1st Sunday of Lent 2025

 
 
Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles 
 
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels 
March 9, 2025
 
My brothers and sisters in Christ,^[1]
 
I always think of this Lenten season as a very special time in the life of the Church. I guess especially because it’s an opportunity for all of us to begin again as we, during these coming weeks, we were especially reflecting on the beginnings of the public life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
 
On this first Sunday in Lent, our Gospel leads us into the desert with Jesus.
 
Of course, during Lent we are remembering those forty days that Jesus spent in the desert after his baptism, forty days he spent making himself stronger, through prayer and fasting, preparing for his ministry.
 
Jesus allowed himself, as we just heard, to undergo temptations, because he knew that we also have temptations in our life. This is something we need to always remember. There is nothing that we go through, nothing that we suffer, that Jesus has not already endured before us.
 
And the saints tell us that everything that Jesus did in his earthly life, he did to give us an example, a model to follow.
 
So, in the Gospel today, we see our Lord’s beautiful humility. Out of love for us, he humbles himself and allows himself to be tempted. Just as we are. 
 
And we notice that Jesus does not defeat the devil by using his divine powers. He overcomes these temptations by using the same means that we have.
 
So, the devil makes three temptations. He tempts Jesus to turn stones into bread. He tempts him with worldly power. And he tempts him to test whether God the Father really loves him and will protect him.
 
And Jesus responds to all three temptations in the same way. He quotes from the words of sacred Scripture.
 
The devil begins his temptations by trying to make Jesus doubt his own identity. The devil challenges him: “If you are the Son of God …”
 
The devil is always trying to get us to doubt our true identity. 
 
In Baptism, as we know, my dear brothers and sisters, we are made children of God. But we are tempted by the world to doubt that God really loves us as a Father, to doubt that he really cares for us as his children.
 
So, we should never give in to this temptation. Because God’s love for us is real. It is true. He “proved” his love by dying for you on the cross. He gave his life for us — for you and for me, so let us never doubt that we are precious to him. 
 
This is why reading the Gospels every day is so important, as Jesus shows us. Because throughout the Bible, we hear one message again and again: God’s tender love for his people. 
 
We heard it in that first reading today, in the words of Moses: “We cried to the Lord … and he … gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.” 
 
St. Paul, in the second reading of today’s Mass, makes the same promise in the second reading: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
 
God goes with us. He is with us always. In our distress, in our struggles. He goes with us. We can cling to him, and we can call on him, and he will deliver us. 
 
In this scene of today’s passage of the Gospel from the wilderness, Jesus is teaching us about how we should confront the trials and struggles of our everyday lives.
 
In the three passages from the Scriptures that Jesus quotes today, he gives us the right attitude for our lives.
 
He tells us: “One does not live on bread alone.”
 
That means our lives are more than just the material things that we have, or that we need. We need our daily bread, but we also need the Word of God, we also need to have a spiritual life, a life of prayer, a life of the sacraments.
 
It’s so important also to reflect on how in the same way that we need to take care of our own human lives, we need to take care of our spiritual lives.
 
That’s something that we all know but this Lenten season is a special time to think about all of that.
 
Jesus tells us again: “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.”
 
That means that we are made to glorify God with our lives, to serve him with all our hearts and all our strength.
 
And finally, Jesus tells us: “You shall not put the Lord, your God to the test.”
 
That reminds us again, as we have been saying, that we should never doubt God’s love for us.
 
So, on this first Sunday of Lent, let us renew our trust in the promises of God’s Word, in his beautiful plan for our lives.
 
We have this wonderful opportunity in these forty days to fast and to pray and to practice deeds of mercy and tenderness.
 
And Jesus promised us that if we do these things, we will know more and more that we are beloved children of God and we will come to know more and more how much we are loved by God.
 
So let us ask especially today for the grace to overcome our temptations and weaknesses and have a holy Lent!

 And may Our Blessed Mother Mary help us to follow the example of her Son, as he shows us the way to live as a child of God in the desert of this earthly world.