Homily for First Sunday of Lent, Year A 2017 (Mt 4:1-11) For the past 16 years, Our Lord has blessed me with the opportunity to have a number of priests serve as my spiritual director. Among the many words of wisdom that I learned from them, one that has long remained with me dealt with how to deal with when the devil was most likely to tempt you to commit sin. A wise old priest taught me that at various points in my day I should say the word HALT. The reason for using this word is that it serves as an acronym for 4 conditions when we are vulnerable to the snares of the Evil One. The 4 conditions are when we are Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired, and the first 4 letters of these words, H A L T, gives you the command HALT! In His Sacred Humanity, Our Lord s time of preparation and prayer in the desert would have been an occasion when He was both hungry and tired. Long hours of prayer and fasting would have robbed Him of His strength, both physical and mental, and left Him fatigued and susceptible to the temptations of Satan.
The devil made a somewhat reasonable request to a starving and exhausted man, use your divine power to turn this rock into bread, You who created the entire universe and inspired man to partake of the fruits of the earth must surely be permitted to appease Your hunger with a piece of bread and offer needed rest to Your weary body? Yet Our Lord will not comply to Satan s temptation, He would rather trust that His Father will sustain Him and that this time of hunger and tiredness must continue and testify to future generations that we too should accept similar times of deprivation to obtain a greater trust in God s care for us. It does not appear that Our Lord was angry at any point during His time in the desert, and we only ever witnessed the righteous anger of the Lord in the Gospels when He purged the Jerusalem Temple of corruption and sought to restore it to being a House of Prayer. But when Satan mocked Our Lord and enticed Him to cast Himself from the heights of the Temple to prove the Father s Love for Him, one might be inclined to think Jesus could have responded
with anger and cast the devil back into hell for having insinuated that He needed to prove that the Father loved Him by sending the entire heavenly host to His aid, to Him who had created those angelic beings and who was praised by them without ceasing. But Our Lord does not respond in anger, but rather affirms that true love of God is shown by not putting God to the test but having an unwavering trust and confidence in Him. In His Sacred Humanity, Our Lord experienced the gift of friendship and so while the Scriptures tell us nothing of Jesus feeling loneliness in the desert, it is reasonable to assume the long days of isolation could have been an occasion for Him to desire companionship. When Satan showed Our Lord all the kingdoms of the world, He tempted Him with the prospect of popularity, power, glory and the worship of all nations who would forced to love Him and despair. But Our Lord, alone and isolated from family and friends, commanded Satan to leave His presence; for His will was to serve His Father alone and not allow the need for popularity, human
respect and accolades to obstruct His journey along the royal road to the Cross and Resurrection. Satan made use of the opportunity to tempt Our Lord when he knew Jesus was more susceptible to his cunning lies, though we see that not even the toil of physical hunger, mental fatigue and long hours of isolation could lead Jesus to fall into sin or to reject the chalice of suffering that His Heavenly Father was asking Him to drink to the last dregs. We should not be surprised that Satan will tempt us in a similar manner. He will tempt us when we are hungry, both physically and emotionally, convincing us to fill our bodies and souls with harmful pleasures and passing things that give momentary satisfaction but offer no lasting peace, joy and nourishment. He will tempt us when we are angry, enticing us to lash out and seek vengeance when we are slighted, to seek to humiliate others, to gossip behind others backs and seek to ruin their reputations, all the while convincing us we are getting the upper hand over our enemies
when in reality we are becoming more and more filled with rage and spite towards God and neighbour. He will tempt us when we are lonely, either trying to convince us that we are unworthy of love and destined to be rejected and pushed aside by all or that we should compromise our beliefs and dignity to convince others to love us, even if it means giving too much of ourselves and being left even more lonely than before. Finally, he will tempt us when we are tired, telling us that our fatigued state of mind and body will not make us more susceptible to fall into sins that we are more readily able to fight when we are alert and refreshed, or that our need for relaxation and rest justifies the use of sinful forms of entertainment, relaxation and relief of built up stress. Let us ask take time throughout Lent and all our days to cry out HALT, to pause and consider if we are hungry, angry, lonely or tired and if we are, then to be on guard and aware that Satan is likely near, looking to tempt us and entangle us in his web of lies.