How the Devil Tempts

We have some good news, and I have some bad news. In light of the readings today, I am going to be preaching about the nature of the devil in today's homely. The good news is, because of Mary Grace's party I had memoses in between masses, so I am in a great mood at this time, I am filled with the consolation of the Lord. It's really important for us to keep in mind the fact that what is the first thing that happened right after Jesus was baptized? Right after he has his vision of the Father, this revelation, this affirmation of God, you are my beloved Son and whom I am well pleased. He's driven by the Holy Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. It's the first thing that happens after this first theophany with his Father. And he did this to show us also that this will be our life, that so often we have the idea that we're fighting the devil in the world, but then when we come to follow Jesus Christ, when we truly give our life over to him, that somehow everything will become peaceful. It's exactly the opposite. Every week we draw closer to our Lord and make the resolutions to give him more of ourselves and redirect ourselves to his will for our life, the battle actually increases at that time. St. Francis of Assisi had this experience where he was walking with one of his brothers and he was going through this town looking for alms. And St. Francis could see demons, you could see angels and demons and saints a lot of times through his life. And as he's walking towards the monastery, he stopped when they're in between and he looked at the city and his brother asked him, what are you looking at, he goes, I see nothing. But when I look at our monastery, I see demons all around it. Why is that? Why wouldn't they be in the city? And St. Francis said it's because they're already following the evil one. It's the brothers here and the sisters in the in the convent, they're the ones who are fighting the battle. So we should never feel bad or confused at the fact that sometimes the more we want to give ourselves to God, the battle actually increases between good and evil in our lives. And I asked a couple of friends, as I was preparing this week or this homely over the week, some priest friends like, what would you say about the devil and what would just be one thing you'd want to emphasize. And one of them just few added some good answers, one said, he's a really nice guy. The devil is a really nice guy. He looks good, he's seductive and he'll always tell you exactly what you want to hear. Reminding me of a Russian saying that your friends, your enemies will always tell you, we'll always lie, but your friends will tell you the truth. Your true friends will always tell you what you want to hear, what you need to hear regardless. The devil will always lie to placate us because that's seductive to just follow our own will. Jesus himself calls Satan, doesn't speak about him too often, but when he does, he said he was a murderer from the beginning and the father of lies. That the devil's ultimate goal in life is to murder the soul, to murder our purpose in life. And if you think about where you've had your greatest struggles between your will and God's will, between good and evil, it's oftentimes around our purpose. Because when we're born, the devil has a plan for our life and the father has a plan for our life. And right after Jesus revealed to him, the father's plan for his life, to offer his life on the cross in sacrifice, it was right there in that spot that the devil came to tempt him. Every temptation of Satan to Christ was a temptation away from the cross. Don't try to win the people by going and dying for them. Become the Messiah of bread, satisfy their longings, give them what they want. Stalin himself said, if you want a people, if you want to rule over a people, give them bread. Nothing else matters. Or do miracles for them. Right? That's why all the Pharisees, all the people are always asking for miracles. And Jesus said this is a faithless generation that seeks miracles. The miracle that he had was being God that he would stay on that cross and offer himself. Or, and this is the greatest temptation, I think, in our times, the temptation of power. If you just have political power, if you have the power of countries, all this has been given to me and I'll give it to you. And Jesus had to reject that too, that it wouldn't be out of the power of nations that he conquered the world, but the power of the cross. So Jesus Christ himself was tempted over his identity, over and over again, if you are the son of God, trying to have him go down a different path for his mission. That's where the devil comes after us, too. Our identity and our mission in life, sin itself, that word, means to miss the mark. So sin is actually, I'm going in the wrong direction in my life. And the devil will use many lies in our life to misguide us. And one person came to me, divorce is a hard topic today because it's affected so many people. But we have to make the choices that are going to end with us. But one parent came to me, made a divorce, and she said to me, I can't believe that I believe that if I just divorced and I got away from a man that I didn't want to be with anymore, this all of a sudden, my life would get so much better. Jesus, and that was a single most destructive thing for myself and for my children. She goes, it was such a temptation, and I didn't see it before. But oftentimes with couples themselves, the hardest temptations in life come right before God wants to do something very powerful in our vocations. It was right before Jesus was going into his public ministry to preach the kingdom. That's where the devil wanted to misdirect him. And what does the devil sound like to each of us? Because this is actually really important for us to know because the devil doesn't sound the same to everybody. There's a Latin saying, "Quiet, quiet, rechipiator, parmodum, rechipientis, rechipiator." I learned that when I was studying philosophy and I was put on goalie because it was on a really good team and I sucked at soccer. And so they're like, "We'll just put you out of the way." And I memorized that over and over again for like an hour because I had nothing to do. And it's been one of the most like helpful Latin axioms I've thought of, whatever is received is received through the