Word for the Week of February 10

Somehow, I forgot to post a new Word for the Week - so I'm grateful to the one reader who noticed and reminded me of this!

As you can see, the new Word for the Week is brief, only two verses from this past Sunday's gospel. Its simplicity is what strikes me every time I read or hear this text. It's such a statement of the obvious: Jesus fasts for nearly six weeks and - he's hungry! (Amazing, is it not, that we think fasting in between three meals on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is a big deal.)

That one phrase, and afterwards he was hungry, assures us of Jesus' humanity, his full share in the life that you and I know so well. Perhaps those 5 words, even more than the paragraphs of the 3 temptations, are the better testimony to the humanity of Christ.

Though in the complete text Jesus resists the devil's temptation to make angels appear to assist him, yet the scene's end tells us that angels came and ministered to him...

Dorothy Day reminds us that: St. Bonaventure said that after the long fast of our Lord in the desert, when the angels came to minister to him, they went first to the Blessed Mother to see what she had on her stove, and got the soup she had prepared and transported it to Jesus, who relished it the more because his mother had prepared it. Of course.

-ConcordPastor