THE TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

The controversial movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” depicted a hypothetical scenario if Jesus gave-up his task as the Messiah. In the movie, his supposed ‘last temptation’ was to abandon his messianic mission in favor of becoming a man for the love of a mortal woman, insinuation was Mary Magdalene. Fiction as it is, the filmmakers categorically disclaimed any historical proof and theological truth in the story. Further, it was unintentional to malign Christianity as an institution of faith. Despite the disclaimers, the movie nevertheless created controversy. I saw that movie myself and despite of the controversy it did not change my faith in Christ or doubted the traditional teachings of the Church. I just hoped and prayed that those who saw that movie may not be ‘tempted’ to doubt or loose faith. Afterall, it was just another work of fiction.

If we take the movie’s premise that Jesus would have chosen to stay as a mere mortal for the love of a mortal woman was totally absurd. As the Son of God, Jesus is one with the Father who is love himself. No other love is greater than God’s. Any form of love that Jesus may have felt as humanly possible such as camaraderie, intimacy or sensuality are nothing compared to the divine love that he possessed as a God. Thus, it was impossible for him to favor any human being as distinct from any other. We all are equal in the sight of God. Besides, to choose any mortal before God is an unforgivable sin!

If Jesus did marry, he would have done so for the same reason of any man-- that is to gain status, fulfill the need for physical intimacy and establish emotional security. However, he was not any man. He neither needed to gain status to bolster his ego (e.g. pride) nor create physical bonds to be emotionally secured. Yet he was truly a man, he does not need all these. Unlike the pagan gods of ancient times, such as those in Greek mythology, Jesus was not narcissistic. His strength of character is unlike any mortal. He had God’s full grace since he was born for a very specific purpose unique in human history. And that is to save mankind.

The true account of Jesus’ temptation is in the Bible when he fasted and prayed for 40 days before he embarked in his public ministry. His intended solitary experience in the dessert was regularly interrupted by Satan’s visit to keep him company. But some company was the evil one. The devil was not there to give him comfort or keep him at ease but to make it harder for him to focus on his preparation to become the Savior and thus destroy God’s plan for salvation.

Jesus was thrice visited by Satan to temp him. Although the devil might have visited him more than that within the 40 days he stayed at the dessert, only these three were revealed to us by God as a summary of the lesson we have to learn from this particular event in Jesus’ life.

Yes, these three temptations are representations of the torments that any human suffers in all levels of his being: the body, soul and spirit.

The first temptation of Satan was for Jesus to turn the stones into bread to satisfy his hunger. It was tempting to do so. This temptation represents every bodily torment we experience that may harm us in any way or contradict values and morals. This is not to deny the physical needs that are inherent. However, it is the indulgence that goes beyond answering to the call of nature or may go against the natural processes of life. Yet Jesus as a man did experience hunger, thirst and other bodily urges, he lived a well-balanced life fulfilling these needs as required and within God’s natural law. For us, there is a tendency to live excessively to our own detriment. Gluttony, sloth, fornication and other forms of urges may destroy not only physically but morally as well. Just like Jesus, we should learn how to tame our urges; to live only as required and keep always his word that says, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from God.”

In the second temptation, Jesus was brought by Satan to the steep wall of the temple and told him to throw himself to test if God will truly send angels to save him from harm. This was in effect a clever strategy of the devil to test Jesus’ faith. Satan even quoted the Scriptures saying, “God has given orders to the angels about you. Their hands will hold you lest you hurt your foot against a stone.” With this temptation, Jesus was assailed in his spirit. He may have been tempted to prove the promise of God about him yet his faith never failed. He doesn’t have to prove it because he had faith. How many of us had doubted God? There were times when we are assailed by contradictions and uncertainty. We feel God has abandoned us. Oftentimes, we pray to Him yet we ask him for signs and reassurance shows only our lack of faith. Sometimes, we even set conditions or bargain with God without fully trusting His will for us. Let us not be tempted to doubt God just because we didn’t get what we ask of Him. Surely, He has a good reason to do so for our sake. We should not try to ‘bribe’ or coerce God even in prayer, it will never work. For it is written, “You shall not put to the test the Lord your God.”

