Audio only:
Joe breaks down how Christ and the saints teach us to use fasting, almsgiving and prayer to combat the Triple Concupiscence.
Transcript:
JOE:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and the season of Lent starts tomorrow. For many Christians, it’s a time to give up chocolate and such, and that’s fine, but it kind of misses the point. I don’t want to have a forgettable lint, and I don’t want your Lent to be forgettable either, because the fact is lint in penance has the power to completely transform our lives. But for it to do that, we need to know what the Bible highlights as the three sources of temptation and sin, and then the three tools that Jesus gives us to combat these sins. So let’s talk about our problems first and then look at the solutions. When we talk about types of sins, there’s various formulations, for instance, number the seven deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Or you can group the sins by which of the 10 commandments they violate.
For instance, sins of theft, covetousness, and so on. But there’s another way of grouping the sins, one which even many Christians are unfamiliar with, even though it’s a grouping we find within the Bible itself. St. John warns us in one John chapter two that there are three types of sin that are incompatible with the love of God. These are sometimes called the triple concupiscence, meaning they’re the three types of temptation, and these temptations are lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life. Understanding each of these three types of sin is critical to see where in your life you might be drawn away from the love of God. Now, the first of these three is pretty straightforward, lust of the flesh. You have a natural desire for food, for drink, for sex and the like. Those things are good in themselves. Without food and drink, you don’t survive without sexual reproduction, the species doesn’t survive.
But these desires, like all earthly desires, can become disordered. That’s going to include the sin that we normally call lust, disordered sexual desires, but it’s also going to include sins like gluttony and drunkenness. But there are other kinds of disordered desires as well, other kinds of lusts that we might have. And John calls this second category, lust of the eyes. So think about this as the desire to have more and more stuff, the most money, the latest technology, the best clothes and his car and so forth. Now, you might be confused here between the term lust of the flesh and lust of the eyes. After all, seeing a beautiful woman might be a trigger for sexual lust. But the idea is that at root, the desire for things like food, drink and sex comes from within it’s internal. Even in a world with that advertising or external temptation, you’d still desire those things, but your desire for material goods is a desire introduced to you.
From outside you see an ad, you find out your friend has some cool gadget, you hear about a new product, and now you start to covet it. So lust of the flesh deals with physical things that we crave naturally. These are kind of the temptations that come from within. Lust of the eyes deals with physical things that we crave, but they’re not natural cravings. They’re introduced to us from outside, but we’re not just drawn towards physical pleasures, the pleasures of the flesh or material possessions. We also crave non-physical things. We crave things like glory and honor. And as with pleasures and riches, it’s not inherently evil to desire those things. It’s not bad to want to be great when the apostles debate amongst themselves about which of them is the greatest. Jesus doesn’t rebuke them for wanting greatness. He shows them what Christian greatness looks like.
But as with the other two kinds of desire, our desire for excellence can easily go overboard. So St. Thomas Aquinas will describe pride as the appetite for excellence in excess of right reason. And this sin pride is actually the worst of the spiritual traps as CS Lewis put it in mere Christianity, it was through pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind. So these are the three kinds of temptations we’ve got to watch out for. Lust of the flesh is about the sinful pursuit of bodily pleasure. Lust of the eyes is about the sinful pursuit of riches and pride of life is about the sinful pursuit of honor and renowned our own glory and our desires. These make good servants, but they make terrible masters. So if you haven’t yet, this might be a good point to pause and consider which of these three areas is your biggest weakness? Where are your worldly desires leading you away from God? What will destroy your relationship with God if you don’t watch out for it? And just as importantly, what can we do about it? Now, Jesus has entrusted us with three spiritual weapons in particular against these three types of temptation. And during the season of Lent, the church reminds us of these three weapons. Tomorrow, if you listen to the call collect during mass, you’re going to hear this prayer
CLIP:
Grant, oh Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting, this campaign of Christian service so that as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint. So we are in
JOE:
The midst of a spiritual battle, a military campaign in the army of the Lord, and our weapons are the weapons of self-restraint. Well, what are those weapons in particular? We just heard about one of them fasting, but there are two others, prayers and alms giving or good works. Now, Jesus points us to each of these three weapons and they correspond with the three areas of weakness that we’ve just seen. Jesus introduces him to us by telling us to beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them. So these are the three ways that he tells us to practice our piety, but he warns us to do them not for the praise of men, but for our own spiritual good and to grow closer to God. Now, Jesus tells us that when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right-handed is doing.
And he says that when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and that when you fast anoint your head and wash your face. Now, that’s a fascinating set of instructions. Jesus has just called up the hypocrites for praying, fasting and giving alms in an ostentatious way to win the approval of others. But he doesn’t tell us to avoid praying, fasting, or giving ohms. He just tells us how to do those things better. In fact, these works of piety are optional. It’s not a question of if you pray, if you fast or if you give alms, it’s a question of how to do it when you do it. So these three weapons are perfectly suited to combat the three types of temptation that St. John warns us about. Fasting helps us in our fight against the lust of the flesh.
Alms giving helps us in our fight against the lust of the eyes, and prayer helps in our fight against the pride of life. But let’s take a closer look at each one to see why that is. So let’s say you struggle with lust of the flesh at heart. The problem is this. You’ve got a hard time saying no to your bodily desires. You fight it hard, maybe even to say not right now or not so much. Maybe it’s your drinking or food or sexual desire, whatever. It’s what’s the best weapon to combat that fasting? Back in the four hundreds, Pope St. Leo, the great pointed out that in the Old Testament when Israel sinned against the Lord, the prophet Samuel told them to return to the Lord of all their heart, to put away their foreign gods and to serve God only and that he would deliver them.
