Saturday March 9, 2025

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“Then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday;
Then the LORD will guide you always.”
(Isaiah 58:10-11)

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Good News Reflection for:

Saturday after Ash Wednesday
March 8, 2025

Today’s Readings:

Isaiah 58:9-14
Psalm 86:1-6
Luke 5:27-32
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030825.cfm
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-march-8-2025

The good thing about temptations

It is often said that the battle for the soul takes place in the mind.

When your mind wanders, where does it go? Does it follow Christ or is it enslaved to worldly ideas? During times of stress, what fills your mind? Prayers and trust in Jesus? Or complaints and misery?

Or both?

We all have vulnerabilities that demons take advantage of when given the opportunity. Over  the past year, the handyman I hired to make repairs on my house failed to do his job and cost  me several thousand dollars for uncompleted work. A trusted friend rejected me, believing that I was a witch. And while traveling home from a visit to my mother, a teen driver plowed into my new car while doing an impossible maneuver into traffic. But looking back, these were nothing compared to the time a priest had been rude, demanding, and hurtful.

In each situation, my anger was justified. In the case of the priest, I’m pretty sure that God was angry too. And always, how I responded determined whether the experience would lead me closer to Christ or ensnare me in the devil’s trap.

Whenever we cling to righteous anger — dwelling on the reasons for our anger — a tempter watches, hoping to trigger sinful anger. To remain holy, we need to relinquish to God the justice we desire. I wanted to tell the priest how wrong he had been. I rehearsed in my head what I could say to him. There would have been nothing wrong about the truths I would speak, but God rescued me from the trap that I was falling into.

There’s a defining moment when a righteous idea, a holy motive, or an innocent reaction turns into self-idolatry. It’s the moment when we want to take matters into our own hands. Temptation says (with a very self-righteous voice): “You be the judge and the jury, you mete out the justice.”

If we repent of this natural desire, we hear God telling us to let him mete out the justice in his own good time and in his own good way. Meanwhile, we pray for the person who offended us. We choose to love our enemy. We only reprove him/her (if and when God sets the stage first) with words that build him up and release the goodness that’s within.

Lent is an exercise of gaining strength over temptations. Winning this battle is not as difficult as it feels. When we face our weaknesses, we give God the freedom to be strong for us. If we turn to him in prayer and in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and in the Eucharist, he sets us free from our enslavement to sin through what Jesus did for us on the cross and through our personal relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Every time our minds go in a direction where Jesus is not found, we have a very important opportunity to repent — which means change direction. It’s a wonderful thing! Our sin-directed minds are revealing to us the next step in our sainthood.

© 2025 by Terry A. Modica

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