This morning’s Gospel reading is Matthew 4:1–11:

At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry. The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” He said in reply, “It is written:One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.”

Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you and with their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Jesus answered him, “Again it is written, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, “All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.” At this, Jesus said to him, “Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.”

Then the devil left him and, behold, angels came and ministered to him.

Welcome to Lent, the season in which we make sacrifices in order to focus more on our spiritual life. People take different approaches to choosing what to give up for the next forty days. Some choose to give up bad habits with the hope of eliminating them, a kind of forced repentance. Others choose to give up pleasures which are perfectly benign in moderation — chocolate, for instance — as a form of suffering and poverty during this season. And some don’t choose to give up anything but instead choose to take more positive actions for sacrifice, such as prayer, almsgiving, and physical service to their communities.

All of these approaches have their virtues, and they also have their limits. They don’t necessarily take us out of our regular lives, nor should we expect them to do so. Only a select few are called to martyrdom, soft or otherwise, and we do not make that choice solely in a Lenten context. Most of us are called to vocation in place — living our “regular” lives but as children of God, fully committed to His Word.

In today’s reading, Jesus gives us a model for true and complete sacrifice as we consider our choices. However, this Gospel and our first reading today remind us that Lent isn’t truly about just making sacrifices, or even resisting temptations and sin. It is about understanding our relationship with the Lord, and about how Jesus came to rescue us from the death of original sin.

We start today’s readings from Genesis and the origins of original sin. In chapter 2, the serpent tempts Eve into eating the fruit which God forbade. But how exactly did the serpent convince Eve and then Adam to do so? It wasn’t by making them hungry, and it wasn’t strictly out of disobedience, although that certainly was an element of it. The serpent convinced Adam and Eve that they themselves are gods, and that the Lord is their enemy by blinding them to their true capacity.

Until then, the two had loved the Lord and each other fully, trusting and prospering. As soon as they became convinced of their own god-hood, however, they lost that faith in God and each other. They became embarrassed of their own bodies and blamed each other for their sudden predicament. They also ran and hid from the Lord who sees all, again attempting to deny His lordship over Creation.

I’ve written before about the ways in which Jesus repairs the sins of Adam, Eve, and the Israelites through His specific rebukes to the devil in these temptations. More importantly, though, this demonstrates to us the necessity of remaining faithful to the right relationship with the Lord. Jesus gets led into the desert by the Spirit, and then remains there fasting for forty days and nights, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us. Only then does the devil show up to tempt Jesus, much as he did with Adam.

Why wait for forty days? Jesus spends that time emptying Himself, allowing His human nature to take the fore. The devil cannot tempt God, after all, but he can hope to corrupt a created being — again. And because of that, Jesus has to empty Himself out in order to become a perfect sacrifice for our salvation. Jesus has to show that we can still find our way to that right relationship with the Lord.

How does Jesus do that? In each of the three temptations, Jesus reminds the devil that the Lord is the true authority of all Creation rather than anything in Creation itself. In each temptation, the serpent offers a form of the same usurpation of God’s authority that corrupted Eve and Adam. Each time, Jesus rebukes the devil by reminding him of God’s authority.

At the end, we get another telling contrast between this and the story in Genesis. When Eve and then Adam decide to usurp God, they get banished from the Garden and lose their connection to the Lord. At the end of Jesus’ battle with the devil, what happens? “Angels came and ministered to Him,” Matthew relates. Angels are the messengers of God, and this represents the reconnection of Jesus to the Lord after emptying Himself to do God’s will in the desert.

In essence, it is a return to the Garden and a final reversal of the effects of original sin. Jesus’ firm commitment to the Father’s will restores that connection, broken on purpose to do spiritual battle against the serpent. When Jesus rejects all the temptations to rebel against God, He makes the choice to recognize that there is only one God, whose authority is unchallengeable.

There is a great line in the film Rudy, which I recounted to David in our show yesterday, when the main character is at his wits’ end at achieving his dream. He asks the priest help him make it happen, and the priest offers this reply: “Son, in thirty-five years of religious study, I’ve come up with only two hard, incontrovertible facts; there is a God, and, I’m not Him.”

As simple as it sounds, this is the true lesson of faith. We must realize that we are not gods, and that we cannot reorder Creation at our whim to suit our own ambitions and predilections. God creates us, not the other way around. We are meant to live and thrive under His authority, and to trust in His love for us as His children rather than reject Him and usurp His authority.

As we move through our Lenten sacrifices, we should keep that overall lesson in mind. Sacrifice, fasting, and prayer have many benefits, but the true reason for repentance in this season is our blindness in considering ourselves gods. When we finally embrace the two incontrovertible facts in Rudy, we finally will have our feet firmly on the path of salvation.

The front-page image is a detail from “Christ Tempted by the Devil” by John Ritto Penniman, 1818. On display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.