(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Mass-Blog-for-the-First-Sunday-of-Lent-2025.mp3)
Here’s a meditation to resurrect your dead New Year’s resolutions into living Lenten ones:
“We give thanks for the gifts [last year] brought
And how they became inlaid within,
Where neither time nor tide can touch them…
We bless [the] year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost,
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.”
This poem from philosopher John O’Donohue suggests life’s learnings share space in our soul with the Word of God. They form an eternal nourishment Satan dared Jesus to produce in perishable form so he’d break his desert fast. Luke’s account of this meeting shows Jesus giving his tempter a similar response to the one he gave the hungry souls clamoring for more of the bread he mass-produced out of a few loaves in John’s gospel. “One does not live on bread alone,” Jesus tells Satan. (Luke 4:1-13)
But the Gospel of John adds:
“Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” (John 6:27)
It is THAT bread Satan is so jealous of and hopes to steal from our soul—where God stores His truths. In Luke’s account of the temptation in the desert, the master of deceit offers Jesus another proposition containing a truth all his own:
“I shall give to you [the world’s] power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.”
Yes, the world’s temptations are Satan’s to give. Many celebrities and power brokers have surrendered their souls to this truth, hoping to gain the fake fame, fortune and security promised. Having lost God’s true security, though, as Satan did, such lost souls succumb to the same eternal hunger from which Satan suffers. This explains his eternal jealousy of the sustenance Jesus offers so generously to those who get sick of hungering for perishables:
“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
Belief is among the firstfruits grown in the fertile soil of our soul. We offer it back to God along with the learnings we harvest during the course of every year. This is how Moses instructed his people to pray, as we learn in Sunday’s first reading:
“’I have now brought you the firstfruits of the products of the soil which you, O LORD, have given me.’ And having set them before the LORD, your God, you shall bow down in his presence.” (Deuteronomy 26:4-10)
Paul describes the fruit of such prayerful resolve:
“No one who believes in him will be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all, enriching all who call upon him. For ’everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’” (Romans 10:8-13)
That’s a salvation for which this world’s slaves will always hunger.
–Tom Andel