WILL GOD’S SUNDAYS OF SEEKING GOODNESS EVER RETURN?

Three strikes and we’re in: Sunday reflection

by ED MORRISSEY Mar 06, 2022 at HotAir:

 

Wikimedia Commons.

Note: I will be at a retreat on Sunday, and unable to write a new reflection for today. Please enjoy this previous reflection on the same Gospel reading from 2019. 

This morning’s Gospel reading is Luke 4:1–13:

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.” Then he took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It is written: You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.” Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you, and: With their hands they will support you, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It also says, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.

Have you ever noticed that there’s something compelling about the number three to people? Even apart from its theological import, where it is often called a number of perfection or completion, the number carries weight that surpasses its literal value. For instance, in the business I’m in — punditry — I often find that when people can’t supply data, they will substitute at least three anecdotes in its place. One anecdote may be a fluke, two a coincidence, but three suggests a pattern in support of an argument. Anything over three may help reinforce the presumption of a pattern, but at a certain point the repetition becomes tedious.

Or for that matter, it applies in comedy as well. How many people walk into that ubiquitous bar? A priest, a minister, and a rabbi, right? That gives us the opening, the set-up, and the payoff. And usually a heck of a laugh, too.

Theologically, the perfection represented by the number three is repeated throughout the scriptures and in other teachings. The Lord visited Abraham in the form of three visitors. We pray in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and Jesus rose on the third day. Peter denied Jesus three times, and Jesus asked him later if Peter loved him three times. Readers can probably recall many more examples, while noting that I just broke the three-times rule here myself.

If three is a number of completion, then what is being completed in today’s Gospel? It is the path of the children of God, which Jesus repairs in persevering through these temptations. Each of these three temptations caused mankind to fall, starting with Adam and continuing through the Davidic kingdom of Israel. To each of these temptations, Jesus balks by proclaiming the word of God back to Satan, specifically from Deuteronomy. These were the instructions given to the Israelites for the path of salvation from sin, the Word which Jesus made flesh in order to complete humanity and heal us from our attachment to sin and rebellion.

But let us ask another question: why did Jesus participate in these temptations in the first place? He certainly had no need of Satan or his false promises of wealth and worldly power, the very temptations that derailed the Israelite kingdoms. Read through these temptations while keeping in mind that they’re being offered to the Son of the Creator, and they suddenly look tawdry and laughable. Jesus inherits all this and more anyway. Plus, as the Son of God, Jesus had all of the authority to not just establish a just kingdom to command obedience, but also to bind Satan as well.

Jesus wasn’t interested in commanding obedience in that manner, nor did He see us as subjects to rule and enslave. Jesus came to free us from enslavement, not from Roman oppression but from the flaws in our own nature that makes us slaves to our own egos and material desires. In order to do that, Jesus had to show that humanity had the capability of defying those forces and the evil that Satan represents to make a free-will choice of loving the Lord. Jesus struck a blow against fatalism, nihilism, and despair by willingly assuming the burdens of our incarnation and completing them into divine worth.

Not only do we have Jesus as an example of the possibilities, we also have Him as our personal savior as we stumble toward completion ourselves. We call out to Jesus when we fail, when we lack the stamina to resist temptation in order to borrow strength from Him. As Paul writes to the Romans in our second reading today, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” The refrain from our responsorial psalm is exactly that prayer: “Be with me Lord, when I am in trouble.”

Jesus came to complete humanity, and He remains present to complete each one of us who calls on Him. Those temptations should look tawdry and laughable to us now that Jesus has exposed them for what they are. And what are they? I’ll give you three guesses …

The front-page image is “The Temptations of Christ,” a 12th-century mosaic in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Italy. Via Wikimedia Commons. 

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.  For previous Green Room entries, click here.

Is America’s DEM Biden TOO IGNORANT TO HAVE A STROKE?

