouth of God. And so we got
to move higher and not get stuck
at the desert floor. So now, let's move in
the topography of the story to a higher level, because
we're going to face a more sophisticated or
refined type of temptation. Listen. “The devil took him higher and showed him all the
kingdoms of the world in a single instant.” Oh, I'll give you all
of this if you but bow down
and worship me. Okay, it's a more
refined temptation. But power. Good? Sure. It's a worldly good.
Nothing wrong with it. Power is the capacity
to effect change. And thank God there are
people with power in various positions
who can effect change in a positive way. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, God is
described as powerful, so power can't be in
itself a negative. But it's just not
the highest good. And when I make it
the highest good, then my spiritual life
falls apart and I tend to use that power for
nefarious purposes. I mean, how often in the
literature of the world have we heard that story told? How often in the annals of
history do we see people obsessed with power giving
rise to terrible injustice? I mean, just think of it. Figures from Alexander the Great
to Julius Caesar to Caesar Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Charlemagne,
the Medicis, Charles V, Henry VIII, Louis XIV,
Napoleon, Nixon and Kissinger, all the way up to
Vladimir Putin. People who are preoccupied
with worldly power. And again,
in itself not a bad thing. But if it becomes
the central or dominating concern
of your life, you will misuse that power
in very bad ways. You know an interesting
thing to me? Think of someone at
the desert floor level. They're preoccupied
with sensual pleasure. People that are really
focused on power, they can often
be very ascetic. They've moved beyond
those low-level desires. They can deprive themselves
of a lot of those things in order to reach this
higher end of power. Okay, okay. But still, power is not God. Notice something,
too, I think really interesting in these stories. I don't know anywhere in the
literature of the world a more thorough-going critique of
human power than this story. Why? Because the devil
says to Jesus, "All these I will give you." Implication? He owns them all. Implication? They belong to him. And so, again,
not to strictly demonize power,
that's not right, but let's face it:
For so many people, and so often in
human history, when worldly power becomes
a dominant concern, it does indeed become a
plaything of the devil. It belongs to the devil. What's Jesus' response
now to this second, this higher temptation? Scripture has it, "You shall do homage
to the Lord, your God. Him alone you shall adore." What's he saying? I'm not going to
adore the devil. I'm not going to adore
the power that he uses often for his purposes. No, no. Notice, please,
my “adoration.” That means my orientation
to the “summum bonum,” the highest good, is not
directed toward power but toward God. Okay? So we've done
the desert floor. We've gone to a higher
point of vantage. And now to the highest:
the third temptation. “Then the devil led
him to Jerusalem, set him on the
parapet of the temple, and said, ‘If you
are the Son of God, throw yourself down
from here. . . . He'll bid his angels
to watch over you.’" Now, what is this? Low level is
sensual pleasure. The second level
is worldly power. What's this one? I'd refer to it as
glory, honor. The temple in Jesus' time,
that was the most important building you could imagine. It was at the heart of the
capital city of Jerusalem. It was a political and
religious and cultural center. It was the focal point
of Israelite life. It was seen, in fact,
as the dwelling place of God on earth. Everybody went
up to the temple. So you're standing on the
parapet of the temple. That means I'm at the center
of this whole society. Everybody sees me. Everybody notices me. In fact, even God has
to notice me because if I throw myself down,
he's obliged to send his angels to make sure
I don't hurt myself. So sensual pleasure,
that's one thing, but some people,
they can eschew that because they're
interested in power. But still, others can eschew
both sensual pleasure and worldly power because
what they want is this. They want fame and
honor and glory, to be noticed, admired. “Look at me.” It's the great
narcissistic temptation. Look, is honor a
bad thing in itself? No. I always love Thomas Aquinas'
definition of honor as the “flag of virtue.” So if we see something
virtuous and good and we say, "Hey, hey.
Look at that. Try to imitate that.
I put a flag on it," well that's honor. That's why we honor people
with degrees and with awards and so on. Okay. Look, in themselves,
you get an award and "Oh, that's nice," and you put it on
a shelf somewhere. It's not the award
that matters so much. It's just a flag
of virtue to, let's say, students
at a university or people in
the wider society. Okay, nothing in
itself wrong with that. The trouble is when people
get addicted to honor and glory and "Hey, look at me
at the top of the temple." No, no. That leads to
nothing but trouble. So Jesus says, "Scripture also says,
'Do not put the Lord, your God, to the test.'" In other words,
who do you think you are standing up on the parapet
of the temple and throwing yourself down,
fully expecting the people to go,
"Oh, no," and for God to act? Come on.
Get over yourself. That's what he's saying. Get over this inflation
of the ego which has gone totally out of control and
will lead to nothing but trouble. Set aside a preoccupation
with sensual pleasure. That's why we fast,
by the way, during Lent. Set aside an infatuation
with worldly power. That becomes a
plaything of the devil. Set aside this bloated
self-importance of the ego. That just leads to trouble. And keep yourself
focused on God, what God wants for you,
what God desires for you. Make yourself
available to his grace. And the trick is, everybody —Look, fellow sinners,
we all are tempted by these three things. We give into them;
unlike Jesus, we give into all
three of them. But when we surrender to God,
make God the summum bonum, it redounds to our great
spiritual benefit. And God bless you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video,
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