L'Angolo di Girolamo Savonarola: Catholic homiletics in lean times

IF THE DEMON who dared GROPED EVEN CHRIST THE LORD CAN take ambition AND THE VANITY, IT CAN DO WITH US WHAT IT WANTS

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If the devil manages to catch us in the weak point of ambition and vanity, he can do with us what he wants and get what he has wanted since the dawn of time.: to prostrate ourselves before him and worshiping him call him Lord, if anything, after saying, before the evil that sometimes seems almost suffocate the Church itself: "... but who am I doing this to me against the powerful and domineering acolytes of the Devil? What good is getting life bitter, when to live in peace, within the Church today, I just do not see, Not to mention, and above all make your business more rigor and its?».

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Author
Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo.

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Jesus Christ be praised !

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Jericho, Mount of the Quarantine or the Mount of Temptation of Christ

In the Gospel passage This Iª Sunday of Lent [see text of the Liturgy of the Word, WHO] we are faced with a paradox: really it happened that the devil has tempted God Incarnate, the Word was made flesh? It may be that the devil attempted to play God in his humanity, pretending to be unaware of what Jesus was divine in his humanity and his divinity in human?

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The blinded by pride and megalomania always start overestimating the most of themselves and underestimating others, why they are doomed to defeat. It may be that they do not fall in the near, but inevitably fall at the first change of season, with the wilting of wildflowers.

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In the Gospel of the temptations, one would think that the Devil overestimate himself and underestimate God. In the early centuries of the Church, with the reason we were able to grasp and define the revealed mystery of the Person of Christ: two natures in one person, the human and the divine. Thanks to the minds and the wisdom of the heart of the great Fathers of the Church in the first eight centuries of the history of Christianity he came to define the mystery of the Person of Christ, which first called for the establishment of appropriate terminology, taken through entries drawn from philosophy and greek lexicon, modulated and applied to our first great theological speculation: before being able to perceive and then to define what was meant primarily, with the words "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ..." [GV 1,1]. Introduced by the intellect of the mystery of Christ, true God and true man, the reason must give way to faith [CF. S.S. John Paul II, Encyclical Faith and Reason], because the problem is no longer either the lexical or philosophical. When you open the portal of faith that goes beyond the human logic, the reason must give way to other categories, for example the gift of perception laid in every man by the gifts of grace of the Holy Spirit. With human reason we have to read the lines of this Gospel, with faith, fruit of our freedom blessed by the grace of God, we must penetrate, because word after word we first introduced and then taken to feel as real and was the perfect human nature of Jesus.

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Part of this ineffable mystery It is also enclosed in another reality: As in Jesus - true God and true Man - divine perfection could coexist with human frailty; because it is quite clear that the Devil does not attempt the Christ of God, but the Jesus-Man, trying to hit the fragility of his perfect humanity. The devil tries to corrupt the divine perfection of humanity as it used bribed our originally created mankind as perfect by God.

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Then the devil aimed at those tender and human frailties Jesus himself will show one by one during its entire existence, during which weeps [cf. GV 11, 35] and deeply moved [cf. GV 11, 33], It is emotionally troubled [cf. Gv11, 33], She suffers and feels scared to death: "Dad, if you want, away this cup from me. Nevertheless not my, but your will» [LC 22, 41-42]. Jesus chose to remain silent when questioned authority [cf. Mt 27, 12] and while he is accused, instead replicate starts writing with his finger on the ground [cf. GV 8,6], so to say the least provocative. He rebels repeatedly injustice perpetrated in the name of God by the religious rulers of the time and does so even with harsh words, at times deliberately offensive, for example calling "brood of vipers" zealously religious observant [cf. Mt 12, 34], devoted more to the tradition that the Word of God; and the apostrophe repeatedly "hypocrites" [Mt 23, 13-29]. I don't pay for this, place in the language of Jesus called "race" or "tribe" of vipers was offensive not only to the individual concerned but also for her entire family tree, It considers it appropriate to add to the burden dose also calling "snakes" [Mt 23, 33], knowing full well that era in Jewish culture - and not only in the Jewish one - the snake was a symbol of evil. It ignites passion and gravely says, and accuses it on Moses sat hypocrites who are not what they preach [Mt 23, 1-3], equates many church zealous era to "whited sepulchres", take care to point out what these tombs are beautiful outside but full of putrid rot inside [cf. Mt 23, 27]. Do not hesitate to get angry and to lead hands, or accuracy ropes [cf. Mt 21, 12-13. MC: 11, 11-15. LC 19, 45-46]. Jesus is filled with pain and perhaps intimate disappointment when he turns to his apostle with a dramatic question: "Down from, with a kiss you betray the Son of Man?» [LC 22, 48]. Regarding the latter two sentences would be the things to which we should pay attention, first of all the question posed as a question which is also found in the original Greek version, just to say than it is a formulation or a random translation: Jesus addressed a question to the traitor listening for an answer, but never come, because in practice the traitors do not respond, because they are inherently evil nature cowards; because the strength from God, the weakness of the Devil. That's why the man of God is intelligent, while the man of the Demon is just smart. And while today we continue to review the episode and the figure of Judas, We do not always say the true dramatic query: As the man Jesus suffered before the betrayal by Judas? Or maybe, even more than the betrayal, for the failure to reply on his part? there, we try to think only those who today, even in the most senior echelons of the Holy Church, They refuse to respond to Christ the Lord who continues to question them through the voice, often deep pain, of devotees believers of Christ Priests and faithful.

