Msgr. Josefino S. Ramirez / Sunday Gospel In Our Life
THE gospel today presents us a very extraordinary event. Before Jesus Christ began his public ministry, he underwent a 40-day period of fasting and prayer. At the end of it, He was tempted by the devil.
We began the season of Lent last Ash Wednesday. It is a 40-day period, parallel to this period we are considering, of prayer and penance.
The Church gives us the opportunity to prepare for those important events, referring to our redemption, which we shall commemorate on Holy Week. The best preparation we can make, in order to receive the graces of God, is a firm decision to turn away from sin—this is the essence of penance.
The mortification and sacrifice associated with penance are signs and means of detaching ourselves from the enticements to sin, provided by our disordered inclinations.
We may perhaps be surprised by the fact that Jesus Christ was also tempted. Let us never forget that Jesus Christ is true God, but He is also true man. Christ has everything pertaining to our human nature, except sin.
If Jesus Christ was tempted, it means that temptation is not in itself a sin. Yet we can learn from Jesus Christ how we should react to temptation.
A temptation is an incitement to commit sin. Because we are free beings, we can also be incited to break the moral order established by God and explained to us in the Commandments.
This incitement can come from outside of us (e.g., bad companions, a materialistic environment, etc.), and it can also come from within us, because of the disorder found in our baser passions.
Our immediate reaction to temptation should be that of not yielding to it. Since we are free beings, we can always resist any temptation, and rest assured that God will never allow us to be tempted beyond our strength.
The second reaction is a reaction of realism and humility. We have to avoid temptation. Although a fall is never inevitable, still it would be great pride and rashness to expose ourselves to the danger of falling if we can avoid it.
If we do not remove a temptation which we could easily remove, then we are somehow not fully determined to follow God’s laws. Therefore, we can see how Jesus, upon being tempted by the devil, was decisive in rejecting the devil’s invitations.
Finally, we can even use temptation to our advantage, and thereby, pull the wood over the devil’s eyes. We turn temptation to an advantage if, on the occasion of a temptation, we intensify our prayers to God.
We can also benefit from temptation if we make acts of humility and acts of contrition for those temptations and for all our past and present sins. That is why, without rashness, we can be serene and peaceful, even if we are beset by temptations.
Someone once made a comparison. The devil is like a very vicious dog that is tied by a leash. It can bark all it wants. But it will do us no harm as long as we don’t deliberately get near it.