The Temptation of Christ in the desert represents Our Lord’s first victory over Satan.  It’s a vivid scene: Christ, alone in the silent and dreary solitude of the desert, kneeling before his Heavenly Father in fervent prayer, subduing his body with an uninterrupted fast of forty days.  The tempter comes, and tries to poison the well of eternal salvation.  He utterly fails.  The devil suggests, “Break your fast; use your power to serve yourself and your own comfort.”  Our Lord says no, because he has come in power to save the world, not to use his power to indulge himself in the comforts of earthly life.  The devil suggests, “Worship me, and I will give you all the kingdoms of the world to reign over.”  Our Lord says no, because he has come in power to give glory to his Heavenly Father, not to use his power to amass world domination for himself.  The devil suggests, “Throw yourself off this cliff, to show off your power and impress everyone with your angelic parachutes.”  Our Lord says no, because he has come with power that shines forth in humility, not in glamour and thrills.  This is Christ’s first victory over Satan: it will not be his last.  But we see a small beginning, here in the desert, of the final definitive victory that Our Lord will win over sin and death.  We begin to see what Christ is truly here for: we see him suffering and denying himself, enduring trials and temptations for our sake.  In this moment, we catch our first glimpse of the Holy Cross.  And already, Christ triumphs. 

Our Lord invites us on a kind of journey with him: he invites us, out of love, to join him in the desert, through this holy season of Lent which we’ve begun.  He invites us to join him for penance and for purification: not out of some perverse desire for suffering, but because we need this.  Because we need a regular dose of the dry heat of the desert to burn away our complacency and our love of comfort.  We probably experience, in our own way, the exact same temptations Our Lord experienced.  “You’re hungry?  Magically turn this stone into a piece of bread.”  Childish religion tends to devolve into a sense of magic.  But our Faith is not about making our sufferings and difficulties magically disappear.  Our Faith is about walking right through the middle of those sufferings with context and with meaning.  “You can have all this power and glory…if you worship a false God.”  Well we probably can assure ourselves a certain amount of earthly power and glory, if we’re willing to have false gods: if we’re willing to sell out, and abandon our principles, and use other people for our own ends.  And this might seem to work for a while.  But we all know, selling your soul, the so-called “Faustian Bargain,” doesn’t end well.  To quote an excellent miniseries I watched recently, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth; sooner or later that debt is paid.”  Finally, “Oh just throw yourself off a cliff.  Your God will take care of you, right?”  Another form of reduction to magic.  We shouldn’t try to manipulate God.  Our prayers, our fasting, and our good works, and our worship of God at Mass, are not some form of rubbing the magic lamp, hoping to attain some kind of thrilling or sensational reward.  We are here to worship a real God.  We are here to enter into relationship with a God who is personal and who is totally free to respond as he sees fit.  He’s absolutely faithful to his promises, but we can’t manipulate or force him into anything.  What we can do, is love him, serve him, pray to him, engage in relationship with him.     

To that end, the Lord gives us this great season of Lent as a way of drawing closer to him in the desert.  We join him and follow his example in prayer, in fasting, and in almsgiving.  God is giving us the grace to draw closer to him in this time, to meet him in the desert, for him to purify these temptations out of us.  Let us allow him to do it.  Let us follow his example.  Let us take up our cross and follow him, follow him through the desert, all the way to Jerusalem, all the way to our salvation.