THE FORTY DAYS’ FAST March 9, 2025

St. Luke tells us in today’s Gospel reading that the Holy Spirit who had come down upon Our Lord at His Baptism, then led Him out into the wilderness for forty days, and during that time He held a struggle of wills with the devil, and also that He ate nothing during this whole time, so that He was hungry.

     The first thing we note is that this strange combat took place after Our Lord’s Baptism, and under the direct impulse of the Holy Spirit. The struggle with the devil, of which we hear three specific instances in this Gospel reading, was something which He had to undergo. It was not an accidental by-product of this retreat from normal human life—it was the very purpose of it. Why should the Holy Spirit have inspired such a strange and extreme struggle? What can it have contributed to Our Lord’s ministry to have gone without food for forty days? What connection is there between the fast, the wilderness and the temptations? The wilderness is a hostile environment. Our Lord and the Holy Spirit deliberately chose it as being somewhere quite remote from human habitation and ordinary everyday life. Our Lord came away from human society and spent time utterly alone. This in itself made Him prone to strange experiences as anyone who has spent considerable time on their own can tell us. Solitary confinement is even used as a form of punishment because the lack of human contact, and the sensory deprivation can have a severe impact on one’s mental state that may lead to a severe personal crisis. Our Lord not only deprived his senses of much that is normal, He also deprived His body of food. He was bringing about a crisis in the ancient Greek sense of that word: “a moment of judgement and choice”.

     Our Lord was, in effect, deliberately inviting the devil to make use of this opportunity to “get inside” His mind and put Him to the test. He wanted to enter into combat with the devil. On the other hand, the devil also wanted to see what Our Lord would do when he put Him to the test. Deprived of human contact and being very hungry, Our Lord was exposed to most extreme and unusual states of mind and body which opened the way for the devil to test Him in the various ways we hear about in today’s Gospel.    

                                          ~ Fr. Paul Dobson