5th Trinity I, (6th Sunday Before Easter), Thaw The Holy

Trinity I

6^th Sunday before Easter (Sunday after Ash Wednesday)

Matthew 4:1-11 

Tissot

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the loneliness of the desert to experience
the tempting power of the adversary. 

After fasting forty days and nights, He felt for the first time hunger for earthly nourishment. Then the tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, let these stones become bread through the power of your word." 

Jesus answered, "It is written, 'The human being shall not live on bread alone; he lives by the creative power of every word that comes from the mouth of God." 

Tissot

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand
on the parapet of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.' " 

Jesus answered him, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." 

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Again a third time, the devil took him to a very elevated place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. "All this I will give to you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me as your Lord." 

Jesus said to him, "Away from me, Satan! For it is written, 'You shall worship
[pray to] God your Lord who guides you and serve him only.' " 

Then the adversary left him, and he beheld the angels again as they came to bring him nourishment.

5^th February Trinity

March 6, 2022

Matthew 4:1-11 

To inhabit a human body is to be subject to very basic needs: every infant first needs food, for to be in a body is to be hungry and to depend on others to supply nourishment.

Another need is for safety—the body reflexively protects itself against injury.

And a third need is for power, the ability to be effective. To fail to respond to a child’s cries is to sow seeds despair in its soul.

At his Baptism Christ entered into a human body for the first time. His spirit, like a child's, encounters the body’s basic needs, which in the hands of the Adversary become demands. But coming as He does from the heart of God, He counters the Adversary who plagues humankind from within. And because He did, we can. For Christ has become the medicine for the sickness of sin, our separation from God, that the adversary engenders in us. He makes us whole. He re-establishes for us our connection with God.

For it is God and his angels who satisfy our deepest hungers. It is God who protects us both from harm and from an inflated sense of self-importance. It is in aligning ourselves with God’s will, rather than merely our own self-will, that we achieve true power; for the power that lies in freedom from earthly compulsions creates true effectiveness. Christ gives us that power.

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As Teresa of Avila said,

…God is always there, if you feel wounded.  He kneels

over this earth like

a divine medic,

and His love thaws

the holy in us.*

 

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*St. Teresa of Avila, “When the Holy Thaws”, in Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, versions by Daniel Ladinsky, p. 290.