People get excited about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The Church is silent on the matter, but teaches us that we are only a small part of God's creation. There is a whole spiritual world of angels and demons and we are caught in the middle of a great battle between them in which we are the spoils: the demons try to associate us with their rebellion against God and take us to hell; the angels try to save us from them and take us to happiness in heaven. All this is made clear in today's readings.
The Gospel begins by referring to the Holy Spirit - the divine Spirit, the Spirit of love, the third person of the Trinity - who leads Christ into the desert and who leads us into the desert, the penitential desert of Lent. He has inspired the acts of self-denial that we have decided and that we try to live during these 40 days in our effort to draw closer to Christ. But in the background lurks another, very different kind of spirit: created but still very powerful, the spirit of hatred, the devil.
The devil is not a fiction or a figure to be laughed at. Our Lord tells us that "that's the one you have to fear". (Lucas 12, 5), with a holy and sensible fear, as one fears and drives away a ferocious dog. We see that the devil tempts Christ "for forty days" and not only at the end. He will tempt us too, trying to make us give up our Lenten resolutions or waver in our desire to be faithful Christians. But it is at the end of the forty days, when Christ is at his weakest, that Satan attacks with the greatest force.
Christ allows himself to be tempted, relying only on his human nature, to give us an example in the fight against temptation. The devil, "liar and father of lies" (John 8, 44), makes sin seem attractive, when in reality it is always poison and leads to our destruction. He tries to make Jesus sin by attracting him to material things (he turns stones into bread), to power and celebrity. Our Lord rejects every temptation by having recourse to Scripture: he is truly nourished by the word of God.
Satan acts everywhere and constantly, but if we pray, use our time well and keep away from evil as best we can, he will not seriously harm us, especially if we turn to our guardian angel to defend us. As today's psalm tells us "to his angels he has given orders to guard you in your ways.". As an angel led Israel through the wilderness to the promised land, so God has given each of us an angel to accompany us on our journey through life.
