Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic where real faith meets real life.

Do you remember Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, how it begins with that weird

Satan figure, that eerie-looking Satan figure there in the Garden of Gethsemane, who's

staring at Jesus while he's praying in his agony, and this Satan figure sends this snake

crawling on the ground toward Jesus to attack Christ, and at the last minute Jesus steps on it and

destroys the snake. I don't remember reading about that in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and I don't

think we're going to hear about that in the Good Friday liturgy either. So it's not explicitly

there in Scripture, but Mel Gibson, you know, he's taking artistic license here, but I have to tell

you I like it a lot. I like it a lot because even though it's not explicit in Scripture, I think what

he's portraying in the scene is expressing something that we do find in Scripture that the

Scriptures are pointing to how there is a severe fierce enemy behind the scenes here. The

Scripture is especially Luke's gospel is drawing attention to the fact that yes, you have the Pharisees

and the chief priests conspiring together against Jesus, but they're not the ultimate bad guys. They're

instruments of somebody else lurking in the background. We might think of Judas as the real bad guy

in the story. And again, he's he's not accomplished in all this and he does some really bad things that

we might think of pilot or Caiaphas is playing a bad role and they do, but behind all that there is

a fiercer opponent, and that is the devil. The devil is mounting his final attack, his most

severe attack on Jesus here in his passion. And there's a lot we can learn from what the devil

does and how Jesus responds to this temptation and responds to the attack. So we're going to learn

a lot today in today's podcast on how the devil works and ultimately how we can imitate Jesus

and fight our own spiritual battles, especially in the midst of Lent. You know, we're a couple weeks

in. We had our plan. We had our devotions, our sacrifices. How's it going for you? You know,

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