(Sorry that these are running a week behind where we are in Lent, but the English translations take a while to appear on the Vatican website. )

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In the past few days, as you know, I have been doing Spiritual Exercises together with my collaborators in the Roman Curia. It was a week of silence and prayer: our minds and hearts could be entirely focused on God, listening to his word, meditating on the mysteries of Christ. To summarize, it is a bit like what happened to the Apostles Peter, James and John when Jesus took them with him up a high mountain, and while he prayed he was "transfigured": his Face and his garments became luminous, glistening. Once again, the liturgy proposes this well-known episode on this very day, the Second Sunday of Lent (cf. Mk 9: 2-10). Jesus wanted his disciples in particular those who would be responsible for guiding the nascent Church to have a direct experience of his divine glory, so that they could face the scandal of the Cross. Indeed, when the hour of betrayal came and Jesus withdrew to the Garden of Gethsemani, he kept the same disciples Peter, James and John close to him, asking them to watch and pray with him (cf. Mt 26: 38). They were not to succeed in doing so, but the grace of Christ was to sustain them and help them to believe in the Resurrection.

The very first thing we do as Christians is believe and speak.

The two go together like the deity and humanity of Christ. And so the very first words of the creed are “We believe,” and they are meant to be spoken aloud in public assembly by the body of Christ. The creed is emphatically a public thing, because God is a very public God and, indeed, a God who is a public challenge to all the other gods that litter the public square.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today is the First Sunday of Lent and the Gospel, in the sober and concise style of St Mark, introduces us into the atmosphere of this liturgical season: "The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan" (Mk 1: 12). In the Holy Land the Judean desert, which lies to the west of the River Jordan and the Oasis of Jericho, rises over stony valleys to reach an altitude of about 1,000 metres at Jerusalem.

After receiving Baptism from John, Jesus entered that lonely place, led by the Holy Spirit himself who had settled upon him, consecrating him and revealing him as the Son of God. In the desert, a place of trial as the experience of the People of Israel shows, the dramatic reality of the kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ who had stripped himself of the form of God (cf. Phil 2: 6-7), appears most vividly. He who never sinned and cannot sin submits to being tested and can therefore sympathize with our weaknesses (cf. Heb 4: 15). He lets himself be tempted by Satan, the enemy, who has been opposed to God's saving plan for humankind from the outset.

From The New Faces of Christianity by Philip Jenkins, the words of a Malawian pastor:

Listen to me my brother. You must have time to ponder upon this book. You must read it when you wake up in the morning, when you go to bed in the evening. You must read this book. There are good stories in this book. There are stories of salvation.