Satan, that obnoxious and detestable charlatan is roaming around, trying to hoodwink you– By Thomas Mathew Vattakunnel

LENTEN REFLECTIONS

Don't enter into dialogue with Satan

  The countdown for the passion of the Lord started in the desert. During these 40 days, the Holy Spirit -- having descended upon Him after His baptism in the Jordan -- urged Him to openly confront Satan in the wilderness before beginning His public mission.
  Lent is the period to renew our baptismal promises, renouncing Satan and his seductions, in order to walk the paths of God and ‘to arrive at Easter in the joy of the Spirit’. The experience of Jesus makes it clear that we shouldn’t enter into a dialogue with these mountebanks and instead, take refuge in the Word of God.
 The same obnoxious and detestable charlatan is still roaming around, trying to hoodwink you and me and prevent us from entering the Kingdom of our Lord. Satan tried to divert Jesus from the Father’s plan by tempting Him “to take an easy path,” a path “of success and power.” These despicable mountebanks will trap us if we don’t firmly reject their proposals and plans.

  In his weekly Angelus address on Sunday, Pope Francis said “the tempter tries to divert Jesus from the Father's plan, that is, from the path of sacrifice, of love that offers itself in expiation; to make Him take an easy road of success and power.”

  The duel between Jesus and Satan takes place with quotations from the Holy Scriptures. The devil, in fact, tries to divert Jesus from the way of the Cross and present false messianic hopes: economic well-being, indicated by the ability to turn stones into bread; a spectacular and miraculous style, with the idea of casting Himself down from the highest point of the Temple of Jerusalem and being saved by angels; and finally the shortcut of power and domination, in exchange for an act of worship to Satan.

  Jesus decisively rejects all these temptations and reaffirms His firm intention to follow the path established by the Father, without any compromise with sin or with the logic of the world. “Note well how Jesus responds: He doesn’t dialogue with Satan, as Eve did in the terrestrial Paradise. Jesus knows well that one can’t dialogue with Satan, because he is so cunning. For this reason, instead of dialoguing, as Eve did, Jesus chooses to take refuge in the Word of God and to respond with the power of this Word,” Pope said. He explains…
 In His responses to Satan, the Lord — using the Word of God — reminds us:

 First:  “one does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3). This gives us strength, sustains us in the fight against the worldly mentality that lowers human beings to the level of their basic needs, causing them to lose the hunger for what is true, good, and beautiful, the hunger for God and His love.

 Second: “again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’” ( v. 7). This is because the road of faith also passes through darkness, doubt, and is nourished by patience and persevering expectation.

 Third: Jesus notes, “it is written ‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.”  We must get rid of idols, of vanities, and build our lives on the essentials.
  The absolute fidelity of Jesus to the Father's plan of love will lead Him, after about three years, to the final confrontation with the “prince of this world” (Jn 16:11), in the hour of the Passion and of the Cross, and there Jesus will achieve His final victory, the victory of love, Pope said.

   Lent is a favourable opportunity for all of us to make a journey of conversion. This is the time for renewal.

 (The writer is a mechanical engineer based in Doha, Qatar)