Taking it to the Cross Isaiah 53:5 NAB
5 But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins, Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.
(Galatians 6:14 NAB) But may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
Behold, O kind and most sweet Jesus,
I cast myself upon my knees in Thy sight,
and with the most fervent desire of my soul
I pray and beseech Thee that Thou wouldst impress upon my heart
lively sentiments of faith, hope and charity,
with true contrition for my sins, and a firm purpose of amendment,
while with deep affection and grief of soul
I ponder within myself and mentally contemplate Thy five Wounds,
having before my eyes that which David, the prophet, spoke of Thee, my Jesus:
"They have pierced My hands and My feet; they have numbered all My bones."
Christ's Temptations and Ours
FR. ROGER J. LANDRY
Lent is an annual spiritual boot camp the Church gives us so that we might train, yet again, to be victorious in this most important battle we'll ever fight.
The episode in Sunday's Gospel is particularly special, because the only way the evangelists would have known about it would have been if Christ had told it to His disciples Himself. No one else was there. The Lord must have opened up His heart to them about this seminal moment in His autobiography, which occurred immediately (Mk 1:12) after He was baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit led Him into the huge fifteen-by-thirty-five mile desert between the mountain of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea so that He could pray to the Father about the public ministry which He was about to commence.
He prayed and fasted for an incredible forty days, which obviously would have left Him physically weak and famished. It was at this moment that the Devil came to Him to tempt Him. Much like God the Father had once allowed Job to be tested, the same Father allowed His Son to be tempted. In the temptations Jesus suffered and later described to His disciples, the devil brought out in a pristine form the types of temptation that Christ would undergo in His public ministry and that each of us undergoes in our lives. By focusing on how Christ responded, we, too, can learn how to react to the various temptations we encounter.
The first temptation was aimed right at Jesus' tremendous hunger: "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of Bread." When the Israelites were in the desert, Satan successfully tempted them to grumble to God to feed them (Ex 16:3ff). Satan was tempting Jesus to recapitulate the Israelites' lack of trust in God. Jesus would have nothing of it. Satan, moreover, was trying to tempt Jesus away from His mission. Jesus had come to save people, to feed their most important hunger — the hunger of their souls, and Satan was trying to induce the Lord to become a baker rather than a Savior.
