First Sunday of Lent: Satan - personification of evil or video game hero?
July 29, 2019 at 12:37 p.m.
The Word
On this First Sunday of Lent, Jesus encounters a real Satan and real temptation in the desert. After having fasted in the wilderness for 40 days, Jesus is hungry and, no doubt, focused on the resolve as to what he needs to do now. Just 40 days earlier Jesus heard the call of God in his life: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
It is at that moment that Satan makes himself known to Jesus by offering the challenge, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” The combination of these two temptations no doubt makes them the most difficult of all to overcome. As a human being Jesus must struggle at also being the incarnation of the God of the universe and at the same time he is hungry after having fasted for 40 days.
The temptations to doubt and self-gratification are clear even if the reader wants to doubt the presence of a real Satan in the account.
By treating Satan, the manifestation of evil itself, as a mere oddity or quaint sort of meaningless presence has some very insidious side effects. Yet, this is a tendency with which modern society is far more comfortable. If we can reduce Satan and the very idea of evil as a meaningless vestige of primitive culture then we no longer need to confront its presence or power in our lives.
In an interesting twist on this theme, Satan, evil and hell itself have been reduced to video game characters. Interesting enough, in many of these games Satan is actually the protagonist in the apocalyptic war against God!
Here are a few examples of that as cited in a column by Susan Brinkman:
“In ’Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation To Darkness,’ players ‘make an unholy pact and sell their soul to Satan in exchange for power’ with the object of the game being to ensure the resurrection of Satan and obtain his power. In ‘Nocturne,’ the hero (a demon) destroys the archangels Sts. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, then goes on to destroy God. The game ‘Devil Summoner’ involves communicating with and recruiting demons. One demon tells the player, ‘That Catholic Church is such an eyesore’ and in the end of the game, blows up the Church. In ‘Shadow Hearts,’ the hero uses his power to intercept and destroy God and ‘save the world.’ ‘Dante’s Inferno’ is loosely based on the ‘Divine Comedy,’ here player travels through nine circles of hell, fighting demons, ‘unbaptized babies’ and other tormented souls. The popular ‘Guitar Hero’ has players using guitars decorated with pentagrams. God is repeatedly mocked by the devil and in the end, the devil is the hero of the game. Women dressed as Catholic school girls are degraded.”
The presence and persistence of such a whimsical approach to the struggle with good and evil in our lives and culture offers us a profound challenge.
Perhaps the devil’s greatest trick isn’t convincing us he doesn’t exist, perhaps it’s convincing us he’s just a videogame protagonist!
During this Lenten Season we are called to a conversion of life, to turn from Satan and the sinfulness of life to a right relationship with God. It seems this may be getting more and more difficult to do.
Dr. Garry Koch is on staff at Christian Brothers Academy, Lincroft.
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On this First Sunday of Lent, Jesus encounters a real Satan and real temptation in the desert. After having fasted in the wilderness for 40 days, Jesus is hungry and, no doubt, focused on the resolve as to what he needs to do now. Just 40 days earlier Jesus heard the call of God in his life: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
It is at that moment that Satan makes himself known to Jesus by offering the challenge, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” The combination of these two temptations no doubt makes them the most difficult of all to overcome. As a human being Jesus must struggle at also being the incarnation of the God of the universe and at the same time he is hungry after having fasted for 40 days.
The temptations to doubt and self-gratification are clear even if the reader wants to doubt the presence of a real Satan in the account.
By treating Satan, the manifestation of evil itself, as a mere oddity or quaint sort of meaningless presence has some very insidious side effects. Yet, this is a tendency with which modern society is far more comfortable. If we can reduce Satan and the very idea of evil as a meaningless vestige of primitive culture then we no longer need to confront its presence or power in our lives.
In an interesting twist on this theme, Satan, evil and hell itself have been reduced to video game characters. Interesting enough, in many of these games Satan is actually the protagonist in the apocalyptic war against God!
Here are a few examples of that as cited in a column by Susan Brinkman:
“In ’Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation To Darkness,’ players ‘make an unholy pact and sell their soul to Satan in exchange for power’ with the object of the game being to ensure the resurrection of Satan and obtain his power. In ‘Nocturne,’ the hero (a demon) destroys the archangels Sts. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, then goes on to destroy God. The game ‘Devil Summoner’ involves communicating with and recruiting demons. One demon tells the player, ‘That Catholic Church is such an eyesore’ and in the end of the game, blows up the Church. In ‘Shadow Hearts,’ the hero uses his power to intercept and destroy God and ‘save the world.’ ‘Dante’s Inferno’ is loosely based on the ‘Divine Comedy,’ here player travels through nine circles of hell, fighting demons, ‘unbaptized babies’ and other tormented souls. The popular ‘Guitar Hero’ has players using guitars decorated with pentagrams. God is repeatedly mocked by the devil and in the end, the devil is the hero of the game. Women dressed as Catholic school girls are degraded.”
The presence and persistence of such a whimsical approach to the struggle with good and evil in our lives and culture offers us a profound challenge.
Perhaps the devil’s greatest trick isn’t convincing us he doesn’t exist, perhaps it’s convincing us he’s just a videogame protagonist!
During this Lenten Season we are called to a conversion of life, to turn from Satan and the sinfulness of life to a right relationship with God. It seems this may be getting more and more difficult to do.
Dr. Garry Koch is on staff at Christian Brothers Academy, Lincroft.
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