BY SCOTT JOHNSON at PowerLine:

THE MADNESS OF SLOW JOE, IRAN EDITION (3)

In addition to helping the Biden administration fund and facilitate the evildoing of the Iranian regime, the friends of Vladimir Putin are administering a dose of humiliation for good measure. The Putinites are rubbing it in and denying the administration so much as a fig leaf. Andrew McCarthy explicates one prong of the humiliation at NRO in “Russia and Iran Taunt Biden in Humiliating Revival of Nuclear Deal.”

Mikhail Ulyanov is Russia’s envoy to the nuclear talks in Vienna. He is Putin’s man in Vienna. In the video below he offers his own guide for the perplexed with a second prong of the humiliation. Eric Mandel draws back to present the big picture in the Hill column “While America watches the war in Ukraine, Biden finalizes a dangerous Iran deal.”

Will Biden thank our friends in China and Russia for making this possible? In a sense, this should defy belief. A sort of reductio ad absurdum of Democrat foreign policy, it is nevertheless all too believable.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=powerlineUS&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH0sInRmd190b3BpY19waXZvdHNfZW1iZWRfMTM1NDUiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoiY29udHJvbCIsInZlcnNpb24iOjR9fQ%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1500466439018491905&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.powerlineblog.com%2Farchives%2F2022%2F03%2Fthe-madness-of-slow-joe-iran-edition-3.php&sessionId=f61f1f11fbb698cc5f581433f47a8f61b066aff6&siteScreenName=powerlineUS&theme=light&widgetsVersion=2582c61%3A1645036219416&width=550px

QUESTION: IS RUSSIA, IRAN, AND CHINA WHERE THE BIDENS HAVE ARRANGED THEIR FINANCES AND SECURITY?

Our Korea Crook John Kerry Still At It: THE FOREVER IDIOT !

John Kerry: Putin’s Useful Climate Idiot

Kerry acts as Putin’s useful climate idiot.

By Rupert Darwall at American Greatness:

March 5, 2022

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine marks the end of the West’s Era of Illusions. It was an era in which Western elites obsessed about solving climate change because the climate crisis was far more dangerous than issues of war and peace and the stability of the international system. They even convinced themselves that climate change causes war, so climate change policy could double as national security policy; and, for many years, the annual round of kumbaya UN climate talks was the apogee of international relations.

In a BBC World Service interview, presidential climate envoy John Kerry expressed concern about the amount of greenhouse gas being emitted from the war in Ukraine. Kerry was just getting warmed up with a string of platitudes that show him as a deluded climate relic, unable to come to terms with the reality that Putin has imposed on the world. “Equally importantly,” Kerry complained, “you’re going to lose people’s focus,” as if the first invasion of a sovereign European country since World War II is an annoying distraction. We can hope, Kerry continued, Putin would realize that Russia’s land is thawing, and the people of Russia are at risk.  

Kerry concluded with an expression of pure self-deception, saying he hopes Putin “will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.” Stay on track? Russia has never hidden its intention to avoid cutting its emissions. Russia’s second Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted in November 2020 under the Paris climate agreement, is to limit its 2030 emissions to “no more than 70% of 1990 levels.” The document is careful to avoid pledging to cut or reduce emissions. The 1990 baseline year was the last one before the collapse of the highly inefficient and heavily polluting centrally planned Soviet economy. Thus, the 70 percent limit actually enables Russia to increase its emissions by 34 percent—and that’s before taking account of any changes in forestry and land use that would allow Russia to claim credit for negative emissions. 

Despite Kerry’s claim about the thawing of their frozen north, Russians’ indifference to climate change predates Putin’s rise to power. During preparation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first assessment report in 1990, Soviet scientists argued that warming might be beneficial at northern latitudes. Yuri Izrael, the Soviet academician and chair of the IPCC’s working group examining potential impacts of global warming, emphasized the doubt and uncertainty of climate change and disputed claims that it would be harmful. 

