The Mysterious Tug of Evil and the First Sunday of Lent
Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread”… When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time. —Luke 4:1-4, 13 In his novel Brighton Rock , Graham Greene wrote, “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” Lent is the time when the Church pauses to reflect on the reality of that mercy. And, when weighed against human standards, God’s mercy is appallingly strange because it costs us so little: God asks only that we surrender to his love and mercy. For most of us, this process of surrender is one which unfolds gradually over the course of a life of prayer, service, struggle, and even setbacks. However, the temptation to cho...