The third and final temptation, Satan brought Jesus to the farthest perspective to view the lavish and ostentatious sight of the world’s vanity. On display are wealth, power, prestige and every temporal wish of any man. All these shall be given to Jesus if he shall worship Satan. This temptation was an attack on his soul. Jesus, the man, may have been tempted to possess all these yet he knew too well how these are temporal and fleeting. He cannot exchange eternal life for the temporal life. Unfortunately for us, we easily fall prey to materialism and to the hedonistic lifestyle. Among us are those who will “give up their soul to the devil” to possess wealth, status and fame. And there are those who ‘worship money’ and are idolatrous towards their self; their relationships or to ideologies. We may have unconsciously and unintentionally neglected the worship of the one true God for these worldly possessions. But the price for our neglect is not worth all the possessions of this world. Hence, we listen to Jesus’ reply to Satan on this ultimate temptation, “Be off, Satan! It is written: worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone.”

Eventually, Jesus triumphed over himself by proving his strength in body, soul and spirit. He defeated Satan and conquered the world by his sheer might against every temptation and won for us our salvation.

Lets us pray,

Praise to You, O Lord!
You never abandoned us.
For our sake You send Your Son Jesus to save us.
May we live like Him full of faith in You most especially in times of temptation.
Grant us a strength of character to bear the trials of this life.
Let us not be blinded by the vanity of the world.
Make us remember always that the most essential are not the worldly possessions
But rest in our mercy for us.
We ask You to grant us the grace to live as You please:
Worshipping You, caring for our selves and serving others.
Make our Lenten meaningful and full of genuine intentions.
That when we celebrate Easter we will rejoice with a pure heart.
We pray through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

LOVE

The Bible says that man has been created in God’s image and likeness. What in man corresponds most to God’s being is his capacity to love. And we resemble God most by the manner we love.

Love, unfortunately, has become one of the most misunderstood and confused word in any language. Some want it to mean nothing more than the attraction between the sexes. Others want it to mean no more than desire and its satisfaction. And when others speak of it, it seems that love and sex are synonymous. It’s all so sad because love understood as any of these is hardly love. It is confused: the wrapper is taken for the content.

Love is really like life. It is so vast in its meaning, so varied in its expressions and so rich in its manifestations that one has to be fully alive in order to understand love fully. As someone wrote: “The best definition of love is a loving person.”

If love is that capacity which makes us resemble God most, then we have to affirm as well that the measure by which we can test our loving is God himself.

God created everything not because he had to, but because, in his boundless love, He so willed that even His creature, man, should have a share in his Godhood, not by force but by free response of love. Man is free precisely because freedom is the necessary condition for loving.

Jesus became God’s Word of love to all men. He came to heal to heal the brokenhearted, to free the prisoners, to restore the sick to health, to forgive all sins.

St. Paul beautifully points out to us that Jesus expressed the greatest manifestation of God’s love: “Thought he was in the form of God, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave… obediently accepting even death, death on the cross.” Jesus lowered himself to the lowest known state so that he could raise us to God. In his love of his Father and of us, he chose to die a man so that we might live like God. And when he was to go back to his Father, he sent the Holy Spirit to dwell among us, to enliven us and to be the love that binds us together in one family of God.

The measure of love, then, is not what our hearts dictate or what our desires lead us to. Love is very much greater than what I now can feel. It is much more than urges I feel within. Love is, above all, the goodness of other persons in communion that is stronger than death.

In this sense, love includes the goodness of a man seeking the goodness of a woman, the goodness of a parent towards his or her child, the goodness of a friend seeking the goodness of another. Love never dies because goodness never dies.

- Reflection from:
Presence: Prayers for Busy People (copyright 1991 St. Paul Publications)

Let us pray

God, You are the source of true love; You are love itself.

Thank You for Your love for us by sending Your only

Son Jesus Christ o save us and all creation by His death

and resurrection.

Let us live in Your love. May we love You accordingly.

