We hear the Gospel of the Temptations of the Lord on the first Sunday of Lent every year. Lent follows the pattern of the forty days that the Lord was in the desert fasting. The Holy Spirit was the one who led the Lord to this retreat with the purpose of the Lord being tempted by the devil. That intention of the Holy Spirit probably sounds a little strange at first.

Lent invites us to focus on our spiritual life and to cast out sin from our lives. Of course, the devil is not going to make that easy on us. The more we strive to cast out sin, the more the devil tempts us to deceive us into continuing to sin.

The Church proposes the Gospel of the Temptations of the Lord at the beginning of Lent so that we learn to be victorious like the Lord and to find the Lord as the source of our victory. Let’s look at how the Lord role modeled handling temptation. He faced three temptations. Many of us face the same temptations in our lives.

Why did the devil first tempt the Lord with food? The devil, who does not have a body, knows very well that we humans fall very easily because of our bodies. We are corporeal, material beings and we encounter the material world in a direct way through our senses. It is very easy for us to stumble because of our desire to control the satisfaction of these senses. The temptation of the senses is the lowest level of temptation. It is the elementary level, the entry point. It is symbolized by the desert floor covered with stones.

That is why the Holy Spirit made the Lord fast during those forty days to control the first gateway that the devil must penetrate to dominate us. Abstinence from the senses (what we eat, drink, touch, hear, see - the latter very important today with the overabundance of cell phones) is the first weapon to take into the spiritual battle.

The other weapon for this spiritual battle is the Word of God. The Lord countered each temptation with the Word of God. Each day, we must reflect on the Word of God. We must read it and consider what it means in our lives. I invite you to read the book of Exodus in these forty days. The book has exactly 40 chapters, one for each day. You can catch up today by reading the first five chapters.

The Lord was also tempted by being raised up in the esteem of men. It is the allurement of the heights, our desire for glory, for honor on earth. The third temptation of the Lord, the seduction of power, is the most sublime and dangerous temptation. In consideration of time, I will not elaborate on these two temptations today.

I said at the beginning that it did not sound normal for the Holy Spirit to lead the Lord into the desert for the purpose of being tempted by the devil. Let us look at this. The Lord was about to begin his public life. The devil had every intention of changing the way the Lord thought.

The devil wanted the Lord to stop thinking like God and to think like a human being. To think like someone stained with original sin, and under the influence of the devil. If the devil had been successful, then the prophet Jesus of Nazareth would not have been able to save us.

If the Lord's way of thinking had been changed by the devil, then his preaching would have been different. Jesus of Nazareth would have gone down in history as just another thinker with doctrinal errors like all humans have. The Church invites us today to change our way of thinking, to stop thinking like humans dominated by the devil and to think like children of God, to follow the Lord’s thinking as our role model.

Let us ask the Lord to give us his grace to be strong in temptation.