mode of the receiver. God and the devil don't change. But how we hear them changes according to our disposition in life. God sounds different to somebody who is oriented towards heaven than he does to someone who is going towards damnation. And so does the devil. They speak to us according to our state in life. For a soul who is going towards heaven who has Christ at the center of their life is faithful to the sacraments, going to church on Sundays and is striving to be faithful to him. God is a familiar friend. They recognize that presence. They're comfortable in his presence. Therefore the way that God speaks to that soul will be in peace, in joy, in consolation, and encouragement. But the devil will come to put them down, agitation, and sorrow, in distress, and all sorts of negative talk to make them think that they'll never be good enough. That's why people who are really living the faith and living in a state of grace, what you really have to be afraid of, is script velocity. And that constant voice, the devil is the accuser of what Scripture calls him, always telling you that you're not doing enough, that you'll never be enough, and that no matter what you do, you'll never escape your sins. The devil's only goal is soul striving for heaven is to make them give up along the way. To push them too hard or trying to hold them in their sins. But God will always come as a voice of peace, and encouragement, love, and joy. But it's a complete opposite to a soul that is moving away from God, that is not in a state of grace, that is living a life of sin, to him that devil sounds like a really good friend. He says, "Oh, you're good enough. Don't worry. God is merciful. If there even is a God, he'll understand. You don't need to change." And God comes to him like a parent trying to wake him up. You need to change. You need to go back to confession. You need to come back to church. You need to separate yourself from these people. He becomes a judgment, and it's very harsh and uncomfortable. When a woman told me a cool story, she said that when this was earlier on when I was here, she had come to college here, and for the first year, she just didn't really go to mass at all. She's like, "I just want to do my own thing. I just want to discover who I am away from my family, away from everyone else, a new start." And she said that the longer she stayed away, she'd come here once in a while. And it was really awkward for her to be here, to sit in the pews. She didn't want to stay afterwards, because she didn't know anybody, believe it or not, she didn't like my homelies. It was, she was in a very bad state in life, obviously. But everything was uncomfortable for her, you know? And at one point, she met one of the focus missionaries who encouraged her to come to a bible study. And she wasn't even coming to mass at that time, but she's like, "You know what, at least I'll go, and I'll do 30 minutes of a bible study a week." So she started doing that. And little by little, from that, she started coming back to mass, had a great confession. But she made an observation to me, without knowing anything about what I'm talking about, as far as discernment of spirits, that I thought was so keen. She said, "Before I was uncomfortable around church, I was uncomfortable around the community. And my comfort was with my friends, who were living, you know, a life of pretty pagan life, a bad life on campus." And then, all of a sudden, when I started really trying to live my faith, more and more, I started finding peace here. And yet, when I was with my old friends, now I was an uncomfortable thing. It's like, that's exactly what it is. It's all about our orientation and life. And in the same way, when we get away from friends who are taking us down an unhealthy path, it's no longer a comfortable presence that we share with them, because we're different. That's how it is with the devil, too. But that's why it's so important, if you are striving to get to heaven. If you're fundamental philosophies, I want to please God. I want to do God's will, and I want to avoid sin. God is not going to hit you with desolation, or sorrow, or accusation. That's going to be the devil trying to break you down. And if you're new to the faith, if you're just coming around, it's okay to feel uncomfortable. Just means you're closer to the devil than you are to us. I'm joking, but kind of true. Now, it takes time, just like when you first go to the gym, when you haven't been there in a while. It takes time, you have to get a new habit. And the last thing I want to say on this is, I don't think he appeared to Jesus. I don't think he just stood in front of him like he does with us. Because Hebrews says that Jesus was tempted in every way that we are tempted, but without sin. And most of us do not see the devil right in front of us. The devil hides behind our voice. And he does that because one of my friends who's been a pagan since we were kids, he said, you know, why doesn't the devil just appear to me? If he appeared to me, maybe I'd actually believe in him. Like, oh, that's exactly the point. He knows that if he shows himself that we would run away. If you just have a voice in the back of your head, like, sleep in, don't go to mass, confession doesn't really matter. It's like, yeah, maybe that's a good point. If the devil showed up to you, like, Pennywise from the movie It, holding a little red balloon, like, you should have gone to confession today, huh? You would run to church. You would run to confession to pay for it. So the devil hides because he knows if we saw him as he really is, we would never listen to him. The saints, I'll just tell a few stories about the saints in their experience of the devil because God allows the saints to experience what we take by faith. And a lot of them, once you get to a point where you know the devil has no power over you through temptation, he'll take the next step, which he's done with many of the saints in the history of the church, which was physically, physically manifesting to them. And so, like, Saint Benedict, a nurse, it started the whole Benedictine order in the third, fourth century. And when he first went out into the desert to pray alone, it was two years of constant temptations and trials, the culmination of which was a naked woman kept walking in front of his cave, trying to entice him out. And