Teach us to love one another just as You love us.

Hence, we shall further Your Kingdom on this earth

by the love You have bestowed us.

All the glory and honors be Yours forever and ever,

in the Name of Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

Amen.

GRANDMA AND OUR MARIAN TRADITION

Today is the feast of the Our Lady of Lourdes. This feast is to commemorate the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France on February 11, 1858 to a humble peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous, who is now St. Bernadette.

On this day also, my grandmother Julia was born in 1920. Were she alive today, she would have been 90 years old. I remember that everytime we talk about her birthday, we would tell her that she should have been named Lourdes since it was, and still is, a common Catholic practice to name a child after the saint whose feast is being celebrated on the day one was born.

Because of my grandmother, our family shared a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was particularly devoted to Mary in her title Nuestra Señora del Santissimo Rosario, La Naval de Manila, whose antique image is enshrined at the National Shrine of Our lady of the Rosary in Sto. Domingo Church. It is noteworthy to share this fact for later on it will play a significant part in my spiritual renewal.

Her children were not only sent to school to have an education but they also brought them up to the Church for moral and spiritual instructions. Thus, my mother and aunts were members of the Legion of Mary. One of my uncles entered the seminary. Although he did not become a priest, his religious education had formed his moral values to become a devoted family man.

Not only my grandmother but also my grandfather, who was a veteran of WWII, was a devotee of the Blessed Virgin. I remember my grandparents telling me their experiences how they survived the war. Undoubtedly, their faith in God was foremost why they survived and their devotion to Mary inspired them to never loose faith in the Lord. Mary for them was a special instrument sent to them for their protection. I remember the story when my grandfather had to go home from battle unnoticed by Japanese soldiers. My grandmother later told him that as she peered through their window she saw a mysterious cloaked lady escorting him to safety. My grandfather survived the infamous ‘Death March’ after the Fall of Bataan and Corrigidor because his faith was unwavering and that he had never loose hope. Amidst the stench and misery around him in the Japanese concentration camp, he prayed on clutching the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.

Indeed our family had a strong affinity to the Blessed Virgin Mary inspite the fact that some among us, later on, had converted to other denomination or had become non-traditional Catholics. Yet, the respect and love for Mary remained. My aunt Purisima who became an Evangelical Christian maintained a ‘private’ devotion to Mary. Her full baptismal name Purisima Concepcion is Spanish for the Immaculate Conception to which the feast is December 8, her birthday.

The fondest memories I had as a child was the occasional gathering of our family for the praying of the Holy Rosary, oftentimes my grandmother leading the family in prayer. The ‘Block Rosary’, a movement that encourages families to pray together by bringing an image of the Virgin to stay at homes for a week within the neighborhood block, regularly visits our home. Thus, I learned to pray the rosary even before I learned how to read. I first learned to pray in English but later on, in primary school, I learned the prayers in our native tongue, Tagalog. Since the prayers were in English, I just mimicked the words without understanding what the words meant. As I grew-up I understood and meant every word of the prayers and most of all, I knew the relevance it holds to my faith.

During my years in the university, I was too engaged in intellectualism and liberal thoughts and I had no use for the spiritual. As young as I was, I searched for answers to the essential questions of life from philosophy, the social sciences to astrology. Later on, my quest for meanings had led me to other denomination; turning-away from the faith I was born into. I was into such quandary when my grandmother suddenly died in 1988. I was then a young eighteen year old who knew nothing but thinks like he knew everything.

It was not until 1991 that I was guided back to the folds of the Church through the intercession of our Lady. It was on that year in the month of May, a month dedicated to Mary, that I alone in Sto. Domingo Church, in front of the image of Nuestra Señora del Santissimo Rosario, La Naval de Manila that begun my spiritual resurrection. Since that afternoon I had a new perspective in life. I came out of that experience with much hope and optimism amidst every challenge and difficulty I encountered in life. I constantly experience God’s mercy prevails through our faith in His Son Jesus. And that Mama Mary is always helping us pray for guidance and protection.
I believe there was no accident in matters of faith. Coincidence is God’s way of making us recognize His message to us. He uses time, place, things and people around us to coincide with each other to catch our attention; to tell us that He speaks to us in the events of daily life. I know it was not mere coincidence that I was in that particular Church at a specified time in a precise area. Somehow, I believe my grandmother is still praying for us now that she is with the Lord.

