#catholic

• In today’s Gospel, we see that Our Lord allows Himself to be tempted. He does this for many reasons, but one of the reasons is this: to show us that everyone is tempted in this world, no matter how holy they are.
• This is comforting for us, because we all experience temptation and we are sometimes tempted to confuse temptation with sin. Our Lord is perfectly sinless and He was tempted. Thus, it is clear that the mere fact of being tempted is not a sin, and also that we are meant to have temptation in this life.
• There is another extreme, however, and this is the extreme of those who are complacent about temptation. They say, “I’m going to be tempted no matter what, so I don’t have to be too careful about temptation”.
• There are also those who have a habit of grave sin and yet are constantly putting themselves in situations where they will be tempted to repeat the sin. They say to themselves, “This time I will be stronger” or “The temptation is not really that hard to fight”, even though they usually fall into the sin, whenever they experience the temptation!
• The fact is that, while we are meant to experience temptation in this life, we are also meant to avoid bringing temptations upon ourselves. This is especially true when we have habits of mortal sin. If we have a habit of drinking, a habit of gambling, a habit of impurity, and so on, we have a strict duty to avoid situations that will tempt us to fall back into those sins.
• In the language of the Church, we have the strict duty to avoid the “near occasion of grave sin”.
• In today’s sermon, I want to speak about what we mean by an “occasion of sin” and what we have to do to avoid occasions of sin.