he would go whenever he saw her, he'd run and he'd jump into a thornbush and pray until she went away. And it was after she finally beat that temptation, all of a sudden, all these people started coming into his around him, asking if they could follow him. So there is this pattern where, after the biggest temptations of our life, that's where God's about to do something amazing. If we just resist, that's why the scriptures say, resist the devil and he will flee. We just have to persevere through the moments of trial. The cure of ours, patron saint of Catholic priests, 1800s, that Satan once said to him that, if you had three more priests like you in this world, my kingdom would be over, to the end. He was a very holy priest. He fasted often, he'd sleep in front of the tabernacle often. He would great preacher, anybody spent like 15 hours a day in confession. And people came to him from all over to hear their confessions. And he'd always have the worst nights before a big sinner would come, where the devil would either be hammering all over the walls. He'd send rats over his face. He'd appear to him in the corner. One time he saw the devil so often and called him the grappling, the claw. And he kind of had a playful relationship. One time he was leaving and the devil appeared to him and it's kind of grotesque. But he was like very ugly and vomiting and just looking very gruelish and the cure of ours just looked at him and goes, I'm going to go tell everybody how ugly you are and shuts the door and walks away. And yeah, but he said that the devil, one big thing with him is that the devil has no power over us. Only if we put ourselves in the devil, he said he's like a loud barking dog. And as long as we stay away from grave sin, he's always on a leash. We have nothing to fear. Now you have others like St. Teresa of Abla, St. Teresa of Abla, she saw the devil all the time, even on priests, it's really scary actually. I wasn't going to tell the story, but it's a fascinating story, it keeps me in check. She one time went to mass and she saw two demons with their horns locked around a priest neck as he was celebrating mass and she said that she realized that God was giving her this vision to show that this was a priest in mortal sin and that when Christ came in a host that the demons were so afraid of him, but they were locked onto this priest because of his state of sin. And she came forward to receive communion, her face like that, because you could see him right there in front of her. And she said she realized that God was doing this to show her that how humble he is, that he even comes into the hands of simple priests, that you should never despair of his grace coming to the church even in the midst of sinners. But one thing that St. Teresa of Abla said, she goes, I fear more the people who are afraid of the devil than I fear the devil himself, that you should never be afraid of the devil. We should only be afraid of sin and we should take it seriously, but by even being afraid of the devil we give him power over us. What's important is that we don't, we just don't pay him much money. Another thing the saints say is that since the devil, his greatest sin is pride, the best thing we could ever do is just laugh at him. The more serious we take him and the more you know, focus we give to him, sometimes it becomes a power over us. Last thing you know, I love St. Patrick Pio so much, he got to a point where like the devil would go to Patrick Pio for confession, it wasn't a sincere confession obviously. And he would make up all these sins and try to talk his way through the confession on why he could justify all the sins he was doing. And in the end, Patrick Pio would just say, live Jesus, live Mary, all of a sudden the person would disappear and it would just be a smell of sulfur there. But the devil would appear to him constantly, whether it's in the confessional, but he'd often come to mass with bruises and cuts on his face. His brothers, both cells on the sides of him, were empty throughout his time in the monastery because everyone refused to sleep next to him because it was so noisy at night and everyone was afraid of the things that were taking place. And that's why every night before I went to sleep, he'd say, give me my rosary, give me my weapon. And he said, the greatest power that we have against Satan is by praying our rosary. Why? Because Mary is the one who's destined to crush the head of the serpent in Genesis. God uses the most humble of women to overcome the most prideful of angels. By praying the rosary, she shares that power with us. All right. So last thing I would say is, how do we beat the devil? Number one, the only one we know of, many people walked away from Christ in his lifetime. And Peter and Judas, they both denied Christ on the night Jesus went to his death. What we must always be aware of is the sin of Judas, the sin of despair, to never give up on our fight to be faithful to Christ. It does not matter how many times we fall, it doesn't matter how long we've been away, it doesn't matter what our past has been or even what we go through in our present. The only thing that separates those who follow the Satan in the end and those who follow God are the ones who never give up on the mercy of Christ, who never stop coming back to him. And that's the fundamental temptation of Satan to every human being on this earth is that you're not good enough or that you can never be forgiven or that you're never going to become what God wants you to be. Whatever he can do to make us believe that we are beyond redemption. And as long as we never listen to that voice and continue to come back whatever our Satan life is, we'll always find the mercy of God, the forgiveness of our sins and the path that he has called us to be upon. And the last story came from a priest he told me when I asked him one thing he'd say about Satan. I thought this was nice. He goes, "One time Satan was walking around the earth looking up at heaven and he was screaming out at Jesus. All those people are with you and they were my friends on earth. They belonged to me. They did what I wanted. They committed the same sins I did. And now they're with you because you've forgiven them and you never forgave me." Jesus looked at Satan and he goes, "But Satan, you've never asked for my forgiveness." That's all it takes.