At a 2005 conference on avoiding dangerous climate change organized by Britain during its G-8 presidency, Putin’s former economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, challenged the premise of the conference. “Anyone who is frightened about the prospect of global warming is welcome to come and live in Siberia,” Illarionov told a journalist. 

Indeed, a strong case can be made that Russian climate scientists have a better understanding of climate science and the likely impact of rising levels of carbon dioxide on global temperatures than their colleagues in the West. In testimony to Congress in 2016, John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compared 102 climate-model simulations against observed global temperature of the mid-troposphere from satellites and balloons (the troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, up to a height of around 33,000 feet). On average, the models warmed the atmosphere at a rate two-and-a-half times faster than what happened in the real world. The only model that produced simulations close to observations was the Russian INM-CM4 climate model. Small wonder Russians are disinclined to believe there’s a climate crisis.  

When it comes to the science of climate change, there can be few people quite as gullible and simpleminded as John Kerry. “I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of science or physics can be tough—chemistry. But this is not tough,” Kerry told an audience of school children in Indonesia in 2014, when he was secretary of state. “This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this.” The science was “absolutely certain,” Kerry claimed. “Let me give you an example. When an apple separates from a tree, it falls to the ground.” Contrast Kerry’s simplistic analogy with this statement in the IPCC’s third assessment report: “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible,” the IPCC said in 2001, before it became deeply politicized as it is now.

There is, however, one area where Kerry and Putin are likely to find themselves in full agreement. Two years ago, at a business conference in Moscow, the Russian president denounced fracking as “barbaric,” claiming that fracking technologies “destroy the environment.” A January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian activities in U.S. elections noted that RT, the Russian state-owned news channel, ran anti-fracking programming that highlighted the alleged environmental and public health harms of the practice. “This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s [the Russian state-owned energy company] profitability,” the assessment concluded. 

In June 2014, Kerry’s predecessor as secretary of state complained about the impact of Russian money on financing “astroturf” environmental campaigns. “We were up against Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia,” Hillary Clinton said.

Putin understands the importance of energy as an essential component of American strategic power. John Kerry does not. That is why, to borrow from Lenin, Kerry acts as Putin’s useful climate idiot. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine plunges the world into its gravest emergency since the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago. It puts into perspective the folly of those, like Kerry, who confuse imaginary crises with real ones.

That Fascist War Against The Winsome Ukraine…

 MARCH 5, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at PowerLine:

CONSERVATIVES, UKRAINE AND RUSSIA

Conservatives are currently under attack on two contradictory grounds: 1) they are pro-Vladimir Putin, and 2) they are warmongers trying to embroil the U.S. in a war against Putin. Of course, it is possible that there are some conservatives in each of these alleged camps. Still, it is odd to be attacked from two utterly antithetical directions at once.

I know hundreds of conservatives, and not one of them, to the best of my knowledge, thinks highly of Vladimir Putin. Likewise, not a single conservative has expressed the view to me that we should send U.S. troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia. Indeed, one striking aspect of the current crisis is how united Americans are in their views of it. Pretty much everyone is pro-Ukraine, but very few want to send American troops to fight for Ukraine. (But hold that last thought.)

Those who accuse conservatives of being pro-Putin mostly refer to statements by fringe characters or hot takes on Twitter. Has any elected Republican official expressed support for Putin and his regime? Not that I know of. The closest any significant mainstream conservative has come to expressing a pro-Putin or pro-Russia view is Tucker Carlson, who questioned why Americans should presumptively be on Ukraine’s side in a conflict in which we have no interest, and at one point said he was “rooting for Russia,” a view he recanted after the Russian invasion.

As for alleged conservative warmongering, John Nolte, generally a sensible guy, writes:

I’m convinced the unholy alliance between Neocons, the corporate media, and the Democrat party is the Seventh Seal.
***
Gas prices, inflation, Biden’s oatmeal brain, Critical Race Theory, teaching gay porn in schools, the invasion over our southern border, and all the rest are vitally important, but not as important as staying out of another stupid goddamned war we cannot win.