And what did they do? They turned back to God with prayer and with fasting, and sure enough, God delivered them. Leo reflecting on this suggested that just as the Israelites restored their powers of mind and body by the injunction of a fast, so too we can only win the fight against our spiritual enemies through prayer and fasting. And he suggested that we should seek divine aid by the observance of the heavenly bidding, knowing that we cannot otherwise prevail against our adversaries unless we prevail against our own selves. Simply put, if you can’t say no to your own body, you’re not ready for spiritual combat. And the way you learn to say no to your body is by doing it. The linin fast is a time to say no even to things which aren’t of themselves sinful, so that you’re that much more prepared to say no when you’re tempted by things that are sinful.
And this by the way, helps to explain why the linin fast is a communal fast. Look, it’s good for Christians to be in the habit of private personal fasting, the kind that Jesus speaks about in Matthew six. But there are also times when like Israel in the Old Testament, the whole Christian people pray and fast together, not as an ostentatious display to try to impress one another, but because as Pope Leo the great said, it’s during this time of Lent that the greatest and most binding of fast is kept and its observance is imposed on all the faithful without exception because no one is so holy that he ought not to be holier nor so devout that he might not be devourer. But our fast can’t just be simply self-denial. Otherwise, the Saint Augustine points out it could easily become a mere self-improvement project, kind of like a diet by itself.
He warns fasting Chas your own self. It does not refresh others. So how can our fasting profit others? Well, by combining fasting with the other spiritual weapons of prayer and of allum giving, Augustine asks, how many poor may be filled by the breakfast we have this day given up? So a good spiritual practice to be in is to take the money you saved from fasting you didn’t get lunch or breakfast that day, and then give it to those who need it as alms. Now that sound biblical counsel, God warns for the prophet Isaiah about those who fast only to quarrel and to fight saying that fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. Instead, the true fast is to share your bread with the hungry. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry. And he will say, here I am.
And Augustine warns that when we do this, when we give alms in this way, it’s important that we do it cheerfully for if you give your bread reluctantly, you’ve lost both the bread and the merit of the action. So being intentional about this is key in helping us against the second kind of temptation, pride of the eyes. This practice of generosity with the poor is critical if we want the love of God to continue to abide within us. The Saint John warns if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need yet closes his heart against him. How does God’s love abide in him? Little children let us not love and word or speech, but indeed and in truth. So just as getting in the habit of saying no to the body is the way we discipline the body instead of being the slave to our bodily desires, getting in the habit of giving away money is key for disciplining our tendency towards covetousness.
It’s disciplining our relationship with money and material things. To put it another way, I’m less likely to spend my money frivolously or in a greedy way if I’ve already given it away to somebody who needs it more than I do. And look, if you are looking to give away your money, you’re free to do that at our patreon shameless joe.com. But saying anything more than that would truly be shameless. So that’s going to lead us with our third and final spiritual tool and our final temptation. You might have noticed a moment ago that God says through Isaiah that when we are praying and giving to the poor, then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry. And he will say, here I am. In other words, true fast and alms giving are meant to be accompanied by prayer and vice versa. In Augustine’s words, would you have your prayer fly upward to God make for those two wings of alms and fasting?
So these three tools aren’t just individually worthwhile weapons in our spiritual battle. They’re meant to go together. And of the three prayer is the most powerful in the fight against the worst of the three temptations, namely pride of life. CS Lewis describes it like this quote, in God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself unless you know God as that. And therefore, though yourself is nothing in comparison, you do not know God at all. As long as you’re proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people. And of course, as long as you’re looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. So pride of life is the temptation by which we make everything more and more about us and we can start to look down on those around us and to enjoy them looking up to us.
And the ultimate remedy for that is simply to stop looking down and to start looking up and to recognize our smallness before God. But then Lewis considers what he calls a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? And he answers this question, I’m afraid it means they’re worshiping an imaginary God. Worse. Jesus describes the self-righteous Pharisee as going into the temple and praying to himself. So it’s clear that we’re called not only to prayer, but a kind of honest prayer in which we realize around nothingness in relation to God. It’s the humble and honest prayer of the tax collector who beats his breath saying, God, be merciful to me as sinner. Humility and prayer are thus closely linked and they serve as our greatest tool against the devil.
There’s a saying from the desert Fathers, the devil can imitate everything. As for fasting, he never ate. As for watching, he never slept. But humble mindedness and love he cannot imitate. So let there be a great effort on our part to have love within us and to hate pride through which the devil fell out of heaven. That’s an important reminder for us. This lint at the end of Lent, we’re praying to ourselves saying, God, I thank thee that I’m not like other men, extortion, unjust, adulterers. Even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get. We might look great on the outside, but our lint will have been a failure. Instead, let’s take this time of LT not only to fight against whatever inclinations we find within ourselves towards sin, but also to grow in our humility and in our relationships with God and with neighbor. As St. Thomas Aquinas points out, those three spiritual weapons also repair the three kinds of relationships in prayer. Our relationship with God improves in alms giving. We improve our relationships with our neighbor and in fasting we improve our relationships with ourselves. If you want to know more about the history of the season of lint and how it was practiced in the early church, check out, the history of Lint You Never Knew For Seamus, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.