杏MAP导航

By Fr Edmund Power, OSB

It is perhaps surprising, given the prominence of the Lord’s Day in the Christian mind-set, that Lent should always begin mid-week with Ash Wednesday, followed by three other ferial days before we arrive at the First Sunday. Although the Gloria is excluded from the Sundays of Lent, the day remains a celebration of the Resurrection of the Lord. Today’s Gospel is always the same: the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness at the start of His ministry. This year, of course, we read the version of Luke. The bare facts of Mark’s Gospel (a mere two verses) find a more studied and elaborate account in both Matthew and Luke.

Have you noticed the prominence of the Holy Spirit in Luke? The Spirit has already descended on Mary, filled Elizabeth and her child John, and inspired Zechariah and Simeon. At His baptism Jesus too receives the Spirit who then immediately leads Him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Instead of reflecting in detail on the three temptations listed by Luke, I would like to propose a meditation for this first full week of Lent. We may suppose that during His forty days in the wilderness, Jesus spent much time in prayer. He was led by the Spirit, the Gospel tells us. One of the introductions to the Our Father in the Italian missal picks up this phrase: “led by the Spirit … we dare to say, Our Father …”. It is curiously suggestive that the three temptations of Jesus should find a remedy in the words of the fundamental prayer He taught us, the prayer, we may suppose, that He himself constantly used.

The first temptation is Command this stone to become bread. But the Our Father (in the version of Luke) responds with trust in God, leaving to Him the initiative: Give us each day our daily bread (Lk 11:3). In the second temptation, the devil takes Him up and shows Him the authority and glory of all the kingdoms of the world, inviting Him to receive it all for Himself. But the Our Father replies, Father, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come (Lk 11:2). All glory goes to God alone. The temptations culminate in Jerusalem on the pinnacle of the temple where the devil proposes an abandonment of God’s gifts of reason, intelligence, and prudence. But the Lord’s Prayer responds, Lead us not into temptation (Lk 11:4), the final verse of the Lucan version.

Matthew’s version, the one we always use in the Liturgy, takes us a step further: Deliver us from evil (Mt 6:13). And … the devil … departed from Him until an opportune time (Lk 4:13) and thus today’s Gospel concludes. As we move on in our Lenten journey and when we are assailed by temptations and trials, we can always return to the trusting words of the Our Father, which give voice to our privileged relationship with God.