During the season of Lent the Church invites us to do penance, to say no to the temptations of the devil, the world, and the flesh, in order to worthily celebrate the Paschal Mystery. We are called, as St. Paul says, "to put away the old self… and put on the new self " (Ephesians 4: 22-24). With the first Sunday of Lent, we contemplate Our Lord being tempted three times by Satan in the desert (Mt. 4:1-11). Our Lord rejects three basic temptations: The temptation to live solely for pleasure (v.3); the temptation to abandon responsibility for one's actions (v.6); and the temptation to seek power (vs. 8-9). These three basic temptations try to stir us away from our true destiny which consists in living only for God.
In recent times, these three temptations have been presented to us by three schools of thought; that of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. For Freud, man is always driven by the pleasure principle. For Karl Marx, man lacks freedom because he is determined by the laws of history. Man cannot control the events of history, rather history controls him. For Friedrich Nietzsche, everything man does is for power. Pope John Paul II in a Wednesday audience in 1983 said that these three thinkers represent one single school of thought, what he calls "The School of Suspicion." All three thinkers deny man the possibility of a loftier call. They suspect that everything man does in some way masks the fact that he is driven by pleasure, environment, or power. Our Lord in the desert rejects these. Man is called to the use of pleasure as a means to his end, and not as an end in itself. Man can make responsible choices in relation to events. And finally, man is capable of finding true fulfillment in service, ultimately, we find our full vocation in the Old Testament words repeated by our Lord: "You shall love the Lord your God with, all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Mt. 22: 37,39).