Today's Gospel Reflection

It's been a really long time since I've done a proper gospel reflection, but here's one for today:

Today's gospel is all about temptation and resisting it. Temptation is everywhere, and it will never ever go away. That's what it is. We can't escape it. It panders to our weaknesses, offering us short-term benefits and deluding us of the long-term consequences. But how then, do we resist it? And the honest answer is that sometimes we can't and we won't, and we will fail. But we can learn from these mistakes and come away stronger and closer to God because of them.


One of the common ways in which we are prone to fall into temptation is by placing our priorities in the wrong places. It is so easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of life that we lose sight of what is most important: faith, hope, love. Lent is a time of rebirth and renewal, and a better time than any to realign our lives and make sure we're what we're striving towards is what will actually make us happy and fullfilled.

Another common temptation is by saying that other people's misuse of power and influence is the cause of the evil and injustice in the world. In this case we are thinking far too highly of ourselves. If we could be more honest with ourselves, humbly admitting that our indifference, our greed, our egoism, and our ambivalence, cause just as much as injustice as the wrong-doings of others, than we may be able to, as cliche as this sounds, be the change we wish to see in the world.

It is much easier to always blame others; to see the source of evil as outside of ourselves and cast ourselves as the victims. But this is not the case. We cannot fight other people, we can try, but we cannot change others if we do not first change ourselves. Thinking otherwise is far too short-sighted. Instead we must face evil head-on. Explore it, find it in our own lives, and conquer it.