1st Week of Lent (C); March 9, 2025
Deut 26:4-10. Ps 91. Rom 10:8-13. Lk 4:1-13
Deacon Jim McFadden
As we begin the great season of Lent, which is a time of repentance, conversion, and metanoia we intentionally return to the source of our faith and spend these 40 days allowing ourselves to be touched by God’s Word, which means we listen to him. As we do we will move from egotism/self-reference to a deeper encounter with our Lord Jesus. So, it is important we listen to him who is the Way to human fulfillment and our destiny: eternal life. It’s important we listen to Jesus and not Satan who will strive to draw us away from God and each other.
What strikes me in Luke’s account of the Temptations of Jesus in the desert is that our Lord, who did hear what Satan had to say, but he did not converse with the Enemy, whose sole intention is to burrow into our soul and to destroy our relationship with God and our brothers and sisters. St. Peter noted that in his first letter when he said that “Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). The Devil wants nothing more than to crush you, to kill anything good in your life. He wants to destroy you. And he does this by getting into our mind, where he can eventually claim victory.
How does he do this? It begins by listening to him, by engaging in a conversation with him. Rather than finding encouragement, hope, and strength in the Good News, we listen to the voices of fear, rage, resentment, anxiety, lust, despair, temptation, and finally defeat. We’re in a battle for our soul and Satan will do anything to destroy our relationship with God and our brothers and sisters because we weren’t “sober and vigilant.”
We start to listen to the Devil when we’re most vulnerable. When we experience calamity, pressure from political and social forces, anxiety, addictions—such as gambling, pornography—depression, divorce and family collapse, all sorts of pain—that’s when we invite Satan to our table and we begin to converse, to listen to him. He only needs the tiniest crack of uncertainty and doubt to get in and suddenly he’s at our table, we’re listening to him, and he’s trying to push God aside.
What Satan does is to make false promises to alleviate our suffering, which is what he tried to do with Jesus in the desert. He promises relief from our troubles. Paul in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians (11:14) said that Satan “masquerades as an angel of light,” which means that he doesn’t come into our life showing his true colors, someone whose sole purpose is to “steal and kill and destroy” (Jn 10:10). Instead, he comes across as someone helpful. Maybe you are lonely, angry, worn out. Whatever burden you are experiencing, we are susceptible to his evil influence, which 1st st John 2:16 describes his tool kit as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes , and the pride of life”, which are basically the Three Temptations that Jesus encountered.
By listening to Satan, his thoughts get into our soul, where they simmer; then those thoughts if they’re not resisted, become actions; an action repeated becomes permitted and soon they become a habit; these habits form our character, influence our relationship with God and others; eventually, our destiny is realized. He’s got us. The Devil is not gentle; in the long run, his end-game is to destroy us; as John notes “he was a murder from the beginning” (Jn 8:44).
This scenario begins by listening to Satan and inviting him to our table, where he wants to replace Jesus. But, we do have free-will and we don’t have to give in to Satan’s temptations. Rather than listen to him, we can set our heart and soul on Jesus, who becomes the center of our lives. As such, as Bishop Fulton Sheen noted, that when our life is grounded in Jesus, He becomes an expulsive force who will expel Satan or anything that is not God from our Center.
Practically, how do we do that? First, we stop conversing with Satan and we go about the battle for our heart and soul by winning the battle of our mind. Notice that Jesus did not converse with Satan. He listened, but he didn’t engage in conversation. What did he do instead? He replaced harmful, negative thoughts with life-giving thoughts that came right from Scripture. With each temptation Jesus came back with an appropriate quote from the Bible, which drives Satan away. How does that work? Jesus, the 2nd Person of the Trinity, is the Word of God and when we absorb his Word, our relationship with him is nurtured, cultivated, and honed. The thoughts of Satan are expelled from our mind and are replaced by the truth of the Good News. Paul put it this way in his letter to the Romans (12:2): “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to rest and to approve what God’s will is.”
If our mind gives shelter to the Word of God, we can grow in faith. We listen to Jesus, not Satan. By changing our thoughts, by being careful to whom we listen to, our minds can change; how we live our life can change. In sum, Jesus can change our life, which is a good way to begin our Lenten journey.
Let us ask the Blessed Virgin to accompany us in the Lenten desert and to help us listen to her Son, to help us on our way to conversion. Amen.
Reflection Questions:
- Have you experienced a situation in which you became aware of the enemy’s presence at your “table”?
- What currently represents the “darkest valley” in your life?
- What passages from the Word of God have empowered you the most as you do battle with the enemy?
• Much of the ideas of this homily was drawn from Louie Giglio’s book,
Don’t Give The Enemy A Seat At Your Table: it’s time to win the battle of your mind.
The following is a YouTube link with the same title:
WWW.DEACONJIM.BLOG 
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