The devil plays precisely on the title “Son of God” in order to deter Jesus from the fulfillment of his mission: “If you are the Son of God” (4:3, 6); and proposes that He perform miraculous acts — to be a “magician” — such as transforming stones into bread so as to satiate his hunger, and throwing himself down from the temple wall so as to be saved by the angels. These two temptations are followed by the third: to worship him, the devil, so as to have dominion over the world (cf. v. 9). Through this three-fold temptation, Satan wants to divert Jesus from the way of obedience and humiliation — because he knows that in this way, on this path, evil will be conquered — and to lead Him down the false shortcut to success and glory. But the devil’s poisonous arrows are “blocked” by Jesus with the shield of God’s Word (vv. 4, 10), which expresses the will of the Father. Jesus does not speak a word of his own: He responds only with the Word of God. Thus the Son, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, comes out of the desert victorious.

SOURCE: The Holy See Archive at the Vatican Website © Libreria Editrice Vaticana

if God is eliminated from the world’s horizon, one cannot speak of sin. As when the sun is hidden, shadows disappear. Shadows only appear if the sun is out; hence the eclipse of God necessarily entails the eclipse of sin. Therefore the sense of sin — which is something different from the “sense of guilt” as psychology understands it — is acquired by rediscovering the sense of God. This is expressed by the Miserere Psalm, attributed to King David on the occasion of his double sin of adultery and homicide: “Against you”, David says, addressing God, “against you only have I sinned” (Ps 51(50):6).

SOURCE: The Holy See Archive at the Vatican Website © Libreria Editrice Vaticana;

“Jesus … was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil” (Lk 4: 1-2). In this scene we glimpse the cosmic struggle of the forces of evil against the fulfilment of the saving plan which the Son of God came to proclaim and to initiate in his own person. For the era of the new creation begins with Christ; the new and perfect Covenant between God and all humanity is realized in him. This struggle against the Spirit of evil involves each of us, who are called to follow the divine Master’s example. 2. “When the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time” (Lk 4: 13). The tempter’s attack on Jesus, which began during his stay in the wilderness, will culminate in the days of his passion on Calvary, when the Crucified One will definitively triumph over evil and reconcile man with God. The Evangelist Luke closes today’s account of the temptations with a reference to Jerusalem; unlike Matthew, he seems to want to emphasize from the outset that Christ’s triumph on the Cross will take place in the Holy City, where the paschal mystery will be fulfilled. In my Message for Lent this year, I wrote that Christ also extends to the men and women of today the invitation to “go up to Jerusalem”, that is, to follow him on the way of the Cross. Today we feel the powerful eloquence of his invitation, as we take our first steps of the Lenten season, an acceptable time for conversion and for returning to full communion with God.

SOURCE: Copyright © Dicastero per la Comunicazione – Libreria Editrice Vaticana