In gratitude, I fulfill the annual solemn novena to Nuestra Señora del Santissimo Rosario, La Naval de Manila during October; a devotional practice handed down from my grandparents. I and two other cousins are continuing the devotion not only as a family tradition but out of genuine faith that goes beyond the external rituals. This we do, ever mindful that our expression of faith is not limited alone to prayers and piety but most of all in our work, character and relationships with others.

Let us pray,

Father God, we praise You for Your mercy. Our gratitude for You is endless. Thank You for this life we possess. Thank You for our families who love and care for us. We give You thanks for the gift of the Church to us, who teaches us Your truth.

May we ask You to see us through all the confusions and find You in every event of life.
May we hear You speaking to us daily and constantly grant us Your guidance and protection.

We pray together with Mama Mary, Our lady of Lourdes for those who seek Your mercy
to be healed of their sickness whether of body or spirit. Protect and strengthen those who labor in Your Name; those who are instruments of Your mercy. May there more respond to Your call to serve others who are in dire need; That in the end You shall be glorified forever.

We ask these in the Name of Jesus, Our Lord and Savior, together with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

CANDLEMAS

FEBRUARY 2: THE PURIFICATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
White Double 2 Class

The Feast of Candlemas, which derives its origin from the local observance of Jerusalem, marks the end of the Feasts included in the Christmas cycle of the liturgy. It is perhaps the most ancient festival of Our Lady. It commemorates, however, not only the obedience of the Blessed Virgin to the Mosaic Law in going to Jerusalem forty days after the birth of her Child and making the accustomed offerings, but also the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple, and the meeting of the Infant Jesus with the old man Simeon --- the Occursus Domini, as the Feast was anciently termed. This is the principal theme of the liturgy on this day: Jesus is taken to the Temple “to present Him to the Lord.” So the Lord comes to His Temple, and is met by the aged Simeon with joy and recognition.

The procession on this day is one of the most picturesque features of the Western liturgy. The blessing and distribution of candles, to be carried lighted in procession, preceded the Mass today ---- a symbolic presentation of the truth proclaimed in the Canticle of Simeon: Our Lord is the “Light for the revelation of the Gentiles.” The anthems sung during this procession, Eastern in origin, well expressed the joy and gladness of this happy festival, and the honor and praise we give to our Blessed Lady and her Divine Son by this devout observance.

Prayer for the blessing of the candles

O Lord Jesus Christ, the true Light who enlightenst every man that cometh into this world: pour forth Thy blessing + upon these candles, and sanctify + them with the light of Thy grace, and mercifully grant, that as these lights enkindled with visible fire, dispel the darkness of night, so our hearts illumined by invisible fire, that is, the splendor of the Holy Spirit, may be free from the blindness of all vice, that the eye of our mind being cleansed, we may be able to discern what is pleasing to Thee and profitable to our salvation; so that after the perilous darkness of this life we may deserve to attain to neverfailing light: through Thee, O Christ Jesus, Savior of the world, who in the perfect Trinity, livest and reignest, God, world without end. Amen.

- from The New Marian Missal (c. 1950)
by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M.
(Doctor of Sacred Theology)

The Canticle of Simeon

Now, Master, You can let Your servant go in peace, just as You promised; because my eyes have seen the salvation which You have prepared for all the nations to see, a Light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Your people Israel. – Luke 2:29-32

Let us pray,

Lord, we adore You for great mercy for us.
Thank You for revealing to us Your Son, Jesus Christ
to be the light of our salvation.
By Your grace, help us to be obedient to Your
Divine will as Mother Mary was.
May we trust in Your promises as Simeon did.
By the power of the Holy Spirit, purify our hearts
And inflame them with the fires of Thy love.
We ask these through Christ, Our Lord.
Amen.