Temptations: Feeling Trapped between Right and What is Not Right

Today we celebrate the feast of John the Baptist, the one who prepared the people for God the Son’s coming into this world to walk among us as a human being, teaching us the way to the Father, to God’s Kingdom here on earth and in eternity.  Herod was fascinated by John, loved to hear him preach but did not follow his counsel, living according to his own will, not God’s, as did Adam and Eve and their descendants to this very day.  John, being a righteous man, confronted Herod when he married his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias.  It was Herodias and his own daughter who trapped him into doing that which was truly against his conscience.

Herod, Herodias and their daughter’s lives were dominated by wealth, power and self-indulgence, a form of self-idolatry. We ourselves live in a world ruled by secularism, materialism and unlimited freedoms, a  narcissism and forms, also, of self-idolatry.  We become our own gods, so to speak.  Hence, as with Herod, temptations abound in our lives.

To whom am I going to listen today: my narcissistic self or my God-self, the voices of others egging me on to follow the Father of Lies or the voice of the Spirit inviting me to follow Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life which the world does not recognize?  The choices is ours!