Who are the Neocons? Like everyone else, Nolte cites Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who advocated granting the Ukraine government’s request to establish a no-fly zone over the country, lest “we…have to intervene in a bigger way.” A handful of others have said we should consider establishing a no-fly zone, although I don’t know of anyone who has seriously recommended that course after reflecting that it would involve shooting down Russian aircraft. Kinzinger, in any event, is a marginal figure: a never-Trump backbencher who is not running for re-election.

Nolte also cites Lindsey Graham’s suggestion that some patriotic Russian ought to assassinate Putin. Just about everyone has piled on Graham for that rather impolitic remark, although 1) it has nothing to do with sending American troops to Ukraine, and 2) many, including me, hope that the economic damage being wreaked on Russia will lead its oligarchs and others to dispose of Putin–not, presumably, by exiling him to Elba.

So the attacks on conservatives from both directions seem to me to be twin teapot tempests.

That said, Byron York notes that there is a surprising (to me) degree of support in the general public for going to Ukraine’s aid militarily:

A recent Economist/YouGov poll asked whether it would be a good idea or a bad idea to send American soldiers to Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers. Just 19% of those surveyed thought it was a good idea. Fifty-four percent thought it was a bad idea, and 28% of them were not sure.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found a large majority, 71%, supported the U.S. sending weapons to Ukraine. But when asked whether “the United States should send troops to Ukraine to help defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion,” another majority, 63%, opposed the idea, versus 37% who supported it.

Politico says that “[t]he pressure on Biden to intervene is increasing,” but I think there is no chance that Biden, or any Democratic administration, would send troops to war against Russia absent a direct attack by that country on us, or, at a bare minimum, on a NATO ally. If that happens, the day could come when there is a serious split among conservatives about how we should respond. But so far, claims that substantial numbers of conservatives are pro-Putin on the one hand, or are itching to go to war against him on the other, are wrong.

Note from Glenn: I am very conservative in our today’s United States. Most, actually all, of folks I know well are also conservative, AND VERY MUCH OPPOSED TO THE CRANKY FASCIST VLADIMIR PUTIN for years.

The John Hinderaker I read never travels down a shadowy lefty road, so I am curious where the Putin folk radiate their lies that conservatives are pro-Vladimir!

The Beautiful Messiah Again! EMPTY IN TODAY’S LONELY KNOW-NOTHING America!

Glory To You All! PLEASE HELP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

For centuries the glory of music arose from GLORY TO GOD!

THE LUCK OF A DRAW!

Glory To You All! PLEASE HELP AMERICA BECOME GREAT AGAIN!

Where, in today’s fascistically taught America does God’s children feel the spiritual joy of being alive?

Does picking ones nose from ages seven to seventy five move your soul, dear American citizen? Does such a needed act uplift you soul?

Do you have a SOUL? If you are American under age 50 it is unlikely you even know what SOUL IS!

Where would you go today to develop your soul? Kindergarten?, third grade?, sixth grade? college?….where your today’s socialist fem teachers are themselves without souls?

Where, in today’s fem sterile America IS CIVILITY, HONESTY, WISDOM , KINDNESS, TRUTH, UNDERSTANDING, PATIENCE, TOLERANCE, and are GODFEARING TAUGHT OR DISPLAYED?………..AND EVEN EXPRESS THE PURPOSE OF GOOD AND KNOWLEDGE, BECOMING CLOSER TO GOD?

………..AS I WAS TAUGHT IN PUBLIC SCHOOL, KINDERGARTEN THROUGH TWELFTH GRADE!!!

from Glenn H. Ray….1934 -?

P.S. Nearly all of the teachers I was provided in my public school days were exceedingly well educated females from kindergarten to college whether they were married or NOT! Males were protecting, building, inventing, professing, fighting wars then…….as they had done for centuries.

And I was born dyslexic…..but that wasn’t actually discovered until a generation ago. I still have never been able to read a full NOVEL and such. But, I was taught to love learning!