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In these deeds, actions and words is enclosed and manifests the humanity of Jesus, who continues to call all of us when necessary, its modern priests, doctors of the law and religious zealous folded into the idolatry of human forms and traditions, with the titles of our legitimate right: race of vipers … hypocrites … snakes … whitewashed sepulchres … Current words yesterday, but perhaps even more so today. Because of this, when the Liturgy of the Word obliges us to preach some of these evangelical passages, we always do it in the past tense, as if the breed of vipers, the hypocrites, the serpents and the whitewashed sepulchres weren't us, but only the members of some religious currents of Judaism of the Jesuit era, now dead and buried in history.

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These words lit with passion, sometimes even pedagogically aggressive, they sum up the historical mystery of concrete humanity and the virile floor gesuano, which if not collected and penetrated will make it impossible to reach perfect communion with the Christ of faith: the incarnate God, dead and risen.

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The man Jesus cannot be changed into a de-virilized holy hybrid with feet off the ground and eyes rolled up to heaven, because that is offensive, rather: this is a blasphemy against his humanity and his divinity. To read this passage on temptations it is therefore necessary to start from the fact of faith that everything really happened, that it is not a parable or an allegory; then focus on concrete historical humanity, physical and palpable of the Divine Word: the man Jesus.

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The first temptation that the devil addresses is the invitation to change stones into bread, to which Jesus replies with a phrase taken from the book of Deuteronomy: «Man shall not live by bread alone» whose continuation is «... but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God» [Dt 8,3]. We are faced with the temptation of the immediate, completely and immediately in a concrete and superficial way, while instead our concreteness is what comes out of the mouth of God, because that alone is a bread of life that bears fruit and eternal nourishment, it cost even to suffer a whole life, given that before eternal bliss human life is only a breath, and in this breath also salvific pain deserves to live [cf. S.S. John Paul II, Saving pain], to thus pay the price of our redemption.

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The second temptation is perhaps the most terrible: "I will give you all this power and the glory of these kingdoms". It is the temptation that encompasses ambition and the desire to dominate others. It is the desire for command, of government understood not as a service to the brothers and members of the People of God, but as power for power's sake leading to the perfect diabolical reversal: using the Church for evil purposes in the lust of being someone, or to "become an important figure through the priesthood" [Homily of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI for the ordination of 15 deacons, Vatican Basilica IV Sunday of Easter, 7 May 2006], better through the episcopate, even better through the cardinalate; instead of serving the Church with love and always seeing in her the palpitating Body of Christ, our mystical bride towards whom we run towards with the passion of the couple in love on their wedding day, as depicted by the Evangelist John through the poetics of his pages.

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If the devil manages to catch us in the weak spot of ambition and with vanity he can do with us what he wants and get what he has longed for since the dawn of time: to prostrate ourselves before him and worshiping him call him Lord, if anything, after saying, before the evil that sometimes seems almost suffocate the Church itself: "... but who am I doing this to me against the powerful and domineering acolytes of the Devil? What good is getting life bitter, when to live in peace, within the Church today, I just do not see, Not to mention, and above all make your business more rigor and its?».

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To address to man Jesus the last desperate temptation Satan becomes theologian, perhaps even an ecumenist, maybe even politically correct progressive, if anything speaking in German and Dutch rather than in Aramaic. Satan begins to speak with biblical mastery as if he had just graduated from a doctorate in sacred theology from our pontifical universities: "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; indeed it is written: “His angels will give order for you, because they keep you”» [LC 4, 9-10].The Devil, as St. Jerome said: «He apes God and wants to create another reality» [The exact phrase then also taken up by St. Augustine is: The devil is the ape of God, the devil is the monkey of God], because he is the master of reversal; also of the reversal of the Word of God used in a deviant way to do evil deeds. The man Jesus, who thank God had never studied in our pontifical universities and who by nature was politically incorrect, he knew the Torah better than the devil, then he replies without hesitation with another Bible quotation: "Thou shalt not test the Lord your God" [Dt 6,16]. And a warning clearly emerges from this sentence: the man Jesus reminds the Devil that he is indeed a true man, but also true God.

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Finally "The devil departed from him..." we read at the end of this page of the Gospel, ending with the sentence: «… to return to the appointed time», that is, to return to us and among us.

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Satan exists today more than yesterday. It is not a symbolic image, it is not — as some theologians of the 1970s defined it, whose theories are sadly still used today to train our future priests — "a mythical and allegorical depiction of man's ancient ancestral fears". Satan exists, it is real and wants to rob us more than ever of our image and likeness to God; he wants to rob us of our amazement and our love in front of God incarnate dead and risen, who in his one person contains the perfect human nature and the perfect divine nature, teaching us to be real men to be real children of God in the way God intended us, created and loved before the beginning of time.

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From the island of Patmos, 10 March 2019

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