First Sunday of Lent
“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”
Temptation is like a probe. One meaning of a probe is to explore the unknown.
In our story from Genesis today, Adam and Eve want to probe the unknown boundaries of good and evil. It is not just harmless curiosity. It is a fascination with who they are. Under the promptings of the Evil One, they slide into wanting to decide what will be good and what will be evil. It is a decision to be unrelated, to forego being dependent, and to be self-contained and totally independent. They want to be sovereign! It is the original sin.
This lure of such independence is common to us all. In various places in the Sacred Scriptures and in more ugly and obvious forms, it can be seen in powerful rulers who want power. Examples are the king of Babylon in Is. 14: “I will climb to the top of thunderclouds, I will rival the Most High!” Or, Antiochus Epiphanes IV in Daniel 11: “The King will do as he pleases growing more and more arrogant, considering himself greater than all the gods.” Of course, in recent history it can be seen in people like Stalin and Hitler. Ten days before his attack on Poland Hitler told his officers:
It will make no difference whether the reasons [for the invasion] will sound convincing or not. After all, the victor will not be asked whether he spoke the truth or not. We have to proceed brutally. The stronger is always right.
Hitler had slid from wanting to know the truth to wanting to decide it! It was a reach for raw power!
This fascination, this temptation, is not far from us. We are all prone to inflation. Even in seemingly humble instances, where we appear to put ourselves down, we can be doing it against a mental backdrop of thinking, ‘I’m not like others and really should perform much better than I do.’
The discouragement the young adult can feel might hide an unrealistic appraisal of his or her real strengths and weaknesses.
These examples may not seem like the normal things we refer to as temptations. But they show the chief characteristic of temptation: ‘It looks and feels so right!’ And they reveal that tendency which is hidden in pride – the desire to be independent of reality rather be a player in it!
The great Jewish Rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, in the book, Man’s Quest for God, gets at the remedy in how we pray:
The focus of prayer is not the self. A man spends hours meditating about himself, or can be stirred by the deepest sympathy for his fellow man, and no prayer will come to pass. Prayer comes to pass in a complete turning of the heart toward God, toward His good¬ness and power. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord our soul.
This is what Jesus taught us in his confrontation with Satan. May we not be afraid to take up this struggle in our prayer!
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Daily Reflections, Lenten Resources